Left Antisemitism is a Right-Wing Construct

Fascists Fuel Antisemitism Because Antisemitism Fuels Fascism

Last week, Zohran Mamdani released a municipal strategy for fighting antisemitism, a fairly minor piece of policy for his administration. The strategy, among other things, funds hate crime prevention, invests in security outside synagogues, and establishes an awareness campaign about New York City human rights law. There are some good faith criticisms of the strategy, as some of the groups he plans to fund like the Jewish Community Council of New York are Zionist organizations. But on the whole this is a fairly straightforward piece of policy, right?

Haha, nope! Not only was Zohran’s plan poorly received by the usual suspects, but a seemingly huge group of leftists on X who saw the plan as a betrayal. There was a particular focus on the fact that he quoted from the Talmud in his announcement video, with one fairly large “leftist” commentator, Sean Padraig McCarthy, posting a literal blood libel, an antisemitic lie that Jews use the blood of christians for nefarious purposes that dates back to the fucking middle ages. It’s always hard to quantify the size of an internet mob, but McCarthy’s post and others like it got tens of thousands of engagements, enough to be concerning.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of essays that go: “here’s a summary of some stupid drama on the internet,” but this is unfortunately not the first time that there has been a widespread outbreak of internet antisemitism among purported leftists. This latest freakout seems to have been the biggest, but it certainly is not the last. It’s therefore worth exploring the contours of left antisemitism, especially since accusations of antisemitism are one of the right’s most enduring lines of attack against the rising socialist movement.

So what the hell is going on? What’s the source of internet antisemitism and has it really infected the left? How should we respond to these vulgar displays and are they going to get worse?

Before we dive in let’s make something crystal clear: there is no evidence for organized antisemitism on the mainstream left. Let me say that again: there is no evidence for organized antisemitism on the mainstream left. There are plenty of bath faith accusations of antisemitism on the left by those who purposefully conflate antizionism with antisemitism, but when it comes to the actual institutions of the left—the Democratic Socialists of America, the United Autoworkers, the Working Families Party—none are advancing antisemitism in any way. In fact they are some of the organizations most vocally opposed to antisemitism in America.

This is important to remember as we dive into the muck of the internet, particularly X: in actual, physical reality there is no organized antisemitism on the left.

Antisemitism Is Rising Because of the Right

Antisemitism is not some natural phenomenon, it is being organized by specific people, with platforms, money, and power. Of course, people can be antisemitic without being a member of their local Nazi party, but bigotries of all sorts are organized by specific people who do so for specific ends (usually advancing the interests of a group of elites). When we view antisemitism, or any other form of bigotry, as some kind of immutable characteristic of human existence, we run the risk of missing the actual people using actual methods to advance hate. By targeting the actual organizers of antisemitism, we can fight back against them.

The real source of organized antisemitism is the right and they are organizing like mad. Elon Musk has spent millions supporting open white supremacists. Prominent members of the Republican party, including JD Vance have embraced the Great Replacement theory, an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims global Jewry is trying to replace white people with immigrants. You may consider Candace Owens a crank (even though she has over 6 million followers), but Tucker Carlson is a mainstream Republican propagandist using his massive platform to relentlessly advance antisemitism (and maybe also run for president god help us).

None of this is to say the far right hasn’t always been antisemitic (they have), but the genocide in Gaza gave far right antisemites the cover they needed to come out of the shadows and into the light. When people are mad about the state of the world, it is easier than ever for them to find themselves in an ecosystem of antisemitic propaganda, thanks entirely to the far right funding and propagating it online. To this end, researchers have found an explicit connection between Israeli violence against Palestinians and antisemitic hate crimes.

In fact, much of the so-called “left antisemitism” that we see online is directly attributable to the far right’s takeover of social media platforms. I’ve been an active socialist organizer for over eight years and I can’t help but notice that whenever there is intraleft squabbling over antisemitism, I happen to have no mutuals with any of the left antisemites. As an example, here’s one left antisemite who had his 15 minutes of X fame when got into an argument with Hasan Piker’s producer. While he claims to be “anti-KKK”, his main cause seems to be…combating anti-white racism on the left. Is this guy a real guy? I have no idea!

Twitter was always a warped mirror of society, but under Elon Musk’s rule, X has become a fascist house of mirrors. When X temporarily showed users’ locations, it inadvertently revealed that many far right accounts are actually run out of the very same third world countries they spend their time denigrating. This is because Elon has created an incentive structure for spreading hateful misinformation (and child sex abuse material). For people like Sean Padraig McCarthy, who is absolutely a real person, the constant stream of antisemitism desensitizes them and entices them to give into their worst impulses in order to seem clever and iconoclastic. This is the exact same process that has led to the spread of fantastically sexist incel terminology like mogging, chads, and looksmaxxing, which have normalized atrocious levels of misogyny. Antisemetic internet vernacular like goyslave and goyslop spreads along paths long trodden by incel slang.

