Taking Aim at Multiracial Democracy

The last thing White nationalist Robert Bowers posted to social media before his deadly attack on the Tree of Life synagogue was, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” That was October 27, 2018. Bowers’ killing of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Pittsburgh synagogue sent shock waves through both the U.S. Jewish community and all those concerned with the violence of bigoted politics. As shocking as it was, it is important to understand that Bowers’ attack was driven by an explicitly White nationalist ideology—an ideology that imagines that U.S. Jews are manipulating policy to use non-White immigrants as a weapon against White people. In his post, Bowers also declared that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish humanitarian aid organization for refugees that Bowers believed partnered with Tree of Life, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people.”¹

Exactly six months later, White nationalist John T. Earnest attacked a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, killing one congregant and injuring several others. In the manifesto he posted to 8chan before the attack, Earnest expressed a similar claim to Bowers, stating his conviction that Jews engineered a “meticulously planned genocide of the European race” through orchestrating massive non-White immigration and other phenomena.²

These acts of heartbreaking violence left many Americans at a loss to understand the ideology that motivated them. In fact, antisemitism has always been a core element of White nationalist thought. For White nationalists, who hold the explicitly racist belief that non-White others are intrinsically inferior, Jews are imagined as the architects of a strategy to use immigrants and “liberal” policy to undermine White civilization and challenge White existence. As this extremist ideology moves from the fringes to increasingly influence the Republican Party, all the way up to the White House, it is important to understand how antisemitism and anti-immigrant racism are core mobilizing strategies of the Right in the Trump era. Make no mistake, it is the White nationalists and their dog-whistling allies in the Trump camp who pose the principal threat to U.S. Jews, alongside a nationalist policy agenda that targets immigrants and communities of color with bigotry and exclusion.³

White nationalists like Bowers and Earnest imagine that immigrants of color pose an “existential threat to White people,” and they blame Jews as a group for orchestrating what both they and President Trump have called an “invasion” of such immigrants. ^4;5  Both ideas—the paramount value of White racial identity and the conception of Jews as malevolent conspiratorial manipulators—are deeply rooted in the history of European White supremacy, and have been refined and promoted by the contemporary White nationalist movement in all its bewildering array. Their ideas have, at the same time, been increasingly echoed and reinforced, in explicit and coded form, from right-wing elected officials, including President Trump, and media pundits. These right-wing leaders fuse antisemitism with anti-immigrant sentiment to mobilize millions behind a racist, nationalist project.

Since 2016, the U.S. has seen a marked increase in bigoted and exclusionary rhetoric and policy from right-wing political leaders, and a surge in grassroots violence from White nationalists and the broader base of the Right, targeting Muslim, Latinx, Arab, Black, and other ethnic minority communities and marginalized groups. As part of this trend, the U.S. has seen a frightening escalation of antisemitism across the Right—from Trump’s antisemitic campaign ads and Republican rhetoric scapegoating George Soros and “globalists,” to the rise of the online Alt Right movement, White nationalist street mobilizations like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and deadly and thwarted violence, arson, and vandalism targeting synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.^{6;7;8;9;10;11} The scapegoating rhetoric deployed by mainstream right-wing leaders is both call and response to White nationalist attacks on Jews, immigrants and other vulnerable communities.

The Trump administration and its supporters represent the principal source and threat of antisemitism in the U.S. Whether they articulate Jews as chief architects of so-called White genocide, shadowy orchestrators of non-white immigration, corruptors of traditional social norms, or in some other manipulative mold, antisemitism is a core component of how the Trump-empowered Right explains the world and their own place in it.¹² Regardless of whether Trump and other right-wing political and media leaders personally hold White nationalist views of Jews as sinister manipulators, they utilize conspiratorial antisemitism as a tool to consolidate support, mobilize their base, and reinforce their hold on power. As the Right attempts to further contract the boundaries of the U.S. around the image of a White, Christian America, we have seen this hard-wired racism and antisemitism spark violence and vitriol during election season and other moments of heightened political tension.

