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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)