An Evil Weekend

There are days when the world stacks tragedy and pain and violent evil one after another, waves of blood rolling over our screens and souls. This was a weekend of evil.

Rob and Michele Reiner are dead, killed in their own home, with police calling it an apparent homicide, and the investigation is still unfolding. When the story broke, my brain did that trick where it tries to bargain with reality: maybe it’s wrong, it’s perhaps a mistake, maybe the universe will walk it back.

But it won’t. It never does.

And now Rob is gone.

A friend, one of those rare Hollywood men who could be ferocious in his convictions without losing his warmth and humor. He made people laugh, yes. He made people argue, yes. His creative genius? Unrivaled. But he was, at bottom, a human being, smart, funny, warm, present, there. The kind you expect to still be in the world because the world needs men like that to stay upright.

But evil doesn’t care about what we need. Evil wants an opening.

Then Brown. A gunman opened fire inside an academic building during finals, two students killed, nine injured, families shattered into before-and-after. The investigation, botched and clumsy so far, isn’t helping explain the horror.

And a world away in summery Bondi Beach, people gathered for Hanukkah by the water, and a father and son attacked the celebration and turned it into a slaughterhouse. Fifteen dead, over 40 hurt, a nation trying to name the thing it just saw.

Now comes the ritual. The sanctimonious cable panels. The hair-trigger op-eds. The gun arguments, clattering down the stairs like a dropped box of silverware. In America, the fight over mag sizes, arbitrary design features, and red flag laws is too often a way to avoid the uglier question, the one you can’t just regulate or ban.

Because the real problem is not only what’s in the hand, it’s what’s in the heart.

It’s the question of how evil works in this world. I’ll tell you how: online, just like everything else.

Our Silicon Valley overlords have built, piece by piece, swipe by swipe, an attention economy that whispers to unstable people that notoriety is a form of salvation. That one spectacular act can give your life a shape it never had. One “high score” will fill the loneliness. You can become the avenging arm of your party, your ideology, your faith. You’ll be a man, not a lost boy.

The algorithm doesn’t care if the content is a dance, a sermon, a conspiracy rant, or a kill list. It only cares that you watched. It only cares that you shared.

Researchers have warned for years about “contagion” dynamics, how highly publicized violence can encourage imitation among the vulnerable and the weak. Social platforms don’t create the sickness, but they are marvelous at handing it a microphone, a map, and an audience, and keeping them locked in a hypnotic loop.

And that’s where Bondi matters in a way that should terrify us beyond the usual culture-war talking points.

Reporting indicates the younger suspect had previously come to the attention of security services years earlier for alleged associations with Islamic extremists, and while Aussie leaders have said there’s no evidence of a broader cell, extremist Islamist and anti-Semitic ideology almost certainly drove this attack.

If that’s where the facts land, it likely won’t be a story about a vast underground network so much as a story about online vectors: the same digital currents that carry grievance, humiliation, and rage into the bloodstream of society, until the person decides the only way to feel real is to make everyone else bleed.

The people killed at Bondi weren’t killed because they were IDF soldiers. They were killed entirely and solely because they were Jews.

A few on the left (a blessedly small few, I must note) have looked at the slaughter in Bondi as a righteous payback for Gaza.

It is not. Most were Australian Jews, disconnected and innocent of any of Netanyahu’s actions. The shooters, both reported to be Pakistani nationals, just wanted to kill Jews. Gaza will turn out to be an excuse, not a reason, for them.

Jihadis are created, not born. Bin Laden used samizdat videotapes. Today’s ISIS, AQ, and other Gulf-state-funded terror groups use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.

Islamic State propaganda and jihadist recruitment have used the internet and social media aggressively. But the grim truth is that the delivery system is ideology-agnostic.

Far-right, far-left, Islamist, nihilist, different flags, same machinery: mainstream platforms to hook the vulnerable, darker channels to harden them, and a culture of spectacle that turns murder into myth. Religion is sometimes the spark. So is race. So is Tate-class misogyny. So is pure, bored nihilism. The accelerant is the same.

If there was one bright light in this terrible weekend, it was a local fruit vendor at Bondi Beach who did what we all hope we will have the courage to do when confronting evil in action: he fought the Islamic radical shooters and risked all for the innocent.

In the middle of that Bondi nightmare, Ahmed al-Ahmed did the one thing our broken age keeps telling people not to do: he ran toward the gunfire. Video shows him charging the shooter from behind, wrestling the long gun away from the terrorist, an act of selfless heroism that saved strangers he’d never met.

He paid for it in blood; reports say he was hit multiple times and rushed into surgery, but what he bought the rest of them in that instant was priceless: a few more heartbeats, a few more people getting out, a few more families not learning the eternal nature of grief in the worst possible way.

What he bought for the rest of us is a reminder that heroism and goodness rise from unlikely places, in this case, a Muslim fruit stand owner stopping Muslim terrorists from killing Jewish Australians. He didn’t have to. He could have run. Hidden. Looked away.

He chose goodness and courage.

We starve for and struggle with meaning in a world of clicks, swipes, and likes, none of which scratch the deeper human urge for connection, community, family, and worth.

I believe in evil. I have seen enough of it now, up close and personal, to pretend it doesn’t.

It is a tangible, terrible aspect of humanity, and the purpose of good men, good civilizations, and good institutions is to constrain it. The purpose of Silicon Valley is to shrug, smile, and say, “Section 230. Shareholder value. Fuck you.” when asked to be accountable for being the most significant contemporary vector for evil people to do evil things.

In the coming heat of arguments over guns, too many will miss the deeper horror: our social media teaches broken men that massacre is a path to recognition, that atrocity is identity, that death is “content.”

And until we stop feeding that lie, until we stop treating infamy like oxygen, this weekend will not be an exception.

Until we live in a world with more Ahmed al-Ahmeds and fewer immune and arrogant social media platforms that empower, encourage, and create monsters, it will be a preview.