Looking ahead to the 2020 election and beyond, it is likely that conspiratorial scapegoating against Jews will be further amplified. Jewish communities will continue to face the threat of violent attack, and a range of racial and ethnic minority groups, along with broad-based movements for equality and social change, will increasingly find themselves delegitimized by antisemitic rhetoric. As White nationalism continues to recast the mainstream Right in its image, the many communities under threat must develop strategies and practices of solidarity, united by an expansive vision of a world where all communities can thrive. One year after the Pittsburgh shooter struck at Jews to defend his White race from immigrants, it is imperative that we understand the entanglement of antisemitism with anti-immigrant racism and the broader racial and ethnic nationalism that is animating the Right, if we are to fortify and expand inclusive, multi-racial democracy.

The Demographic Obsession of White Nationalism

White nationalists promote the notion that people of European heritage constitute a biological, cultural, and political entity known as the White race.¹³ This is sometimes euphemized as Western or Christian civilization.¹⁴ They assert that the demographic cohesion, identity, and continuity of the White race is under imminent and existential attack by massive non-white immigration and the forces of multiculturalism—a crisis they call “white genocide” or “the great replacement.”¹⁵ Such ideas precede the Trump administration by decades. Movement intellectual Jared Taylor wrote in 1996, “What we are witnessing is one of the great tragedies in human history. Powerful forces are in motion that, if left unchecked, will slowly push aside European man and European civilization on this [North American] continent. If we do nothing, the country we leave to our grandchildren will be a grim Third-World failure, in which whites will be a minority.”¹⁶ The only way to preserve a future for the White race, in their eyes, is to establish a homogenous ethnostate, within which Whites must command a decisive demographic majority and from which non-whites must be purged.¹⁷

White nationalists see racial categories as biological, immutable essences. Obsessed with demographic decline, they interpret the mere presence of non-whites on “their” territory as an existential threat, as is clearly stated in their movement mantra known as the 14 words: “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”^18;19 Accordingly, they see current manifestations of institutional White supremacy, such as mass incarceration, privatizing the public good, persistent racialized wealth inequality, and more, as not racist enough. They are oriented towards ethnic cleansing, from pragmatic means such as immigration restriction, through to expulsion and genocide. As we shall see, the White nationalist framework of separation and expulsion, as distinct from a White supremacist framework of domination and exploitation, is operative not only among movement militants but also among the buttoned-down strategists that write the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Antisemitism at the Core

“The core concept of the [White nationalist] movement, upon which all else is based is that Whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into White countries which was enabled by a corrosive liberal ideology of White self-hatred,” stated neonazi propagandist Andrew Anglin in “A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” an August 2016 manifesto published on his inflammatory website The Daily Stormer_. He added, “the Jews are at the center of this agenda.”²⁰ Indeed, antisemitism forms the linchpin of how White nationalists understand their predicament.

 For White nationalists, progressive U.S. Jewish activists have worked for over a century to covertly orchestrate a slew of progressive forces, from the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ rights movements to multiculturalism, “political correctness,” and more.²¹ White nationalists purport that Jews have long supported these “corrosive liberal ideolog[ies],” as Anglin called them, in order to chip away at the cultural and ideological pillars upholding traditional White U.S. culture.²² For example, Kevin MacDonald, an antisemitic evolutionary psychologist and White nationalist thought leader, argues, “beginning in the 1920s, Jewish intellectual and political movements have been a necessary condition for the reshaping of American culture away from a strong sense of being a European [White] Christian society in the direction of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass immigration of non-Europeans and non-Christians.”²³ By framing White Christians as the historic and rightful core of the United States, White nationalists minimize the vital role played by non-White and non-Christian peoples in the history of the U.S., while justifying the traumatic legacies of slavery and indigenous genocide.

