I didn't watch it—but reportedly, one of the most skin-crawling episodes from the Charlie Kirk memorial service last weekend came when Tucker Carlson decided to insinuate a Protocols-style antisemitic conspiracy theory about Kirk's death. (A theory that has proliferated on the right in recent weeks.)
Carlson—in the course of a speech in which he also giggled eerily—first likened Kirk to Jesus. He then imagined that in Jesus's case, a group of people "eating hummus" decided to kill him for daring "to tell the truth about them." And then he strongly implied the same thing happened in Kirk's case.
The antisemitic dogwhistle behind these words wouldn't be quite so obvious here if we didn't know the larger context of Carlson's ideology. After all—this is hardly the furthest he's gone in openly revealing his own antisemitism. He's said worse before; and has even dabbled in Holocaust denialism.
Nor is Carlson the only figure on the right to traffic in antisemitic conspiracy theories specifically about Kirk's murder. According to the Wall Street Journal—Candace Owens has also reportedly floated the theory in recent days that Kirk was killed by a conspiracy of Jewish billionaires.
Many on the right would like to distance themselves from what Carlson said at the Kirk memorial—without disavowing the man in whose ostensible honor he said it.
But the truth is that Kirk repeatedly flirted with the same kind of antisemitism while he was alive. Indeed, he probably did more than any other figure in the country to bring the antisemitic "Great Replacement" theory trope into the mainstream of Republican Party discourse.
In this way, Kirk's influence on the right has been to serve as a kind of reverse-Buckley. If Buckley—to his credit—made antisemitism socially unacceptable within mainstream movement conservatism—figures like Kirk and Carlson (and Musk too) have brought it back into the center of the coalition.
Probably any form of antisemitism is as dangerous as another—but still, there's something striking about the way the American far-right has recently gravitated toward the "Christ-killer" trope in particular—the specific trope that Carlson appeared to double down on in his speech at Kirk's memorial.
Partly what worries me about this especially is that for many evangelicals and Catholics, this stripe of antisemitism seems to pass simply as religious orthodoxy.
I'll never forget when Marjorie Taylor Greene (no stranger to antisemitic conspiracy theories herself) protested against one anti-antisemitism bill in Congress on the grounds that it might make it illegal to "believe the Gospel" (which tells us a lot about her understanding of the Gospel message).
The bill was bad and certainly should have been opposed on free speech grounds, don't get me wrong—but Greene appears to have opposed it for quite different and much more concerning reasons. Apparently, she saw the "Christ-killer" trope as a core and inextricable part of the Christian religion.
She's not the first. I remember an excellent poem by America's great working class poet Philip Levine, in which he describes an episode from his childhood, when he was confronted for the first time with the image of the crucifixion at a friend's house. "The Jews done it," his classmates confidently asserted.
Levine's reaction to this claim was a human one familiar from everyone's childhood: "I felt a chill run through me, sure that once more I was going to be blamed for what I had not done or what I'd done but done without meaning to do."
Every one of us has been in a similar position at some point in life. What is childhood but to be "a stranger and afraid / in a world [we] never made" (Housman) and thus mysteriously condemned for breaking rules we didn't know existed and that we didn't even realize we had transgressed.
But religious and ethnic minorities perhaps carry this burden through life longer than the rest of us. This is perhaps the source of that "existential loneliness" that at least one recent writer has described as a part of the Jewish experience.
Gentile society has always attached a mysterious and inexorable collective guilt, that is to say, to the state of being Jewish—largely as a way to externalize and project its own guilt feelings.
In the image of the Jewish "cabal" of the conspiracy theorists, after all—bent on world domination and on persecuting the goyim—gentile society holds up a mirror to its own imperialism; its own exclusivism; its own long history of persecuting the Jews; its own discrimination against religious minorities.
But perhaps part of the mechanism involved here is also the experienced need to compensate for the psychic distance that gentile Christians must always feel from the roots of their own ostensible religion.
After all, the gentile religion that persecutes the Jews also bows down before an image of a Jew who was crucified—a Jewish prophet in the Hebrew tradition who would have been horrified at the travesty Christians have made of the ancient faith of Israel.
Perhaps here, then—in the need to disavow this obvious truth; to obscure the fact that they, the gentiles, are in truth the strangers and interlopers in their own religion, by making the Jews the perpetual outcasts and pariahs—we find the solution to that paradox Isaac Rosenberg once posed, in his poem "The Jew":
The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?
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