An AI-generated photo of the WHCD gunman in an IDF sweatshirt went viral within hours of Saturday’s attack. The picture was fake. The pipeline that made it land is real — and Jews are downstream of it whether or not we are the target.

Within hours of Saturday night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — before anyone outside the FBI had a clear picture of who the gunman was, or whether the President was alive — a single image was already racing across X, Telegram, Truth Social, and the comment section of every major American news outlet.

A photograph of the suspect. Lounging in an armchair. Holding a beer. Flashing a peace sign. Wearing an Israel Defense Forces sweatshirt.

The image was AI-generated. The New York Post and Storyful walked through the tells inside a day: a mole on the wrong side of his face, mismatched ear structure, malformed fingers. Black Mirror-grade fakes, basically.[1] By the time the debunk landed, the picture had been seen millions of times.

Meanwhile, in the comment sections of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and The Young Turks, researchers at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism were watching something else move just as fast. Explicit conspiracy commentary jumped from a marginal six percent (after Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September) to roughly one in four after the WHCD attack — across left, center, and right outlets, no real spread. The most-engaged comments speculated about a “Mossad-CIA joint charade” and “the family that owns and brags it founded that country.”[2]

The shooter was a 31-year-old California teacher named Cole Tomas Allen. He was in custody. He had a manifesto. None of it had any plausible connection to Israel, the IDF, or Jews.

The audience supplied the connection anyway.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is the wrong version.

Cole Allen — a Caltech-trained engineer who, Saturday evening, ran through a Hilton magnetometer with a 12-gauge and shot a Secret Service officer in the chest at point-blank range — sent his family a lengthy manifesto minutes before the attack. In it, with the affect of a man writing a polite letter of resignation, he describes himself as a “Friendly Federal Assassin” and announces that he is “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”[3] He cites scripture. He argues Christians have a moral obligation to resist unjust authority through force. The President is alive because the officer was wearing a ballistic vest, drew his weapon, and returned fire.

So: I am not telling you Cole Allen tried to kill the President because he hates Jews. He didn’t. His manifesto is a Christian-nationalist screed — not a Protocols of the Elders of Zion deep cut. I am not telling you Donald Trump is the latest victim of the world’s oldest conspiracy theory. He isn’t. The President has a long list of enemies. The Jews are not the relevant variable in his threat file.

What I am telling you is something more uncomfortable, and harder to wave off.

Once a culture starts to believe — softly, conditionally, with a polite cough — that some lives are forfeit, the rest happens on its own.

That belief is the moral sickness. Everything else is the symptom set.

Once you accept the premise that the right kind of person killing the right kind of person is regrettable-but-understandable; that violence in service of a sufficiently good cause is a moral category and not a moral failure; that some people had it coming because of who they were, what they said, or where they sat on the chessboard — your reasoning moves into a different tax bracket. The faculties do not recover fast. You start needing bigger and bigger stories. Who really arranged this. Who is really benefiting. Who is the hidden hand. Who, if you squint, is behind it.

That is the soil. Antisemitism is the weed that grows in that soil first, every single time, because it is the most well-tilled patch in the Western imagination. It is the autoresponder. It is the muscle memory. It is the script the cultural body remembers without trying.

That is why it does not actually matter, structurally, that Cole Allen had no Jewish target list and no IDF beef. The infrastructure that made Cole Allen possible — the rolling, low-grade public consensus that some assassinations are downstream of the deceased’s politics and therefore ethically navigable — is the same infrastructure that, within hours, generated the IDF sweatshirt and pushed it into millions of feeds. Same disease. Different symptoms.

This is the pipeline. And Jews are downstream of it whether we are the target or not.

If you have been treating Saturday as a freak event, you are not paying attention.