White nationalist antisemitism plays a distinct and crucial role in the movement’s spectrum of bigotry. To most White nationalists, Jews are not White.²⁴ While other ethnic and religious groups are seen as external demographic and cultural threats from below, Jews, claim White nationalists, have destabilized White civilization from within or above, the prime movers and puppet masters of creeping White genocide. “To rail against blacks and Hispanics without mentioning Jews,” wrote neonazi leader Victor Gerhard in 2003, “is like complaining about the symptoms and not the disease.”²⁵ By blaming Jews for the gamut of purported systemic attacks on White people, the White nationalist movement welds together an overarching worldview that interprets a range of disparate political, cultural and economic phenomena—from the civil rights movement and liberal immigration policy, to changing gender roles, corporate outsourcing and job loss—as interconnected machinations of a sinister, conspiratorial Jewish elite. Within the movement’s broad constellation of others, “the organized Jewish community,” said Greg Johnson, publisher of the White nationalist periodical Counter-Currents, “is the principal enemy—not the sole enemy, but the principal enemy—of every attempt to halt and reverse white extinction. One cannot defeat an enemy one will not name. Therefore, White Nationalism is inescapably anti-Semitic.”²⁶ 

Given their fixation on demographic change, theories framing non-white immigration as a Jewish conspiracy hold special prominence in the White nationalist worldview. In his 1998 book, The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald advanced the influential thesis that U.S. Jewish political clout played a pivotal role in reversing the restrictive U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, securing the 1965 immigration reforms that, over the coming decades, would drastically alter the demographic makeup of the country.²⁷

Jews vigorously pursue this activism, argues McDonald, because they have adapted a vested interest “in opposing the establishment of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies in which they reside as minorities” as a way to thrive in diaspora.^28;29 As White nationalist leader William Pierce explained in 2002, “the motive driving the Jews’ campaign for the new immigration law in 1965 that brought in the flood of non-White immigrants who have so drastically darkened America in recent decades…was to dilute White political strength, to multiculturalize America, so that Whites couldn’t gang up on the Jews.”³⁰ Pierce is best known as the author of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 dystopian novel, highly influential within the White nationalist movement. The book inspired a number of White nationalist violent attacks in the 1980s and 90s, including the bombing by Timothy McVeigh of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.³¹ The Turner Diaries depicted an apocalyptic race war waged by White revolutionaries against a Jewish-controlled world government, culminating in the systematic extermination of non-whites.³² Today, White nationalists remain convinced that in the 21st century, as movement intellectual Andrew Joyce described in a December 2018 essay tracing Jewish involvement in refugee and immigrant organizations, “Jews are demonstrably providing the leadership, organisational capacity, money, and legal aggression that is driving the mass migration machine.”³³

Indeed, for White nationalists, presumed Jewish control over immigration policy is understood as one manifestation of sweeping Jewish power over the U.S. (and global) political system as a whole. As David Lane, member of the White nationalist violent vigilante group, The Order, and author of the “14 Words” put it bluntly in his mid-1990s White Genocide Manifesto—“all Western nations are ruled by a Zionist [read Jewish] conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the white race.”³⁴ Driven by an acute sense of White victimization and aspiration towards revolutionary heroism, Bowers, Earnest and many other antisemitic activists see themselves as guerrilla warriors, liberating the incipient white ethnostate from this all-powerful, unassimilable, permanently foreign elite.

Escalating Threat of White Nationalism

On October 27, 2018, Robert Bowers invoked this conspiratorial linkage between U.S. Jews and non-White immigration to commit the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. White nationalists like him are a growing force on the U.S. and global political landscape, and without appropriate interventions, we can expect violent attacks against Jews and other minorities to continue and even to escalate.

Of course, Jews are far from the only targets of White nationalist violence. From El Paso, Texas to Charleston, South Carolina and Christchurch, New Zealand, Latinx, Muslim, and Black communities have been attacked by mass shooters whose manifestos, posted on forums like Gab or 8chan, are steeped in a White nationalist worldview, which sees “White genocide” and “great replacement” lurking around the corner.^35;36 These ideologically interconnected attacks are carried out by individuals who share ideas, tactics and encouragement with the broader White nationalist movement online, before ultimately carrying out each attack independently.³⁷ In the summer of 2019, federal and local authorities arrested at least four far-right White men who expressed intent to commit mass attacks. Three were explicit White nationalists, who planned to shoot up or bomb synagogues and Jewish community centers.³⁸  

