At least Erika Kirk’s widely promoted December 13 appearance with Bari Weiss on CBS News raised one
timely question: What did we just watch?
I could
be alone in wondering. The audience for the town hall was minuscule, according to Nielsen—41 percent smaller in
the key 25–54 demo than the year-to-date average for the 8 p.m. time slot,
formerly devoted to the third hour (!) of 48 Hours.
So, since
you probably missed it, here’s what the town hall was: a religious revival
disguised as a news event. It was also a holy mission statement by Weiss, the
editor in chief of CBS News, and David Ellison, the owner of its parent
company, Paramount Skydance.
All was revealed in a remarkable sermon by Kirk, a literal come-to-Jesus
moment that wouldn’t even have tracked in the secular, Walter Cronkite days of
CBS. Bob Milgrim, an audience member whose daughter Sarah was killed in an act of horrific antisemitic violence
in May, asked Kirk to condemn antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and anti-Zionism.
This was reasonable. Also odd. Why ask about an antisemitic hate crime when the
topic is political violence, occasioned by the assassination of Kirk’s
non-Jewish husband, Charlie, a Christian nationalist? Kirk took the question in
stride.
“I will
pray for you,” she said to Milgrim. “It sucks, doesn’t it? Hate is hate. It’s
evil. Charlie and I have always been very clear on our stance—Israel, the
Jewish people. It’s awful.… What healing factor comes out of hating Jewish
people? What healing factor comes out of hating Christians? … Charlie always would
say very clearly: Jew-hate was brain rot.”
Kirk, who
now runs Turning Point USA since her husband’s assassination in September,
warmed to her subject. “We’ve been to Israel twice together, and to be able to
walk in the place where Our Lord walked and see the Bible come to life in
Technicolor…. How could you hate that place? How could you hate the Jewish
people? … We are human. No one is perfect. No Christian is perfect. No Jew is
perfect. No Muslim is perfect. We are broken, sinful humans in need of a Lord
and Savior.”
Oh dear.
“And that’s
why it’s so important to give your life to the Lord.”
Milgrim
now looked wary.
“Because
once you do that, and you fully surrender to the Lord, you have no room in your
heart for hate. And so, sir, I am so sorry what happened to your daughter.… I
pray that that is something we can somehow extinguish in this world. But we are
living in enemy-occupied territory. And every single day, we need to guard
ourselves, guard our minds, guard our heart, and the best way to do that is
reading God’s word. And you cannot separate the Old Testament from the New
Testament. You cannot. You cannot.”
There was
a big round of applause. Milgrim didn’t clap. OK, so Erika Kirk doesn’t hate
Jews. She just wants to turn them into Christians.
This would have to suffice, though.
Because CBS News and Paramount Skydance had brought on Kirk for a reason, and
it wasn’t to discuss political violence of the kind that killed Charlie Kirk, and the kind Trump regularly calls for. (If the murder of Sarah Milgrim for being
Jewish was political violence, then so are ICE’s unlawful arrests and documented torture of people they’re racially profiling.) The point of the affair was to get Kirk to
underscore, with max emotion, the case for Christian Zionism.
Kirk, as
a top Christian influencer, was a solid choice for this role. There are some 78
million evangelicals in the United States. Their support for Israel is crucial to the
Zionist cause, which is dear to Ellison, a significant donor to Israel who has shown a willingness to produce
propaganda for the state, and Weiss, who calls herself a “Zionist fanatic.”
But
what’s Christian Zionism again? It’s complex. Where traditional Zionism aims to
create and maintain a secure homeland for the Jewish people, the Christian
version is more spiritual than geopolitical. It holds that the Jews are God’s
chosen people and that the current nation of Israel fulfills various Biblical
prophecies.
This is
what Kirk