A Crash Course in the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory |
I did not grow up thinking about antisemitism. I did not study it in school. It was not part of my professional life. For nearly a decade after law school, I was a management-side employment lawyer — I defended large employers against discrimination claims, and I was good at it. My Jewishness was a fact about me, like being right-handed. It shaped my holidays, not my worldview.
Then came October 7. Like a lot of Jews I know, something cracked open that has not closed since.
For some people, it was the attack itself. For me, it was what came after. The speed with which people I knew — educated, progressive, thoughtful people — began contextualizing, rationalizing, or simply looking away. The sense that something I had always taken for granted — that the people around me would recognize the mass murder of Jews as wrong, full stop — was not as solid as I had believed.
I could not make sense of it. So I did what I always do when something does not make sense: I started reading. And I have not stopped since.
Here is what kept nagging me: a lot of otherwise smart people cannot actually identify antisemitism when it is standing in front of them waving. Not because they are stupid. Because they are looking for the wrong thing. They scan for garden-variety bigotry — slurs, swastikas, the kind that announces itself — and miss everything else.
Some Jewish advocacy organizations have lately tried to rebrand antisemitism as simply “Jew hatred.” I understand the impulse. It is cleaner. It is punchier. It fits on a T-shirt. It is also wrong. Antisemitism is not just hatred. Hatred is a feeling. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory — arguably the oldest and most durable one in the world — and like any conspiracy theory, it mutates. It changes costumes, swaps vocabulary, moves into new institutions. That is why it is so hard to recognize. You are not looking for a feeling. You are looking for a structure.
What follows is the short version of what I found. Quick disclaimer: I am not a scholar of antisemitism. I am a girl with a library card, an Audible subscription, and a hyperfixation I did not ask for, trying to synthesize what I have learned from people who actually know what they are talking about. The footnotes are there for a reason. Use them.
The writer who cracked this open for me was René Girard — a French-born literary critic and anthropologist who spent most of his career at Stanford chewing on one stubborn question: why do human communities, over and over again, turn on individuals and groups, and why does the violence always follow the same choreography?
Girard’s answer starts with mimetic desire — the observation that we do not generate our desires independently. We learn what to want by watching each other want things.[1] It is why advertising works. It is why middle school is a hellscape. It is why we are all a little miserable on Instagram.
Imitation breeds rivalry. If I want what you want and there is only one to go around, we become competitors. Scale that up across a whole community and you get a mimetic crisis: everyone wanting what everyone else wants, rivalries unresolved, social cohesion fraying.
Here, according to Girard, is the ancient trick civilizations keep reaching for to bleed off the pressure: the scapegoat mechanism.[2] The community unanimously blames a single target. Economic anxiety, political instability, cultural upheaval — it all gets loaded onto someone different enough to single out but embedded enough to serve as a symbol. The unanimity — everyone agreeing at once — is precisely what makes it feel righteous. Nobody pauses to ask whether the target is actually guilty. The crowd moves as one. The tension is released.
Girard wrote in the abstract. He did not need to spell out which group Western civilization has, more consistently than any other group in human history, loaded its anxieties onto. The pattern speaks for itself.
If this still sounds hypothetical, look at what happened on college campuses in the weeks after October 7. An entire moral framework reorganized itself in real time around a single consensus: one group was to blame, their values and their very presence were the problem, and the consensus was so obviously correct that anyone who paused to ask a question was suspect. That is a scapegoat mechanism. That is mimetic desire going viral, with hashtags.
The Oldest Conspiracy Theory
If Girard gave me the psychology, David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition[3] gave me the scope. Two thousand years of Western civilization, and in nearly every chapter “the Jew” turns up — not as a real person, but as a symbol onto which societies project whatever they most fear about themselves.
The content rotates. Medieval Europe: Jews poisoning wells, drinking the blood of Christian children. Early modern Europe: Jews as the secret hand behind capitalism. Nazi Germany: Jews as the secret hand behind capitalism and communism, simultaneously (the ideology never fussed about internal consistency). Soviet Union: Jews as the secret hand behind American imperialism. Today’s campuses: Jews as settler-colonialists, white supremacists, genocidaires.