In the last year alone: a man set fire to the Pennsylvania Governor’s residence on the first night of Passover, while Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside, because he had decided the Jewish governor was a “monster” for supporting Israel. A gunman shot Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim — a couple, planning to get engaged in Jerusalem the following week — to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum, then shouted “I did it for Gaza” while in custody. A man with a homemade flamethrower attacked a walk for the Israeli hostages in Boulder, telling agents he wanted to “kill all Zionist people”; his oldest victim was an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. A 22-year-old assassinated Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus because, by his own text messages, he had “had enough of his hatred.”[4]

Different killers. Different targets. Some explicitly antisemitic, some not. They did not share a motive. They shared a predicate.

Politically motivated violence in the United States grew by more than thirty percent from 2024 to 2025. By September, for the first time in over thirty years, left-wing political violence had eclipsed right-wing political violence in this country. And the pattern is not symmetrical at the level of attitudes either: in a YouGov poll fielded in the days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, twenty-five percent of self-identified “very liberal” Americans said political violence was sometimes justified — compared to six percent of conservatives, and nine percent of moderates.[5]

Then, on Saturday, the same predicate pointed itself at a sitting President. And that, finally, is when the comment sections lit up.

The Conspiracy Theory Is the Default Operating System

I have written before for these pages that antisemitism is best understood not as a feeling but as a conspiracy theory — a structure that swaps in new vocabulary every century and keeps the same bones underneath.[6] A small, hidden, powerful group is responsible for whatever is going wrong. The fact that you cannot see the strings is taken as proof of how good they are at hiding them. Once you spot the operating system, you stop being surprised by where it crops up. The man behind the curtain has been threadbare for centuries. The reveal stops being a reveal.

What I want to add now is this: the operating system runs hot when the moral predicate gives way. It is the file the cultural laptop reaches for when it needs an answer it does not have. It does not require an antisemitic shooter. It does not require an antisemitic target. It only requires a public that has half-accepted that some violence is fine, actually, and now needs a story for the rest.

Hand a public like that any unexplained event, and watch the autoresponder fire. Six weeks ago, during the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, the comment-section “hidden orchestrator” slot was filled by Mossad and AIPAC. This Saturday, with no Jewish connection in sight, the same slot was filled by an AI-generated IDF sweatshirt. The villain rotates. The architecture does not. A Bond villain who cannot die because he was never a person to begin with — just a job description, recast every century.

And the link between that architecture and the violence itself is not theoretical. ADL and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats found that Americans who hold multiple antisemitic tropes are roughly three times more likely than the general population to support political violence — across the political spectrum. They estimated about ten million American adults hold both. That is more than the total number of Jews in America.[7]

This is why it is not paranoid to say Jews are downstream of the WHCD attack. It is just arithmetic.

A Personal Note: This Is Not Abstract for Me

Let me tell you about a conversation I had — or, more accurately, did not have — last September, in the hours after Charlie Kirk was murdered on a Utah college campus.

A family member of mine — someone I love, someone I know loves me — posted within hours of Kirk’s assassination about how “hateful” he was. As if the appropriate first response to a young man’s murder were to litigate, in real time, whether he had earned anyone’s sympathy. As if “he was hateful” and “his children no longer have a father” were items of comparable weight on the same scale.

That post was the pipeline. In domesticated form. At my own family’s dinner table.

I am a person who speaks, professionally, about deeply controversial topics — and, increasingly, about Jewish issues, Israel, and antisemitism. I know what it is to walk into a room full of people who have already decided they hate you. Since Kirk’s murder, I have received my own death threats from online trolls in various iterations of “get Kirked.” I keep them in a folder. They are not abstract. They are not theoretical.

When someone who does the kind of work I do is murdered — regardless of whether I agreed with everything he said — and the first instinct of a person who loves me is to reach for “he was hateful” rather than “this is unspeakable” — that tells me something. It tells me tribal allegiance has replaced moral reasoning. It tells me the empathy claimed as a core progressive value has a very sharp partisan boundary. And it tells me the same predicate that makes it possible for an Elias Rodriguez to shoot two embassy workers “for Gaza” is operating, in a quieter and more domesticated form, at my own family’s dinner table.

