‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled…’

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

From one of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, in reference to supervillain Keyser Soze (full context withheld to avoid spoilers).

This week ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after he said:

“The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

I had to dig for those words; headlines implied something far harsher, or false. But Kimmel’s remark is modest next to many of Kirk’s. Kirk had called for banning gender-affirming care and once said of transgender people in locker rooms: “someone should’ve just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.” It is also well founded. The murderer, Tyler James Robinson, was a white man radicalized online who chose a gun over the rule of law. Where have we seen that before?  The takeaway seems deliberate: it doesn’t matter what Kimmel said—criticize MAGA and expect swift retaliation.

If we hope to remain a free society governed by the rule of law, political violence must be unacceptable. Yet the outcry over Kirk’s assassination far exceeds responses to other ideologically driven killings:

• women murdered by men animated by incel ideology (e.g., Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista rampage)

• LGBTQ patrons slain at Club Q in Colorado Springs

• Black shoppers killed in Buffalo by a white supremacist

• Catholic schoolchildren murdered in Minneapolis by an antisemitic attacker

• Minnesota legislators killed for supporting abortion rights, by a perpetrator with a long list of targets including abortion providers

• a shooting at CDC headquarters–in Atlanta–by a vaccine-conspiracy gunman, killing a police officer who was (like Kirk) the father of young children

None drew the same national mobilization, particularly within the Jewish community. In the past week, major Jewish groups—from Federation and the ADL to the Jewish Democratic Council of America—have urged members to denounce Kirk’s murder and, implicitly, to honor him. Rabbis who cite Talmud to defend his right to “disagree” were silent about the equally political killings listed above, the CDC shooting just down the road. An organization that sent its members a 1700-word missive in a standalone email about Charlie Kirk last week … sent nothing about the January 2021 Capitol riots that sought to overthrow the government.  Why?

An editorial selection bias of sorts: injustice against supporters of Israel must be denounced in the loudest possible terms; in an attention economy, other injustices are less worthy of emphasis, or sometimes even of acknowledgement. If injustices harm someone critical of Israel, at times we may not regard them as injustices at all, or it could reasonably appear that way to outsiders.

Condemning assassination is uncontroversial. But condemning only this one—of a man celebrated for views that sought to roll back civil rights—while overlooking other ideological murders sends a different message.

We must not be fooled by the “devil” in plain sight, with its clever propaganda that silences dissent by loudly proclaiming that others are doing so, and by proffering performative “debate.” Charlie Kirk and his supporters are not advocates of free speech; they are ushers of a regressionist agenda that seeks erasure of dissonant truths in increasingly brazen and disturbing ways. The executive branch is presently on a mission to remove unpleasant imagery depicting the horrors of slavery because, in the president’s words:

The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future

This is only the most recent example. Kirk, Trump, and others aligned with their ideology would rescind the speech rights of anyone who didn’t share it; to enforce his preferred speech on gender norms, he would prohibit organizations from affirming an individual’s preferred gender identity; he suggests “Nuremberg-style” trials for doctors who provide gender-affirming care. He talks a big game, but this is not a person who stands for “argument for the sake of heaven” in the tradition of our sages.

Nor are they allies of the Jewish people. Their movement exploits Jewish fears to enlist us in dismantling the freedoms we helped build after the Holocaust and during the civil-rights era. Every uncritical tribute risks tying Jewish identity to that agenda and, as history warns, inviting future scapegoating. Affiliating the Jewish community with fair-weather Zionists like Kirk, and embodying his movement’s propaganda techniques, even unwittingly, is risky and dangerous. 

I’ll put myself on record thus:

I am unequivocally against murdering people for their hateful views. I am also against

• glorifying hateful views just because someone was wrongfully murdered for them.
• shrouding the glorification of hateful views in free-speech rhetoric
• denying that views are hateful because they are packaged in dog whistles
• tolerating, normalizing, or amplifying hateful views because they happen to coexist with support for Israel.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Pirkei Avot 1:14. Embedding uncritical Zionism in every public statement is not an effective strategy “for myself,” though. Regardless, Pirkei Avot continues: if I am only for myself, what am I? Let our public comment choices be so.