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 might have gestured at with the line the crowd liked—“You cannot separate the Old Testament from the New Testament.” But she was hard to read there. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps a better exponent of Christian Zionism. On Tucker Carlson’s show, he justified American foreign policy not with white papers but with Genesis 12:1-3: “‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.’ I want to be on the blessing side of things.”
The problem with that, though, is that Christian Zionists like Cruz are a dying breed. Between 2018 and 2021 alone, according to a study commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75 percent to 34 percent. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, according to research on antisemitism, support has plunged even further. In a July poll by Gallup, only 9 percent of Americans 18–35 across demographics approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
This precipitous drop has various explanations. For one, foundational Christian commitments can be, let’s say, somewhat hard to square with genocide. What’s more, now that Israel leans autocratic, old neocon arguments about protecting liberal democracy in the region have curdled. Then there’s the isolationism and antisemitism of the ascendant America First crowd, including the influencer Candace Owens, who has recklessly blamed Kirk’s assassination on the Mossad and who came in for appropriate derision on the CBS show.
And finally, as Kirk made clear, there’s the Bible.
Christian Zionists who discuss Israel don’t reason in op-ed speak about historical prerogatives and geopolitics. Instead, they cite scripture to argue that the Israel named in the Bible is the same nation-state that exists on today’s maps and is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Cruz puts it, you’re only blessed if you keep voting to arm that Israel.
But of course there are other Biblical interpretations. The most germane might be dispensationalism, which says that Israel and the church are distinct entities. The Israel of the Bible is the name given to ancient Jews who, with Jesus’s first coming, were replaced in God’s favor by converted Jews, which is to say Christians. Dispensationalists further reject the Christian Zionist notion that the state of Israel must be cleared of Muslim infidels and shored up militarily to hasten the Second Coming.
So it’s not quite clear what Erika Kirk was saying with her applause line about the Old and New Testaments. She objects to “Jew hate,” yes, but evidently not because Jews are chosen and deserve a secure nation but because they are benighted sinners who, with Jesus’s tender mercy, might yet be saved.
Let’s leave it at that. I have to close my Bible. But, really, it doesn’t matter how the CBS News event landed for normcore viewers. The target audience was those 78 million evangelicals in the U.S. whose support of Israel is crucial to traditional Zionists and above all to Netanyahu, an Ellison family friend.
Erika Kirk did indeed ask, of Israel, “How could you hate that place?” If that’s enough to draw evangelicals to network news, and get wavering Christians on side with American support for Israel, then the town hall was a huge win for Ellison and Weiss. If not, CBS News will surely try something else. In the new world of American propaganda, that’s the way it is.