Brown, Bondi Beach, and the Reiners: The Murderous December 

This year, 2025, will end in a swirl of sorrow, soaked in blood. While the stock market is up almost 14 percent, so are inflation and unemployment. With the Supreme Court’s help, Donald Trump will raze the administrative state. 

The rule of law is being rubbished. The president pardons criminals with relish, including the January 6 mob, and indicts critics with not so much as a sugarcoat of impartiality. Meanwhile, his “Department of War” is in the eyes of many as committing extrajudicial murder on the high seas. 

Some of us may be immunized to the Grand Guignol of Trump’s tantrums, but the bloody December of recent days truly shocks the conscience. We recoil in horror at the killing of two students at Brown University, the massacre of at least 15 Jews at Bondi Beach outside Sydney, Australia, as they celebrated Hanukkah, and the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, allegedly by their son, who has substance abuse and mental health histories. 

Of course, it is too early to know the Brown attack motivation. We know more about Bondi Beach. The Australian authorities say it had to do with antisemitic Islamic State ideology, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, vowing even tighter gun control, proclaimed antisemitism was “a scourge, and we will eradicate it.” 

Eradicating antisemitism is a fraught goal for those who care, let alone those who have been cavalier like the government in Canberra. Antisemitism is a centuries-old virus. Jews represent “other,” a vulnerable, identifiable people at the center of conspiracies. Before the state of Israel, Jews had no army and no means of defense. Their reliance on others’ goodwill proved misplaced. 

Bondi Beach was no isolated incident. The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) documented 5,118 antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2025 as of October 1, with over 5,000 in the United States, 1500 in the United Kingdom, and incidents in Australia reaching historic highs. 

In 2025, Trump said he wanted to eradicate antisemitism in American universities by withholding needed research grants from such iconic learning institutions as Harvard and Columbia. The effectiveness of such an approach has been seriously questioned, and the damage to American scientific leadership is profound. Trump’s motives seemed to have less to do with protecting Jews on campus than pandering to his anti-intellectual base. 

The Brown horror, like Bondi Beach, provokes the usual Kabuki “thoughts and prayers” calls for more gun control and more psychiatric support. At least 75 school shootings have unfolded this year in the United States. And Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” drastically cuts overall Medicaid and federal health spending, impacting behavioral health significantly through nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, leading to potential loss of coverage for millions, including those needing mental health services. 

Jew hatred long rested on prominence in finance or the killing of Christ. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, such shopworn, virulent antisemitism was replaced by the conflation of Israel with Jews. 

To justify attacks on Australian Jews based on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is specious. Last I checked, Bondi Beach is not in Israel. Nor are Washington, D.C., or Boulder, Colorado, sites of other antisemitic slaughter. 

The Holocaust occurred before there was an Israel. Violent antisemitism is not caused by anything Israel does or doesn’t do, which, of course, does not insulate the Israeli government from just criticism. 

The depressing truth this holiday season is that unalloyed rage seems everywhere. Social media has become the conveyor belt for virulent racism. So is the presidential podium. 

President Trump used alleged fraud by Minnesotans of Somali origin as a pretext to demonize American Somalis. There is no answer for this other than to speak out. John Lewis, the late congressman, who was knocked unconscious on the Selma bridge, famously said, “When you see something awful happen, you’ve got to speak up. You’ve got to stand up. Democracy is not a state of being. It’s an act.” 

While Trump has declared war on drugs, he has pardoned or reprieved primary drug dealers. One, quite notably, is former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took millions in bribes and used his police and military to protect drug shipments and crush rivals. He was convicted, but Trump allowed Hernández to walk free from a 45-year prison sentence. 

Because it’s all about him, Trump mocked the Reiners, harshly blaming the killings on the victims’ “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” posting on social media that Rob Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused by others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction.” Trump’s callousness inspired rare pushback from conservative lawmakers. In 2025, add those who cheered or would not condemn the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Murder, which in 1967 was characterized by the Black militant H. Rap Brown as “American as cherry pie,” is today politicized. 

As Stephen Bush writes in The Financial Times, those “from across the political spectrum” have “created the conditions for old hatreds to flourish freely in the 21st century.” It’s a murderous December.