On Assassination Culture: "Traitor for Israel"
How one issue hijacks every permission structure at once for political violence
A queer anti-fascist killed Charlie Kirk with a bolt-action rifle last September. His letter to his boyfriend said nothing about Israel, nothing about Jews, nothing about foreign policy. He drove three hours to shoot a conservative activist because he hated what Kirk represented to the American right.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, within days, Candace Owens blamed his death on Israeli foreign policy operations. Nine months later the theory is still alive.
Recently, merissahansen17, with almost 200,000 followers, built a conspiracy connecting my account to Palantir, “the number 33,” and Israeli intelligence.
I replied with the facts. “A transgender-affiliated communist killed Charlie Kirk. End of story.”
A person named FLORIDA CHAN responded: “You are a traitor for Israel who should be tried and disposed accordingly (swinging from a tree after being found guilty). End of story.”
That reply garnered over sixty thousand views. Fourteen clicked “Like.”
I wasn’t talking about Israel. I don’t have an Israel position. A queer leftist killed a conservative for conservative reasons, and I got an execution threat over Israel for saying so.
Why?
Before I answer that, a disclosure. The research I’m about to cite comes from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI). Joel Finkelstein, who runs it, is a good friend of mine.
I know what comes next. She cited Finkelstein. Finkelstein is pro-Israel. Therefore she’s running interference for the lobby. Citing peer-reviewed research will get me coded as a Zionist agent, again.
NCRI hasn’t accepted donations from Open Society or other left-wing entities since 2017. Its board leadership is diverse. Regardless, my methodology has never been ‘someone took a grant, therefore they’re compromised.’ A single historical donor on a tax return has never been enough to discredit an organization’s output; if it were, I’d have to throw out most of my own source material, starting with Propublica (also backed by Open Society grants).
Finkelstein’s recent op-eds have criticized his former employer, ADL. His organization’s focus has shifted toward DSA and foreign Marxist influence; work that overlaps with my own.
But the kneejerk reaction of instant disqualification is coming, and that is itself a demonstration of the mechanism I’m about to describe.
Finkelstein’s team at the NCRI has been studying for how politics become a flashpoint for hatred and death threats.
In 2024, they first described an emergent “permission structure” — the sequence of cultural signals that leads ordinary people to view political murder as justified.
Charlie Kirk himself quoted a 2025 report from NCRI in talking about assassination culture.
Over its reports, NCRI found:
Thirty-eight percent of surveyed Americans considered murdering President Trump “somewhat justified.”
Forty-four percent said the same about the UnitedHealthcare CEO killing. Among heavy social media users, 64 percent.
Congressional threats climbed 58 percent from 2024 to 2025.
In May, NCRI published “Evengelizing Murder,” a report that documented the permission structure operating on a single target: Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow.
The stages are specific.
First, the target class gets coded as a hegemon. Not a person, not a minority, not someone who lost her husband — a representative of dominant power.
Second, victimhood gets denied. If the target class is the hegemon, they cannot be victims. Erika Kirk isn’t a widow. Her grief is a performance. Her persecution complex is “laughable.”
Third, moral protection gets stripped. Once the ideology establishes that a class of people cannot be victims, harming them stops registering as harm. Erika Kirk isn’t protected by the normal moral rules that say you don’t threaten widows, because the framework has already reclassified her.
Fourth, violence becomes conceivable. Jacob Wenske was recently arrested for allegedly threatening to bomb a TPUSA summit. His social media included statements such as:
“Every Christian nationalist shall perish in the bombing.”
“I know exactly where to bomb.”
“Death to Erika Kirk and every single speaker there!!”
“I can’t wait to be the valet for her escort.”
Kirk himself cited NCRI’s assassination culture research 153 days before he was shot. His widow became a target through the exact mechanism he tried to warn people about.
Every other issue in American politics activates the permission structure along one axis. Healthcare rage runs left-populist. Anti-government extremism runs right. Anti-Muslim violence runs through a specific nativist pipeline.
But anti-Israel rhetoric operates on a different level altogether. It activates every axis simultaneously. And each pipeline runs the same four stages independently — through completely different ideological logic — arriving at the same operational conclusion.
Stage 1. Hegemonic framing. Each pipeline codes Israel or its supporters as the dominant oppressive force, using its own language.
Tucker Carlson, April 2026: “President Trump is a slave to Israel.”
Nick Fuentes: “We are being held hostage as a country, and as a people, and as an entire generation... by a small minority that doesn’t even share our values.”
Hasan Piker: “Israel, in its current formation, given that it’s a settler colonial operation that’s seeking out the expulsion or complete extermination of the indigenous population as an apartheid state, does not have a right to exist.”
Max Blumenthal: “I used to think Zionist Occupied Government was an antisemitic term. Now I’m forced to see it as a pretty accurate description of the reality we live in [as] one nation under ZOG.”
Nihad Awad, CAIR executive director, at the AMP convention in November 2023: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7.”
Imam Usama Abdulghani in Dearborn: “The Friends of the Zionist Occupiers and Colonialists must know that their time is over.”
Rep. Thomas Massie on Tucker Carlson: “Everybody but me has an AIPAC person — like your AIPAC babysitter, who is always talking to you for AIPAC.”
Seven people. Four pipelines. Little ideological overlap. All saying the same thing: Israel and its supporters are a hegemonic force that controls us.
Stage 2. Victimhood denial. Once the target class is the hegemon, it cannot be the victim.
