On Wednesday, wildly popular nutcase Alex Jones (he of the infamous “they’re turning the frogs gay” rant) blew the cover off the latest conspiracy threatening the fabric of the republic: an evil “Jewish mafia” controlling everything from Uber to Obamacare.
He explained in his typically thought-provoking, nuanced fashion:
[Y]ou know I was thinking, they’re always trying to claim that if I talk about world government and corruption I’m anti-Semitic, there’s mafias of all different stripes and groups but since you want to talk about it, the Emanuels are Jewish mafia. So there you go. But, I mean it’s not that Jews are bad, it’s just they are the head of the Jewish mafia in the United States. They run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you.
And then they got weirdos that they’re allied with like George Soros who’s a literal Nazi collaborator, and then you’ve got Madeleine Albright who’s a Nazi collaborator, her dad was, rounding up Jews, I mean it’s like, if being against Jews that are weirdo Nazi collaborators and gangsters makes me anti-Semitic then fine. I’m not against Jews, but at a certain point, when you people call you out, I’ve been called out in hundreds of newspapers in the last month, as being anti-Semitic, because I talk about a global, corporate, combine.
Well why are you labeling the TPP Jewish, I mean it’s got Jews involved in it just like it’s got everybody else. It’s communist Chinese, global government, Japan, I mean all these groups — but again, I’m gonna skip this break, it’s injected into it that you must be anti-Semitic. So, I was just sitting back and — let me then, I guess I better do some exposes on the Jewish mafia. And a guy foaming at the mouth with knives at cabinet meetings, basically threatening the president. Totally crazed. Who’s got his fingers in everything, screwing us over. I mean, how do you come up with this stuff? Where does this come from? Why? It’s disgusting.
This sort of talk is, in fact, anti-Semitic. Judaism has nothing to do with Obamacare. Secular Jews are prominent in many areas of life, and that does not mean there is a “Jewish mafia” out to control industry. But when you believe that life is replete with victims at the hands of a cruel, unjust universe, it’s your obligation to find the source of that victimization: a global conspiracy with your victimization at its center.
This sort of conspiracism used to be more foreign to the right. The “Bush lied, people died” conspiracy nonsense belonged to the left; the “stolen election” garbage belonged to the left. Vaccine truthers were largely leftists; the “neocon conspiracy” routine sprang from the left. The Wall Street bankers stuff came from the left, too.
But now it has infused a certain segment of the right – or at least gained traction. The rise of the conspiracy-minded alt-right has mainstreamed rhetoric like Jones’; the gap between the myth of ethnicity-based cultural supremacy with the reality that many people of European descent are impoverished and dissolute leads to a victimhood mentality that demands answers. And those answers can only be found in shadowy scheme promulgated by those who aren’t part of the ethno-cultural victim class.
This is ugly stuff. It was ugly stuff when it sprang from the left – and it still does, in the conspiracism of groups like Black Lives Matter. It’s equally ugly coming from the right.