The writer, Andrew Klavan, a Christian who identifies as “Jewish by race,” has a theory about antisemitism: Jews, he has said, gave the world the Bible, and people who don’t want to live up to the moral standards it sets will always hate them for it.
“Of course, I’m against all bigotry, all racial bigotry, certainly, but Jew-hatred is special because the Jews hold a special place in the history of the world,” he explained two years ago. “You don’t have to believe in G-d to understand that this is true. People hate G-d. G-d expects something of them that they don’t want to give. … They think that by erasing the Jews, they’ll erase the people who wrote the book on G-d. And so in these moments, when evil arises, Jew hatred rises with it.”
Put another way, immoral people will always hate those who brought the world its first moral code.
This hypothesis came back to me again and again, as the war in Gaza progressed in 2024 and 2025, and protests went off the deep end with open calls for intifada against the Jewish state. But it has rung especially true over the last ten months, mostly since the war in Gaza ended. During this time, I watched from the sidelines as one rhetorical attack after another was launched on a young widow, a mom of two small children, whose great offense was that her husband had been murdered in the most vicious and public way imaginable.
Obviously I’m referring to Erika Kirk. Not many things are more immoral than trying to publicly force her to spend her time responding to baseless claims that she was part of a plot to murder her own husband, while she is not only deep in her own grief, but trying to help her small children get through the loss of their father. As this went on, I wasn’t the only one who noticed that the fault line between her attackers and her defenders seemed to line up so neatly with those who attack and those who defend Israel.
The attacks came primarily from Candace Owens, while Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson implicitly, if indirectly, defended Owens. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kirk’s most outspoken and prominent defender was Ben Shapiro, with Dave Rubin, the satirists at the Babylon Bee and others following closely behind.
Within weeks after the shooting in Utah, Owens was making her insinuations, with her attacks escalating to the point at which she produced what she called an “investigative series,” eight episodes whose title and black-and-white cover imagery unsubtly compared Mrs. Kirk with the bride of Frankenstein. As recently as April, Owens continued to demand proof over the succession of an organization with which she had not been involved for nearly seven years, and others continued their attacks as well. But well before weaving conspiracy theories about Charlie’s widow, Owens had earned herself a profile with the ADL, which calls her a “a top global broadcaster of conspiratorial antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” and reported that she “has promoted inflammatory conspiracy theories, including the ‘blood libel’ and ‘dual loyalty’ tropes, made bizarre allegations of Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination and advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and claimed that modern Jews are secretly not actually Jews, but rather ‘pagan gypsies who have been wearing the cloak of Judaism’ since the 8th century. She’s also claimed that Israel ‘took over’ the U.S.”
Megyn Kelly has called Owens “brilliant” and defended Owens on the ground that she was a “young mom” (as if Erika Kirk isn’t?). Previously, Kelly allowed Tucker Carlson on her show to call American Jews “creepy people taking direct orders from a foreign government,” and said of “groyper” Nick Fuentes “he’s very interesting and he’s very smart.” And Carlson, who has shamelessly hosted Holocaust deniers and others who promote baseless conspiracy theories about Jews, has also echoed the same types of conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s death as Owens has.
Even Joe Rogan, who has used his show to promote all kinds of crackpot theories, including, but certainly not limited to, those about Jews, piled on to Erika Kirk. On his March 20 episode, he made fun of the way her eyes looked while she spoke about the murder of her husband, allowed his guest to call her “possessed,” and even agreed with that guest when he called her a “star**cker.”
The overlap is neither surprising nor coincidental. Antisemitism is primarily a conspiracy theory, so people who subscribe to it will be likely to believe other conspiracy theories as well. But beyond that, if you’ve ever wondered about the morality of the anti-Israel crowd, all you need to do is look at how they treated this widow of a very public figure in her time of grief. They are filled with self-righteousness, but completely empty of any morality that would have compelled them to treat Mrs. Kirk with a shred of decency. They preyed on her vulnerability for clicks, just as they preyed on Israel in the wake of a most savage and barbaric attack on it on October 7, 2023. And for the same reason – they are immoral ghouls.
Erika Kirk has famously said that she forgives Charlie’s assassin, and has made religiosity a central pillar of her public persona. Yet she was – shockingly – criticized by Owens even for the way she acted at the side of her husband’s casket. Mrs. Kirk sets an example of what it looks like to live a moral life, to exemplify grace even in a time of deep personal despair, and the same people who hate Jews for bringing the world the Bible, hate Erika for her morality.
Thankfully, in the past few weeks those attacks seemed to have died down, with the influence of those who were making them declining as primary elections seemed to have revealed their lack of real-world influence.
Charlie Kirk called Jew-hatred “demonic.” Attacks on his widow through the spreading of conspiracy theories about his death, or through attacks on her demeanor or appearance, are no less so. The war we are fighting is nothing less than a war between good and evil.
And we must win it.
