Columnist Peggy Noonan is an unusual political writer. Her opinion pieces tend to be infused with extravagant rhetorical pathos and even sentimentalism. Last Friday, she published a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Charlie Kirk and the New Christian GOP,” the central argument of which was that the Republican Party “is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been.”
“The memorial, in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., has been well described,” Noonan wrote.
“There was a height to it, and a gentleness, with a few rhetorical exceptions. More than 90,000 people attended. TV and online viewership is estimated to have reached tens of millions.
“Halfway through it struck me the memorial might have been the biggest Christian evangelical event since the first visit to America of Pope John Paul II in October, 1979. He was a year into his papacy. ‘Be not afraid!’ he said, and took America by storm.
“At the memorial there was an altar call… [that] was singular, and moving. So was the dignity and peacefulness of the crowd. They didn’t indulge their anger or cry out against the foe. It was as if they understood that would be bad for the country. I couldn’t remember a time a big Trump-aligned group did that, as a corporate act, in the past 10 years. It struck me as a coming of age. They were taking responsibility.”
Different folks will certainly view an event differently. Personally, I was negatively impressed by the political rantings of Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller, which I thought inappropriate to a memorial service. But I was most put off by Tucker Carlson’s distasteful eulogy, which set up Charlie Kirk as a sacrificial lamb, and featured a pointed analogy between Kirk’s murder and the crucifixion of Jesus. “Picture the scene…2000 years ago,” Carlson said, “in a lamp lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about what do we do to make this guy [Jesus]… stop talking. And then… there is always one guy who… says, ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him! That will solve the problem. That will shut him up!’”
It was a nauseating moment watching Carlson imply Jewish responsibility for both Jesus’ and Kirk’s death, and then proceed to throw back his head and laugh like a spotted hyena at his clever double libel. Even worse, however, was hearing members of the often rowdy audience laugh with what I sincerely hope was embarrassment, but what I suspect might have been sympathy for Carlson's nasty rhetorical trick.
Since Charlie Kirk’s death, Tucker Carlson has been the most prominent of several right-wing pundits promoting a baseless conspiracy theory that Kirk’s assassination was a Mossad hit job, and that the pro-Israel lobby (read Jews) are behind much international political mischief. (Candace Owens and Ian Carroll are two others of Carlson’s ilk who have disturbingly wide public recognition and appeal.) If that sort of anti-Semitic agitation represents the “coming of age” of a new peaceful and dignified Christian right, America is in deep trouble.
Conservatives anxious to play down the events of January 6, 2021 are wont to assign the more poisonous and inciting forms of contemporary American rhetoric to the far left, which sixty years ago openly accepted Malcolm X’s battle cry for liberation “by any means necessary.” And indeed, recent opinion polls by the market research organization Yougov — one taken just after Democratic Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman’s murder, and the other just after Charlie Kirk’s assassination — indicate that people who self-identify as “liberal” or “very liberal” are between three and four times more likely than those identifying as conservative to see acts of political violence as “sometimes justified.”
But it may not be long before right wing agitation becomes every bit as frequent and great a threat to civil peace as left wing. It’s hard to conceive that evangelical Christian conservatives imbued with and emotionally invested in the Christology of Jesus’ death — will be long immune to the dog whistle of Jewish incrimination that Carlson and his ideological cronies are constantly blowing, and that has historically led to so much violence and harassment against the Jewish people.
The Trump administration promised in the last few weeks to go hard on those who would incite political violence. Pam Bondi even threatened to prosecute “hate speech,” although she walked back that ridiculous and constitutionally untenable position soon after pronouncing it. But certainly those grotesque figures on the American right who would manipulate the GOP’s Christian base in order to stir up political hatred against Jews and Israel need to be called out loudly and clearly by the Trump administration . And conservative pundits like Peggy Noonan, who is presently conveniently ignoring the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican party, and Megyn Kelly, who last week excused its Jew hating buffoons by citing their enormous “grief” in the loss of their friend Charlie Kirk, should get honest. The fact that anti-Semites are Republican should not entitle them to exemption from the harshest criticism. Rather, the opposite. If the administration and conservatively aligned news commentators really want to be regarded as sincere in their advocacy for both the survival of Israel and the continued safety of American Jews, it is time to speak out against anti-Semites on the far right.