To borrow from every horror movie ever made: the call is coming from inside the house. Unlike the movie, no one is sprinting up the stairs to save us.

Stop pretending the political-violence problem is the other team. The data is in. The pattern is visible. The shooters are coming, with increasing frequency, from cultural neighborhoods progressive Jews have spent two generations underwriting — the universities you donate to, the parties you vote for, the cultural institutions you put on your tax forms.

Refuse the consensus that the murder of someone you disagree with is a “complicated” topic requiring careful reckoning with their views. The murder of a human being requires exactly one statement from you: this is wrong. If you cannot manage that, you are not a moral sophisticate. You are a small example, in a small frame, of the same disease.

Ask the obvious question of every chant, slogan, hashtag, and viral photograph in your feed: who is the shadowy, powerful, malign group this is asking me to identify, and how does this end if its instructions are followed? If the answer is “Jews,” “Zionists,” or any other rebrand of the same character — call it what it is, and do not share the post.

And if you saw the AI-generated IDF photograph this past weekend and felt, even for a moment, the small, embarrassed pull of that does explain a lot — sit with that feeling. Take it apart. That is not a thought you arrived at. That is a script you ran. That is the operating system, working on you, in real time.

Cole Allen left a clean, professional, polite explanation behind. He cited scripture. He apologized to his loved ones. He told us, at length, why his target deserved to die. And that, in the end, is the part I keep returning to: it was almost civil.

It is not civil. It has never been civil. It is an old pipeline running through a new century, dressed up in better clothes, knocking on a door in 2026 we collectively decided to leave unlocked.

We can lock the door.

It is, even now, not too late.

[1]Alex Oliveira, “All the clues that photo of accused WHCD gunman Cole Allen in IDF shirt is AI,” New York Post (April 27, 2026).

[2]Matthias J. Becker, “The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn’t Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them,” The Algemeiner (April 28, 2026), reporting findings from NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism (Decoding Hate project), 2,000-comment corpus across ten major US news outlets in the 24 hours after the WHCD shooting.

[3]U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Suspect in WHCD Shooting Charged with Attempt to Assassinate the President” (April 27, 2026); Washington Post, “Correspondents’ dinner shooting suspect called himself ‘friendly federal assassin’” (April 26, 2026); CBS News, “What we know about the suspect in shooting at White House Correspondents’ Dinner” (April 26, 2026); manifesto excerpts as reported by CBS News (April 27, 2026).

[4]PA Capital-Star, “Governor’s mansion arson suspect cited Shapiro’s positions on Israel-Palestine conflict, police say” (April 14, 2025); NPR, “2 Israeli Embassy aides are killed in a shooting in downtown Washington, D.C.” (May 22, 2025); Colorado Sun, “‘Act of terror’: 8 injured as man uses flamethrower, incendiary device on Israeli hostage demonstrators in Boulder” (June 1, 2025); Assassination of Charlie Kirk, Wikipedia.

[5]Thirty-percent figure: Bridging Divides Initiative, Princeton University, “Special Report: Key Political Violence and Resilience Trends From 2025” (2026), drawing on START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) data showing a 34.5% increase in total terrorism and targeted-violence events in the first eight months of 2025 relative to the same period in 2024. Left-wing eclipsing right-wing finding: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States: What the Data Tells Us” (September 2025); see also Axios, “Study: Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years” (Sept. 28, 2025). YouGov data: YouGov, “What Americans really think about political violence” (Sept. 2025), fielded in the days following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

[6]For the underlying argument, see Jaclyn S. Clark, “A Crash Course in the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory,” The Times of Israel, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-crash-course-in-the-worlds-oldest-conspiracy-theory/; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013); and Izabella Tabarovsky, “Zombie Anti-Zionism,” Tablet Magazine (July 30, 2024).

[7]ADL and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), Antisemitism and Support for Political Violence (October 2023).

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