Nor is this threat limited to the U.S. On October 9, 2019, on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, a White nationalist attempted unsuccessfully to storm a synagogue in Halle, Germany, before killing 2 people in a nearby shooting spree. In a live video streamed online during the attack, the gunman railed against “feminism” and “mass immigration,” declaring, “the root of all these problems is the Jew.”³⁹ Similarly motivated deadly attacks—such as the 2019 murder of 49 Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand⁴⁰, and the murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011⁴¹—show that White nationalist terrorism, driven by widespread “great replacement” ideology, remains a global phenomenon.⁴²

Today, watchdog organizations track high levels of antisemitic incidents and violent attacks from the Right.⁴³ Meanwhile, White nationalism enjoys an expanding potential base of support across the U.S. landscape. Studies indicate that millions of White Americans hold a strong sense of White identity and victimization, and express a “desire for collective action on behalf of Whites.”^44;45 Millions also fear that the effects of the country becoming majority non-White by 2045 will be mostly negative.^46;47  

Meanwhile, White nationalist views on immigration are shaping the rhetoric and policy of the mainstream Right. Today, many observers describe the draconian anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration as motivated by some version of White nationalism. Jayashri Srikantiah and Shirin Sinnar, for example, wrote in a March 2019 essay published in the Stanford Law Review, that the Trump administration has implemented a “dizzying array of policy changes that explicitly target or disproportionately affect noncitizens of color” and observed that Trump’s statements on immigrants and refugees “suggest that he views U.S. national identity in racial terms and seeks to preserve the nation’s predominantly white identity.”⁴⁸ Meanwhile, mainstream pundits across the Right increasingly adopt “great replacement” rhetoric to insinuate that White Americans are being replaced through immigration, with Fox News commentators regularly warning of an “invasion…of illegal immigrants” that will “replace…the old America with a new America.”⁴⁹

At the same time, prominent organizations in the anti-immigrant movement act as a bridge between open White nationalists and what have become relatively mainstream politicians and media outlets. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), two leading anti-immigrant organizations founded by White nationalist John Tanton, have spent decades advocating for draconian immigration restriction policies now adopted by the Trump administration.^50;51

These and other trends indicate that even as Trump and most mainstream Republicans disavow White nationalism—and White nationalists, in turn, often express disillusionment and even active opposition to Trump and other right-wing leaders—White nationalists are succeeding in their long-term metapolitical strategy of social transformation by shifting and shaping a long term policy agenda, and structuring basic elements of the common-sense worldview held by millions across the U.S.⁵²

Antisemitism as a Technique of Power

Conspiracism against George Soros or globalist elites (a parallel antisemitic trope also favored by the mainstream Right, evoking a similarly shadowy cabal orchestrating non-white immigration and various progressive causes⁵³) gains sizable traction and staying power from the stereotype of what industrialist Henry Ford called the “International Jew,” a concept deeply rooted in popular imagination by the legacy of modern European antisemitism.⁵⁴ From early 20th-century Tsarist Russia to Nazi Germany, conservative and ultra-nationalist governments and social movements have long fixated upon the fantasy of a scheming, secretive Jewish cabal, diabolically manipulating world affairs.⁵⁵ Concentrated in liberal urban settings and institutions like government, finance, and the media and disloyal to traditional norms and values, the stereotype paints Jews as eager to backstab the nationalist cause out of loyalty to a shadowy global conspiracy.⁵⁶ Today, this charge is voiced explicitly by White nationalists, while coded forms like the scapegoating of George Soros and globalists help to repackage White nationalist ideology for broader public consumption. 

Progressive opposition to exclusionary nationalist policies such as Trump’s border wall or the detention and separation of immigrant and refugee families are marked as globalist or backed by Soros, bolstering the notion of interconnected threats posed by a sinister, parasitic elite. This elite is rendered as an absolute enemy of the racist nationalist project, intent, ultimately, upon diluting national identity, subverting traditional values and collapsing “Western civilization” itself.^57;58;59;60 Right-wing leaders posit this “big Other” to explain the intrusion of immigrant others upon the White Christian body politic and to justify the implementation of policies to remove these intruders, while inspiring a subset of militant followers, such as Bowers and Earnest, to use vigilante violence.