Tucker Carlson platformed Darryl Cooper, whose thesis was that the Holocaust was “an inadvertent consequence of poor German war planning.” Carlson called him “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Thirty-five million people watched.
Nick Fuentes on October 7: “all a lie” and “none of it was real.” He denied the rapes, denied the murders of children.
Hasan Piker: “What rapes did Hamas do? What are you talking about?... The systematized mass rapes that Hamas dealt on October 7, not a single bit of that has been verified.”
Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone: “October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles.” Israeli civilian deaths reattributed to Israel’s own military.
Students for Justice in Palestine, Zohran Mamdani’s college organization, in their Day of Resistance toolkit: “Responsibility for every single death falls solely on the Zionist entity.”
Imams compiled by MEMRI in January 2024: “Israel Created Hollywood-Type Videos Of Hamas Atrocities.” “The U.S. Lied About Hamas Beheading Babies And Raping Women.”
Across all those ideological pipelines, every single one independently denies that Israelis or Jews can be victims. The ideological reasoning is different each time. The conclusion is identical.
Stage 3. Moral protection stripped. Once victimhood is denied, harming them stops registering as harm.
Elias Rodriguez, in the manifesto he posted before walking into the Israeli embassy and killing two people: Israel’s “abettors have forfeited their humanity.”
Hasan Piker: “Every type of armed resistance against both the settlers and also the Israeli Occupying Force... perfectly legal, perfectly valid, and perfectly moral.”
A Columbia protest leader, on camera: “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” And: “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill.”
Imam Abdulghani in Dearborn: “There is no way to deal with the Israelis, they cannot be alive. Their politicians are like sick puppies that must be put down.”
Chris Hedges: “Palestinians have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power.”
Nick Fuentes: “Jews have no place in Western civilization.”
Candace Owens called Israel a “terrorist state,” a “demonic state,” a “cult nation.” She accused Ben Shapiro of having “absolutely no values that exist outside of the Talmud” — Jewish identity itself as moral disqualification.
Tucker Carlson’s paraphase: “Netanyahu says he is defending Western civilization. No — he is its enemy, literally its main enemy.”
The language runs from academic (”armed struggle against an occupying power”) to eliminationist (”sick puppies that must be put down”). Each statement strips moral protection from a class of people connected to Israel, making whatever happens to them something other than harm.
Stage 4. Violence becomes conceivable. Then actual.
In May 2025, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum. His manifesto cited Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation as proof that “his sacrifice was not made in vain.” He called the shooting “the only sane thing to do.”
In June 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman firebombed a pro-Israel solidarity walk in Boulder. Federal charging documents: “He wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.” He shouted “Free Palestine” during the attack.
In June 2026, the FBI arrested five men planning to attack the UFC Freedom 250 event with explosive drones and snipers. Tycen Proper, 19 years old, had spent $3,000 of his graduation money on ammunition. He identified his targets — five sitting members of Congress — by searching TrackAIPAC.com for politicians who took pro-Israel PAC money.
Now compare to any other geopolitical flashpoint - Ukraine, Uyghurs in China. None attract nearly as much violence and emotion as Israel. That’s because none of these countries have gone through a convergent permission pipeline.
What NCRI documented for Erika Kirk was one pipeline producing one set of threats against one woman. What’s happening with Israel is that same mechanism running through every pipeline simultaneously.
That changes the nature of the threat. Single-pipeline radicalization produces ideologues — people who know they hold a controversial view and have to recruit others into it. Cross-pipeline convergence produces something different: people who don’t think they hold a view at all.
When your enemies and your allies and people who reject both frameworks all name the same target, that target stops being a political position and becomes a background fact of the world, like weather.
And facts don’t need to be argued, only acted on.
That is how a 19-year-old in Ohio spends his graduation money on ammunition and builds a target list from a PAC tracker website.
It is how a 30-year-old in Chicago writes a manifesto declaring that embassy workers have “forfeited their humanity” and treats his own shooting as an obvious moral act.
It is how a 45-year-old in Colorado firebombs a solidarity walk while shouting “Free Palestine” and tells federal agents he wished they were all dead.
These people did not know each other. They consumed different content from different pipelines serving different ideologies. They arrived at the same target set because the convergence made it feel like something everyone already knew.
You are now reading an article that cites Joel Finkelstein’s research and corrects a false narrative about Erika Kirk’s murder. By the rules of the structure I just described, that is enough. The death threat I opened with wasn’t the exception. It was the structure working exactly as designed.
That is an assassination culture.
An environment where the permission to kill gets manufactured independently from every direction until the next person who acts doesn’t feel like a radical. He feels like a realist.
The first derivative of your well described "permission structure" is the "incentive structure" where the individual receives accolades, hearty "well done" hits, and is "mentioned in dispatches" (social media) for being "brave and committed to the cause". This plays into human nature: You get less of what you punish, more of what you reward. Getting a reward for something that you perceive in your reality as "a righteous act" be it murder, a bombing, etc. guarantees you will get more of it. So the permission leads to the incentive and even being arrested and put on trial results in ego and dopamine gratification. Talk about a toxic self-licking ice cream cone. Your analysis provides insight into a strategy of deliberately targeted induced formation psychosis. Suspect some MISO types are having a field day with this, American and non-American. The things you find when you roll over a rock...
Terrific analysis, as usual. I'm glad to see pieces on your Substack.