Is anti-Semitism in American political discourse actually just a carefully cultivated deception? Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X revealed the location of every account on the site, and the results were eye-opening. Viral MAGA influencers ranting about “my tax dollars” funding foreign wars were exposed as Pakistani or Russian. Thirst traps of attractive Israeli soldiers turned out to be run by Indians. Heartbreaking stories of Gazan suffering were found to be posted from Europe. And many overtly racist accounts championing Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist and Hitler aficionado, were revealed to be foreign-run. This discovery led some to suggest that anti-Semitism on the app was in fact an inauthentic intrusion into the American debate with little organic appeal.
“Groypers are in shambles right now,” crowed Eyal Yakoby, a student activist who once testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on college campuses, referring to the supporters of Fuentes. “It’s all a foreign psyop,” he added. “Liberals point to these accounts and say, ‘See, here’s the evidence that Trump’s base, the MAGA movement, is racist and anti-Semitic to its core,’” the libertarian journalist Robby Soave wrote. “Well, guess what? A substantial number of them are based in the Middle East—Pakistan in particular. They’re not MAGA or America First. They’re cosplaying as America First in order to discredit MAGA.”
The notion that American anti-Semitism is an outside influence operation rather than a homegrown menace is a comforting story. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Fuentes followers punch above their weight in American discourse because they are young and disproportionately online; some foreigners no doubt found this far-right niche useful for generating engagement and revenue. But the rise of American anti-Semitism is not a foreign phenomenon, and it is not an online illusion.
Last year, David Shor, a data scientist who did polling for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, surveyed nearly 130,000 voters and found that a quarter of young people had an “unfavorable opinion” of Jews—not Israel, Jews—far more than their elders. Today, some of the top podcasts in the country regularly feature overtly anti-Semitic conspiracy content, whether it’s Tucker Carlson rehabilitating Hitler, Candace Owens claiming that Israel had a hand in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk, or Joe Rogan hosting a conspiracy theorist who fulminated about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”
And it’s not just words. When far-right activists, including a college student named Nick Fuentes, marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” that wasn’t a foreign psyop. When a white supremacist animated by that same fear—that conniving Jews were replacing the white race through mass migration—massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, he wasn’t taking cues from abroad. Neither were the Black nationalists who shot up a Jersey City kosher supermarket in 2019, nor the anti-Israel assassins this past year who attempted to incinerate Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and murdered three people, including a young Jewish woman allegedly shot in the back in Washington, D.C., and an 82-year-old burned to death in Boulder, Colorado.
The reasons for this anti-Jewish eruption are manifold. Holocaust memory has attenuated with the passing of older generations. Outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza has led some self-styled Palestinian partisans to perpetrate or justify attacks on Jews thousands of miles away. Social-media platforms lowered the barriers to spreading anti-Semitic invective, allowing bigots to find and amplify one another more easily. Algorithms often privilege novel inflammatory content—including conspiracy theories—over careful, factual reporting. Sites such as X no longer pretend to moderate this material, not that they ever did much to impede it in the first place.
The upshot is this: Whether anti-Semitic content comes from America or abroad, the supply is simply rising to meet demand. Viral Groyper content only goes viral in the first place because it appeals to Americans who share the sentiment. Outside spending and propaganda cannot manufacture what isn’t already there.
Consider an analogy: In 2022, the Democratic Party spent millions to boost pro–Donald Trump primary candidates who denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The strategy succeeded—many of these extreme candidates won their primary, only to be defeated by Democrats in the general election. Some Republicans groused about Democrats interfering in their party’s processes to promote weaker contenders, but the complaints were copes—a way to avoid blaming their own voters. After all, the Democrats didn’t lie to Republican voters about the election deniers. They simply hyped up extreme candidates—and the GOP-primary electorate liked what it heard. Foreign Groyper accounts, like those election-denying candidates, are merely marketing lies that many people are already predisposed to accept.
To be clear, astroturfed campaigns can and do distort discourse and stoke conflict. For the online marketplace of ideas to function, users need to know what’s authentic and what’s inauthentic, what’s foreign and what’s domestic. X’s location update was a small but salutary step in that direction. But no one should fool themselves into thinking that American pathologies—including anti-Semitism—are primarily paid propaganda. Foreign actors may exploit our divisions, but they don’t create them. They can fan the flames, but they didn’t start the fire. We did that ourselves—and we will have to put it out.