So when we see what appears to be left antisemitism on X, not only should we doubt the veracity of the accounts as actual members of the left, but we should be skeptical of the entire discourse as a whole. Of course there is left antisemitism on X. There is antisemitism all over X. It is a site built for spreading antisemitism. Discourse on X is permanently tainted and isn’t evidence for anything other than the fact that X is a pernicious and demonic influence on our society and should be shut down immediately.

Are there people on the left who are antisemitic even outside of X? Absolutely. Are left wing organizations actively spreading antisemitism? No. Could unorganized internet masses cohere some sort of left populist, antisemitic force? Maybe, but they would face some pretty powerful roadblocks, mainly the fact that every single mainstream socialist politician and organization is viciously opposed to any form of antisemitism.

Antisemitism Is a Weapon Against The Left

Antisemitism is a very real problem and it’s one that only the left can solve. Mainstream Jewish organizations that are supposed to fight antisemitism, most notably the Anti-Defamation League, have spent the last three years calling anyone who is even remotely critical of the state of Israel an antisemite. Antisemitism has become a buzzword of both the center and right to deflect any criticism of Israel. This reached its ridiculous nadir when Hollywood producers accused Mark Ruffalo of antisemitism for criticizing Larry Ellison’s support of Israel and his monopolistic takeover of Hollywood. Bad faith antisemitism is mutually beneficial for both Zionists and antisemites. It allows antisemites to conflate very legitimate criticisms of the genocide in Gaza with antisemitism, while Zionists can use the existence of far right antisemitism to push for stronger support for Israel. This is why the component of Zohran’s antisemitism initiative that funds Zionist groups both damages the fight for Palestinian liberation and risks backfiring, increasing antisemitism instead of decreasing it.

We should also see antisemitism as part of a broader push by the far right against all minorities. Since October 7th, there’s been a very present and very weird centering of Jewish feeling when it comes to the Gaza genocide. Scott Galloway, cohost of the Raging Moderates podcast, demonstrated this when he told Abdul El-Sayed that he took exception to the candidate labeling the genocide in Gaza as a genocide, because Jews have a very special relationship with the world genocide (unlike the Armenians, Bosnians, Tutsis, Yazidis, Romani, and of course Palestinians). Antisemitism is not some special form of bigotry that carries more moral weight, but part of a whole host of bigotries that combine to form the horrid Voltron that is the far right.

I will caveat this by saying that while antisemitism is not morally worse than any other form of bigotry, it does happen to function as a catalyst that can unite all far right conspiracy theories. When thinking about racism, we generally use a definition along the lines of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In the current day, antisemitism is not doing this at nearly the same level something like anti-Blackness, or other forms of bigotry like transphobia.

What makes it threatening, at least for now, is something different: it makes the far right’s story more coherent. In times of rising anger towards elites, scapegoating people at the bottom of society like undocumented immigrants can go very far in redirecting anger away from those at the top. But still, people look to the top, and that’s where antisemitism comes in. “Yes”, antisemites say, “you’re right, there is a greedy 1% robbing you. But it’s not billionaires, it’s the Jews, who are the reason the immigrants are here in the first place!” This is why antisemitism has long been known as “the socialism of fools,” and every person falling prey to it is a potential socialist lost to the right.

Through the Great Replacement theory, antisemitism is increasingly a load-bearing piece of modern far right ideology, doing crucial ideological work to hold fascism’s paradoxical combination of populist and elitist rhetoric together. So we should cut it off.

Socialists in power should use this moment to go after far right antisemites using the institutional power they have. They should aggressively prosecute and disrupt white supremacist terror cells, shut down X, and pull all government funding from the companies that are run by fascists (remember, the US government is giving Elon billions via government contracts). Finally, antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry should be called out relentlessly and repeatedly. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò says, we must “bring back shame.”

In practical terms, we need to reframe the discourse around antisemitism to focus on its actual source, the right. If we force the media, politicians, and society writ large to focus on the well known and powerful antisemites on the right, spurious allegations and cherrypicked anonymous X accounts won’t be able to shape the antisemitism discourse in ways that undermine us, while we will be able to shape it in ways that undermine the right. This is a missed opportunity for Zohran’s strategy to fight antisemitism, which targets antisemitism in a neutral, apolitical way, rather than going after the far right.

We owe it to ourselves and our movement to fight antisemitism on our own terms, not the right’s, and if we want to actually stop antisemitism and the network of bigotry it fuels, we should go after its true source: the far right.