As a racialized form of anti-elitist conspiracism, this kind of modern European-derived antisemitism looks and functions differently than many forms of oppression. While many forms of oppression “punch down” by dehumanizing and declaring some groups of people inferior based on race, class and gender, modern antisemitism claims to “punch up” at a secretive, elite class of Jews, who White nationalists imagine sit in a more powerful position from which they orchestrate the world’s problems.⁶¹ During times of intense economic downturn, widespread inequality and political instability, right-wing leaders and social movements use antisemitic scapegoating to redirect popular discontent away from challenging the inequitable systems and policies they create, uphold, and benefit from, and onto the false image of the conniving, all-powerful Jew, whether in explicit or euphemized form.

In their book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, researchers Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons explain that modern right-wing populist movements have long attracted “middle-level groups in the social hierarchy, notably middle- and working-class Whites, who have a stake in traditional social privilege but resent the power of upper-class elites over them,” as well as certain factions of the societal elite itself.⁶² For over a century, explain Berlet and Lyons, right-wing populist movements in the U.S. have mobilized these sectors of White society—anxious to preserve the privileges of Whiteness, alienated by perceived cultural change, and often bruised by economic dislocation—to punch down at immigrants and groups of color below them, and up at an easily imaginable face of the elite, perceived to sit above them in the social hierarchy.⁶³

Throughout the history of the U.S., explain Berlet and Lyons, populist movements have existed across the right, left and center of the political spectrum. These movements, they explain, “can promote forms of antielitism that target either genuine structures of oppression or scapegoats alleged to be part of a secret conspiracy. And they can define ‘the people’ in ways that are inclusive and challenge traditional hierarchies, or in ways that silence or demonize oppressed groups.”⁶⁴ While progressive populist movements offer, at their best, a clear analysis and condemnation of the real societal elites who benefit from structures of exploitation, right-wing populism “fueled in large part by people’s grievances against their own oppression…deflect[s] popular discontent away from positive social change by targeting only small sections of the elite or groups falsely identified with the elite, and especially by channeling most anger against oppressed or marginalized groups that offer more vulnerable targets.”⁶⁵

For the race-obsessed White nationalist movement, this manifests as taking aim explicitly at Jews, who they view as a racialized image of the upper-class elite, in an attempt to galvanize Whites in the U.S. around a radical agenda of separation and exclusion.  White nationalists use the very fact that, over the twentieth century, some U.S. Jews entered visible positions in portions of the middle and upper classes, while some others enthusiastically embraced progressive causes, as proof of their false and conspiratorial view of Jews as hidden puppeteers both of economic and governmental power structures, and of progressive movements.

Meanwhile, many right-wing elected officials and media figures, while possibly holding no conscious commitment to ideological Jew-hatred, also deploy conspiracist punching up, rooted in modern antisemitism, as an effective technique to define and mobilize a self-proclaimed “American middle,” squeezed by elites from above and non-white immigrants and communities of color from below, around a racist, nationalist agenda.⁶⁶

The anti-elitist posturing of right-wing populism resonates for many Americans fed up with widespread poverty and wealth inequality, corrupt and unaccountable political leadership, media monopolization, the hollowing out of democracy, and other alienating ills of late capitalism. As racial and economic justice advocate Dania Rajendra puts it, “antisemitism is a powerful explanation for a society looking for answers about why the richest nation in the history of the world often feels so terrible to live in, to work in, to be neighbors in.”⁶⁷ While blaming immigrants for job loss and holding other bigoted views against Muslims, Black folks and other groups, many people are also energized by the prospect of punching up at an imagined globalist elite, personified in the visage of select prominent Jews like George Soros, whom they hold intimately responsible for their economic misery and social alienation.

The irony, of course, is that Trump and other right-wing leaders are actually among the members of the economic and political elite who are most committed to, and benefit the most from, the disastrous status quo economic policies so deeply resented by millions of their followers. Multiracial, progressive movements for democracy and equality, meanwhile, are most committed to challenging this status quo, and reshaping the rules to end exploitation, cease empowering the ultra-rich, and spread the benefits among everyone in society. By misdirecting millions towards illusory revolt against George Soros and “globalists,” antisemitic “punching up” thus functions as a powerful technique to help right-wing leaders protect and consolidate their power, foreclose the possibility of powerful multiracial solidarity, and ensure that their own inequitable policies remain hidden from scrutiny and accountability.

