Epstein’s Ghost and the Many Sides of Conspiracism
”A lot of A mode of political explanation that assumes a vast insidious plot against the common good. Learn more is rooted in anti-Jewish ideology—but by no means all of it. The image of ‘the Jew’ as a malevolent, superpowerful figure who manipulates events from behind the scenes has been a fixture of European culture for at least a thousand years. The medieval European stereotype of the Jewish moneylender evolved into the modern image of the Jewish banker, from Lord Rothschild to George Soros. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this anti-elite scapegoat was joined by the countersubversive image of the Jewish radical, whether anarchist, socialist, or Bolshevik. The fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Tsarist Russia in 1903, details an international Jewish plot to conquer the globe through secretive means, and laid the groundwork for a lot of the conspiracist ideology that followed. The International Jew, a compilation of essays first serialized in Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1920-1922, gave The Protocols an American inflection by claiming that Hollywood, jazz music, and bootlegging were part of the plot. Anti-Jewish conspiracism was ideologically central for U.S. fascist groups in the 1930s, from the German-American Bund to Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice. Since the 1980s, claims that an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to destroy the white race have been pivotal to the rise of the white nationalist movement. Less explicit forms of anti-Jewish Blaming a person or group wrongfully for some problem, especially for other people’s misdeeds. Scapegoating deflects people’s anger and grievances away from the real causes of a social problem onto a target group demonized as malevolent wrongdoers. Learn more have infused both Christian nationalism and the Patriot movement.”