The Audience Has Changed

On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim walked out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They were young Israeli Embassy employees and a couple. Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose.

Alas, Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian anarchist, fired approximately 20 rounds at the couple shouting “free Palestine.” Inside the museum afterward, he allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Rodriguez had brought an explanation with him.

His manifesto, Explication, dated the previous day, defended the “morality of armed demonstration.” He wrote that he had considered such violence justified during the 2014 Gaza war, but understood that most Americans then would have found it “illegible” and “insane.”

By 2025, he believed America was different. “I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

In his mind, the violence had not changed. The audience had.

Rodriguez described armed action as “theater and spectacle.” He had watched enormous demonstrations against Israel, accusations of genocide become commonplace and supporters of Israel portrayed as complicit in mass killing. Yet, he complained, “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.”

The violence would be the spectacle. The manifesto would tell the audience how to read it.

Especially because of the timing: May 20, 2025.

Rodriguez penned his manifesto on the same day that UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid reached them.

The claim was completely false. The comment was a distorted derivative of a report that approximately 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children might occur over the next year. And he placed all of the blame on Israel.

The accusation spread quickly. That afternoon, CAIR issued a call for action after the UN said 14,000 Palestinian babies could die under what CAIR called Israel’s “forced starvation campaign.” Genocide supplied the larger charge.

Shortly before his murder the next day, Lischinsky reportedly shared criticism of Fletcher’s claim that called it a “blood libel.” The blood libel was much more than a charge of accusing Jews of killing children; it gave license to an audience to kill Jews in their defense.

Rodriguez had another word for encouraging the crowds to murder: Legible.

And he was right.

Eleven days later, in Boulder, Colorado, prosecutors say a man attacked a peaceful gathering supporting Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine.” One victim died.

In August 2026, popular pro-Palestinian podcaster Hasan Piker said that if American Jews continued publicly associating themselves with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Keep associating with those falsely accused of genocide, and people will come for you.

Anger and frustration are being harnessed through podcasts and manifestos to inflame passions and violence. The audience is all too happy to join the spectacle these days.

Because the violence is legible.

So crowds cheer on the killer of a United Healthcare executive, gunned down in the streets. They listen to their alt-left congressman shout on the streets that the rape of Jewish women never happened, to turn the victims into aggressors. They watch an Ariane Grande video of a frustrated musician cutting old white men to pieces to rapture and applause.

*Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the alt-left Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman*, *November 2025.* (start at 52:00)

Legible.

Once upon a time – say 2010 – the mass murder by an angry person was viewed through a lens of pity and disbelief. What did we do as a society that enabled isolation and frustration to turn into heinous violence? Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is a cry out of pain – for the victims and the shooter. There are no winners, just anguish.

No longer. The audience has changed. We revel in the spectacle. If the dead are cast as privileged and powerful, part of a caste that keeps people down, the revolution will celebrate the rolled heads.

More, they will want to participate.

There has always been violence, assassinations and terrorism. But we are no longer appalled universally, only selectively. The crowds have read the jihadi-socialist manifestos and they appallingly read “sane.” LEGIBLE.

James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, spoke to the United Nations in June 2023 – months before the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Gazans – and bemoaned “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” He warned that the mob – his own people – had become so twisted that they were itching for Jewish blood.

That same deformity showed itself on American university campuses right after October 7. It has continued to spread outward to American streets as false charges of genocide and mass starvation make the violence “the only sane thing to do.“

And it is no longer just the alt-left drowning in the empathy swamp. All of those little screens that we carry every waking second make us an addicted audience, barraged by posts and podcasts, amplified by bots and armies of American foes. We listen to idiots and lies openly and frequently, and have lost our moral compass in the process.

We have reached a point where the reluctant assassin may become more willing to join the anarchy, believing the crowd might finally understand and appreciate mass murder as a noble cause, rather than a heinous crime.

We have crossed the tipping point of moral collapse. Sensing the panic, we point a finger at artificial intelligence as the problem, willfully blind that the toxin is already in the bloodstream. AI is just an accelerant, not the root of the sickness.

We are entering a new year in the Jewish calendar. As we read from the special Rosh Hashanah prayer book and ask God to have mercy on humanity, consider how many people have internalized very different – and deeply evil – texts and messages. Pray that the sound of the shofar will not only reach Heaven, but awaken the audience on earth from the hypnotic spell that has deformed their moral judgment.