While progressive movements, at their best, expand the notion of “we the people” to envision a U.S. future where every group can thrive, right-wing populism wields antisemitic punching up, alongside other forms of punching down bigotry, to contract the boundaries of the “we” to exclude those, within and without, deemed infiltrators and defilers of the set of cultures, values and groups deemed truly and authentically American. Since it looks and functions differently than many more familiar forms of punching down bigotry, antisemitic punching up often remains unfamiliar and confusing to progressive movements. This lack of understanding constitutes a dangerous gap in progressive movements’ analysis of the mainstream Right and helps complicate the development of solidarity between Jews and other targets of racism and White nationalism. It is crucial for progressive movements to understand antisemitism, since it functions as a key weapon in the mainstream right-wing arsenal, and is used effectively to build and maintain power in political moments like our own.

Stoking Antisemitism

In the weeks and months leading up to Robert Bowers’ violent attack on Tree of Life synagogue, right-wing politicians and conservative media pundits drew on White nationalist-friendly rhetoric to galvanize millions behind a racist anti-immigrant agenda. Indeed, Trump and his supporters in the mainstream Right regularly spread antisemitic ideas, however lightly veiled, to mobilize elements of their base.

On October 12, 2018 migrants fleeing violence, poverty and political repression gathered in Honduras, and began to travel north together.⁶⁸ Within two days, a conspiracy that George Soros was funding and orchestrating the migrant caravan began to spread online, sparked, according to an analysis from USA Today, by a White nationalist Twitter user who posted frequently about Jews and “white genocide.” ⁶⁹ Though similar conspiracies had circulated earlier in 2018 regarding previous caravans, this time, it quickly spread like wildfire, as right-wing leaders positioned the supposed threat of the caravan as a defining flashpoint in the final contentious weeks before the November 6 midterm elections.^70;71

According to PRA’s review, in the two months leading up to the November 6 election, Fox News and five other leading conservative websites published a combined total of at least 345 news pieces that connected Soros and globalists to liberal causes—almost one article a day per site, on average. During the month of October 2018, this conspiratorial rhetoric against George Soros and globalists was frequently voiced by right-wing officials and amplified on the shows of Fox News Channel prime-time anchors Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Each of these shows had between 3 and 3.5 million viewers—with Fox News Channel emerging as the most-watched basic cable network that month, beating CNN and MSNBC combined.⁷² Politicians and pundits were supported, in their antisemitic scapegoating, by conservative think tanks like Judicial Watch and Capital Research Center.⁷³ By the time of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on October 27, the conspiracy that Soros was funding the migrant caravan, boosted by continued mainstream exposure, had a potential reach of over 670 million on Facebook and Twitter alone.⁷⁴

In the exchange of ideas between mainstream and periphery, increasingly radical, conspiratorial and racist views are reinforced and amplified across the Right. In their landmark 2018 study, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” a team of Harvard researchers describe this process as a “propaganda feedback loop” operating across the Right, whereby “the media, [political] elites, and public are all participants in a self-reinforcing feedback loop” that exhibits “high insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumor and conspiracy theory, and drift toward more extreme versions of itself…[and] tend[s] to reinforce partisan statements, irrespective of their truth.”⁷⁵

The cultural and commercial model of this ecosystem, researchers describe, is structured to produce cathartic outrage, visceral disgust, and an adversarial mentality. This is fueled by the relentless profit-driven quest for clicks and views, with social media platform algorithms encouraging the spread and magnifying the impact of sensationalist, conspiratorial and White nationalist content. Through the continual promotion of racism and antisemitic conspiracism, political leaders secure a reliable and outraged audience, and broadcasters secure a loyal market segment—while the beliefs and attitudes of the attentive public help shape, and in turn are shaped by, this rhetoric.

