Implicit Whiteness and “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” at the Charlie Kirk memorial

I listened to much of the memorial service for Kirk. It definitely had the feeling of a Christian religious revival. Every speaker commented on Kirk’s intense Christian religious beliefs and there were calls for people to get more involved with Christianity. The memorial began with Christian music and it was striking to see people swaying and lifting their arms up to heaven as if they were in church. Marco Rubio talked about the Resurrection and the Ascension. Sebastian Gor, who has a Jewish mother, talked about Western Civilization as the source of all science and innovation—and obviously something to be proud of. Stephen Miller,  also Jewish, did the same, echoing Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s Greatness and Ruin. He did so without getting into the Judeo-Christian garbage, a phrase that is clearly the result of Jewish academic and media activism. His speech recieved quite a bit of attention (video here):

Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion, our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens to Rome to Philadelphia to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities, they produced the art and architecture, they built the industry. …

What do you [the left] have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. …

You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong. …

And what will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing to our enemies. You have nothing to give. You have nothing to offer. You have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty. We have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength.

Other important themes:

• Courage. Kirk said he wanted to be remembered for his faith and his courage. Not being Christian, my interpretation is that we have to have faith in our ability to enact change, that no matter how bleak things are at present, they will change. We must believe that we are on the right side of history, and that takes courage, because it won’t be easy. Courage is much-needed among dissidents still being routinely harassed and hounded out of respectable society.
• Encouraging young people to get married and have families. Especially men. Another critically important message in these times of cultural decline and plummeting fertility. Of course, as F. Roger Devlin emphasizes, the laws surrounding marriage are very much against men, so many are making a rational decision to avoid marriage. We think of pre-nups being for rich people, but seems like a good idea for everyone, especially men.
• Implicit Whiteness. The only Black speaker was Ben Carson. No LGBTQ+ people, even as tokens—so different from Republican gatherins where non-Whites and queers are given conspiculous places in an effort to showcase “inclusiveness.” And the two Jews that I was aware of being Jews extolled Western Civilization.

Tucker Carlson provided another highpoint, much noticed by Jewish activists (here’s his speech and a compendium of his interviews with Kirk emphasizing Kirk on “God, Christianity, and hope”). It seems a stretch to suppose that Carlson was hinting that Israel was behind the assassination, as many of these activists do, but there’s a lot of Jewish paranoia out there right now—understandable given Israeli genocide of Palestinians and the damage that has done to the “Jews as eternal victims” narrative, Europeans calling for a Palestinian state largely because of the genocide, Kirk’s declining support for Israel, and Carlson’s record of making statements and interviewing people that Jews don’t like, such as Darryl Cooper. His speech has exacerbated Jewish hostility.

JTA: Tucker Carlson tells story about murder of Jesus at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, igniting criticism

 Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus — and his assassin to those who killed the man worshipped by billions of Christians. Recounting what he said was “my favorite story ever,” Carlson said:

So it’s about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it, and they just go bonkers. They hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop: ‘This guy’s got to stop talking. We’ve got to shut this guy up.’

And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about — what do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking. And there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him? That’ll shut him up, that’ll fix the problem.”

It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way.

For many listening, including right-wing Jews who admired Kirk, the link between the story and the contemporary allegation against Israel was clear.