Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination should have made one man the obvious object of outrage: Tyler Robinson, the Utah student accused of pulling the trigger. Yet in the days since, some prominent activists have trained their rage to an ancient scapegoat long accused of orchestrating the world’s woes – the Jews.
Conspiracies alleging that Jews were somehow culpable for Mr. Kirk’s killing have been all the rage online. Posts on social media condemning the Jews or Israel routinely eclipse tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of likes. Figures such as Ian Carroll, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have repeatedly alleged that Mr. Kirk was growing increasingly wary of Israel’s war, leaving their conspiracy-addled followers to put the pieces together. (With the exception of Carroll, all stopped short of directly accusing Israel or Jews of Mr. Kirk’s murder.)
But this digital hysteria did not emerge in a vacuum. For years now, a rising tide of antisemitism has placed the Jews at the center of nearly every newsworthy event in the United States, and always as the villains. People blamed Jews for Hurricane Helene (Jews control the weather, after all), for last year’s assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and even for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
These accusations are no longer shocking; they’re banal at this point. But the fact that they’re banal doesn’t mean they’re harmless. Blaming the Jews – or any minority group – for society’s ills leads down a path we all know too well. And we know where it ends.
At face value, it’s tempting to dismiss these comments’ virality. After all, at least some of them – particularly on platforms like Instagram – are jokes, meant to illustrate the absurdity of antisemitic stereotypes. There is also a longstanding tradition of prominent Jews making fun of themselves. Nobody thinks the “Jews in Space” sequence in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World: Part One” was antisemitic, and nobody faults figures like Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Norm Macdonald for jokes and commentary about Jewish people and culture.
But what begins as parody doesn’t always stay that way. When social media algorithms come into play, people see the same jokes, the same tropes, and, in more sinister cases, the same lies over and over again. For the first time in history, an algorithm makes the stream of antisemitic content run constantly, and most platforms are either unable or unwilling to stop it.
Research suggests that when someone repeatedly sees the same tropes – even something as ridiculous as the “Jews control the weather” conspiracy – they become increasingly likely to actually believe them. And even if someone doesn’t believe these nonsense tropes, they can still become desensitized to them, making the barrier between truth and fiction even blurrier. When the barrier between truth and fiction becomes blurry, the barrier between right and wrong quickly follows suit. This process is how fellow citizens can quickly become scapegoats.
The scourge of antisemitism isn’t anything new. Mass hysteria about Jews is as old as Judaism. But what people forget is that violence didn’t happen overnight. Widespread suspicion regarding Jewish magic preceded the pogroms during the Black Death. Blood libels – accusations that the Jews used the blood of Christian children in secret rituals – often preceded riots and executions in Eastern Europe. Most infamously, the Holocaust followed more than a decade of gradually simmering resentment, with the Jews being blamed for the German defeat in WWI.
But the banality of this wave of antisemitism doesn’t make it any less dangerous. Already, the consequences are evident for all to see. Iran blamed Mr. Kirk’s death on the Jews, a narrative that many American white supremacist groups have embraced wholeheartedly. People have immersed themselves in various conspiracy theories, making the legitimate investigation into the assassination all the more difficult. This affects not only the case against Mr. Kirk’s killer – Tyler Robinson’s alleged motives are most apparent from chat logs and anecdotes from those who know him – but all future cases of social importance.
Mainstream scapegoating doubles the chance of political violence. If nothing is done, Instagram memes and Twitter trolling could cascade into outright violence. Should this occur, it would devastate our society, robbing us of the principles that have made America so exceptional. Nobody should want that, and yet the flames rise ever higher.
Fighting these trends will take courage, open-mindedness, and moral certainty, but these are in short supply. There’s a reason why the “banality of evil” – and the banality of blaming the Jews – endures. It’s easier.