When right-wing elected officials voice antisemitic conspiracy theories, it grants these theories legitimacy and a massive public forum, helping to create a climate that encourages White nationalist attacks on Jews and other minorities. Scapegoating rhetoric by right-wing leaders, amplified and repeated by right-wing media and shared by millions of followers, functions, in the words of researcher Chip Berlet, as “scripted violence.” It encourages followers to “adopt a ‘superhero complex,’ which justifies their pre-emptive acts of violence or terrorism to ‘save society’ from imminent threats by named enemies ‘before it is too late.’” Thus, “a leader need not directly exhort violence,” writes Berlet, “to create a constituency that hears a call to take action against the named enemy.”⁷⁶ While scapegoating speech from leaders helps push a subset of followers toward acts of violence, far-right segments of the public also find, in this right-wing ecosystem, opportunities to seed their ideology and rhetoric into mainstream discourse, pulling leaders rightward.

Disrupting Antisemitism

One year after the Pittsburgh shooting, the mainstream Right still weds exclusionary rhetoric about immigrants and people of color with scapegoating rhetoric about Jews, in order to mobilize millions behind a racist, nationalist, and increasingly authoritarian political agenda. If we are to defeat this growing political movement, we must understand how antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric work together to create a cohesive ideology, and then directly confront and disrupt that ideology as a whole by showing the benefit of joining together across difference.

In the aftermath of the 2018 midterms and ahead of the 2020 elections, antisemitism has not receded from the U.S. landscape. Right-wing leaders including President Trump and his surrogates have continued to use antisemitic rhetoric, from railing against Soros and “cosmopolitan elite[s]” to quoting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an effort to demonize liberal media on the floor of Congress.^77-84 Voices on Fox News including Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck have continued to scapegoat Soros and “global financiers” as secret funders of “human wave[s]” of non-white immigration, bemoaned “the degree to which George Soros is successfully remaking this country,” and advanced other antisemitic conspiracist narratives.^85-90 Prominent Trump-aligned anti-immigrant organizations such as FAIR and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) have also increasingly engaged in antisemitic discourse.⁹¹

In these and other ways, the Trump administration and its supporters and amplifiers across the Right remain the principal threats to Jews in the U.S. today. Antisemitism persists as a potent force in mainstream right-wing U.S. politics, and will likely escalate as we approach the 2020 elections, as it has in the two previous election cycles. Meanwhile, non-White immigrants, Muslims, Black folks, and other minority communities remain principal targets of White nationalist violence, as well as bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policy from the Right. The racial and cultural fear stoked by Trump and White nationalists will continue to serve as a rich wellspring of nationalism and division, long past the 2020 elections. In truth, the fight against White nationalism is a decades-long fight.

Yesterday and today, antisemitism doesn’t only threaten the safety and vitality of Jewish communities. It serves as an especially flexible and versatile scaffolding for sweeping attacks against progressive movements and corrodes the foundations of robust democracy by convincing people that social movements arise not as organic expressions of real communities demanding rights and representation, but as the shadowy work of subversive elites infiltrating the body politic. The stakes in this moment are high. If we fail to disrupt and dismantle escalating, politicized antisemitism, we may not be able to contain the rise of White nationalism, and the steady drift of the mainstream Right towards authoritarianism and White nationalist policies of separation and exclusion.

In order to contain the rise of White nationalism, defend the safety and deepen the vibrancy of all our communities, we must challenge the bigoted and exclusionary rhetoric voiced by right-wing elected officials, transmitted by right-wing media outlets and amplified by social media platforms. We must understand the threat of White nationalist antisemitism animating today’s Right, from center to periphery—and we must interrupt this totalizing, conspiratorial antisemitic narrative with a bold, expansive vision of real, inclusive, feminist, multiracial democracy in which everyone can thrive.

We must organize together and practice solidarity between Jewish, immigrant, Muslim, Black, LGBTQI, and other communities targeted by White nationalism and the mainstream Right—and we must build a movement to win justice for all. In practice, this means working together to promote policies that advance racial and economic justice. It means engaging with our differences in a shared understanding that it is the Right—in both mainstream and White nationalist versions—that seeks to exclude, incarcerate, disenfranchise, criminalize and scapegoat our communities and silence our allies. It means understanding that however radically insufficient U.S. democracy has always been, we have to show up for each other if we are to have any chance of transforming it.

Political Research Associates in collaboration with Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice

© 2019 Political Research Associates