Television pastor likens Germans who criticise state media defamations of Charlie Kirk to the devil

Annette Behknen, unhinged lunatic.

One of the longest-running traditions in German broadcast television is the “Word for Sunday” – a brief sermon delivered for Das Erste after the Tagesthemen news programme on Saturday evening. Among the prelates tapped to deliver these tiresome remarks is a dreadful woman (and former Protestant pastor) named Annette Behnken. Yesterday it was yet again Behnken’s turn to preach her conception of piety and virtue at all of us:

I feel it when I’m sitting on the train gong to work. I feel it when I meet my friends in town for coffee and when I get home in the evening and talk about my day. I feel it at the movies, when I’m out walking, and even now as I’m speaking to you. And I wonder if you feel the same way. It feels like poison and it’s spreading into our everyday life.

How do you stay sane in a world where so much is falling apart? How do I stay sane with so much madness about? Where is the antidote?

The poison is called hatred, and incitement, and lies. It works across all of society. You see it when people who stand up for freedom, justice and democracy are bombarded with so much hatred they can no longer bear it and have to withdraw.

This is a not-so-veiled reference to Dunja Hayali, the state media news anchor who drew such widespread criticism for slandering Charlie Kirk in the hours after his assassination that she was chased off the airwaves for a few days.

[This poison] affects politicians and activists, and lawyers, journalists – and recently, women in particular … You see the poison at work when a right-wing racist is downplayed as a conservative who inspired young people. And now it’s getting even more absurd, because just saying what is happening draws the insinuation that you’re justifying murder. This a total distortion.

Diabolos: The distorter. That is what the Bible calls the devil …

I guess it is unsurprising that a television pastor who a few months ago rhapsodised that “my Christian faith is actually entirely political” should now strive to rediscover a secularised form of her cherished beliefs in the political sphere, identifying Satan with the millions of Germans who have criticised state media slander of Charlie Kirk.

I promise to move on to other themes tomorrow, but the raging hatred of the German press for Kirk and his sympathisers has yet to abate. Also this weekend, the loathsome ZDF satirist Jan Böhmermann thought it helpful to make his own disdainful remarks to the press, implying beneath a layer of plausibly deniable irony that Kirk got what he deserved as a “right-wing extremist enemy of humanity.” This follows days and days of coverage in which media personalities have called this moderate Christian conservative a racist, an inhumane misanthrope, a misogynist, a white supremacist, a sexist, a metaphorical arsonist, a conspiracy theorist and an advocate for stoning homosexuals to death, who is worthy of comparison to Adolf Hitler and whose assassin might put one in mind of Claus von Stauffenberg.

Apparently worried that their tactic of shouting unsubstantiated slurs was wearing thin, Der Spiegel finally produced a wall of text purporting to explain “why Spiegel describes Charlie Kirk as a right-wing extremist.” Kirk deserves the label, they tell us, because he advocated “the conspiracy myth of the ‘Great Replacement’”, “the conspiracy myth of the manipulation of the 2020 presidential election” and “the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism.” That is remarkably thin gruel to support a defamation campaign against a foreign political activist with whom Germans have no quarrel and whom most people in the Federal Republic had never heard of before his death.

Generally, media coordination like this originates with leading U.S. news outlets like the New York Times. Our domestic media find it easy to get on the same page when they can take cues from the imperial centre. In this instance, however, the American press cannot be the cause; they have been far more muted and careful in their characterisations of Kirk and his politics.

I don’t pretend to know where this is coming from, but I do know that the campaign has an ideological purpose. The political left has cultivated an entire civic religion premised upon identifying and defending an ever growing number of victimised groups. They have arranged their precious victims according to hierarchical categories (the “progressive stack”), while delimiting those who under no circumstances may ever be victims because they are victimisers. Victims now and forever require succour and defence; victimisers must be driven out, marginalised and suppressed – for the safety of their victims and the good of society as a whole. These are indelible, permanent categories, and nothing can supersede or erase them. White men are victimisers, of course, as are those on the right side of politics. They can never be victims, and if they appear to have been victimised, that is merely because they are playing the victim.

The problem for self-satisfied left-leaning ideologues everywhere, is that Kirk, who met all the requirements for being a stereotypical victimiser, was killed brutally in front of his family on video that has been viewed by billions. The consequence is a powerful cognitive dissonance that requires repair. Here we have seen various strategies, for example Jimmy Kimmel’s malicious (and career-ending) lie that Kirk’s assassin “was one of” “the MAGA gang.”¹ That is however a hard sell in light of Tyler Robinson’s obvious political convictions and motivations, and so the preferred approach has been to reconstruct Kirk as a dangerous political villain in the mould of Hitler on the one hand, while on the other hand demanding that everybody “just shut up for a moment and … not say anything at all.” The more Kirk is slandered, the greater the implicit justification attaching to his murder, at least as long as nobody thinks about it too hard. Thus the fragile categories of victimisation might be saved from their latest collision with reality.

You can believe a lot of foolish things without yourself becoming a fool, as long as you don’t take yourself too seriously and accept that the world will not always flatter your preconceptions. The progressive left in Germany have always professed nutty things, but in the course of my adult life, their beliefs have acquired a rigidity and a self-seriousness they never had before. They have become a lot of ridiculous, hysterical and very angry people. They scare the hell out of me.

1. In the left theology of victimhood, victimisers may occasionally victimise other victimisers without disturbing the categories of victimisation.