Watch what changes and what does not. The accusations rotate — well poisoners, bankers, communists, colonizers. The structure never does: a hidden, powerful, conspiratorial group, pulling strings from behind the scenes, responsible for whatever is going wrong. That is not ordinary bigotry. That is a framework. Think of it like an operating system. Every few centuries it ships an update, the icons get a redesign, but the code underneath is the same.
This is why antisemitism is uniquely slippery. It is a conspiracy theory — and like all good conspiracy theories, it is self-sealing. The absence of evidence is treated as proof of how deep the conspiracy must go. If you cannot see the strings, it only means the puppeteers are really good at hiding them.
Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews[4] brought this home — into the American Jewish experience.
Horn’s argument, stripped to the studs: the world loves Jews best when we are suffering, and has very little patience for us when we refuse to. Dead Jews are easy. You can put them in a museum, write a novel about them, mint an Oscar-bait movie, feel deeply sad, go home. Living Jews — who argue, who succeed, who build a country of their own, who refuse the role assigned to them — are a much harder product to sell.
The deal on offer, across most of Jewish history, has been the same: assimilate, be grateful, do not make a fuss, do not organize your identity around anything that makes the majority uncomfortable. In exchange, you get to be tolerated — until you are not.
Horn’s book made me realize the bargain is not a safety net. It is a trap.
Izabella Tabarovsky[5] was the piece that clicked.
Tabarovsky — a researcher who grew up in the Soviet Union — has spent years documenting the enormous state propaganda campaign the USSR ran against Israel and the Jewish people during the Cold War. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Moscow rebranded the Arab-Israeli conflict as colonial oppressor versus indigenous liberation movement. Israel was equated with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. Zionism was redefined as racism. The vocabulary — settler-colonialism, apartheid, genocide, imperialist aggression — was workshopped at Soviet-funded conferences across the Third World and shipped, translation-ready, to left-wing movements around the globe.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed. The propaganda did not. It had been absorbed so thoroughly into the DNA of global progressive politics that it no longer needed a state sponsor. It became self-replicating — a zombie ideology, Tabarovsky calls it, stumbling forward on institutional momentum long after the empire that birthed it turned to dust.
This is why every campus protest sounds like every other campus protest. Why the same phrases appear in every open letter. Why nineteen-year-olds at Columbia speak with the uniform certainty of people reading from a script. They are reading from a script. It was written for them decades ago, in a language designed not to illuminate but to mobilize.
The Soviets’ old soundtrack got a glow-up, a new distribution platform, and an HR-approved vocabulary.
Bari Weiss[6] has argued that what we shorthand as DEI is not actually about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is a worldview that sorts human beings into two moral categories: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). Merit is a dirty word. Colorblindness is a microaggression. Every person becomes an avatar of their group, and every group gets ranked on a victimhood hierarchy — which, as James Kirchick memorably put it, goes: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”[7]
Take that framework. Load the Soviet scripts into it. Look what you just built.
Jews — two percent of the American population, overrepresented in law and medicine and the sciences and the arts — get recategorized not as a minority with a four-thousand-year history of persecution, but as a proxy for power. Israel — founded by refugees and Holocaust survivors, the only country on earth a Jew can reliably flee to — gets recategorized as a white-supremacist colonial project. Same conspiracy theory. New interface. The hidden, powerful, string-pulling Jew just got a rebrand: the Zionist.
And this ideology has not stayed on campus. It has swallowed every major sense-making institution in American life — the universities, the museums, the media, the law schools, the medical schools, the HR departments of the Fortune 500. The Soviet script, pressed to wax in 1967, is now playing over the PA system of basically everywhere you work, study, and seek medical care. You did not notice the playlist change because the aesthetic got such a polish. The lyrics are the same.
Once you see antisemitism as a conspiracy theory and not a feeling, something else starts making sense: horseshoe theory.
Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far right and the far left, which imagine themselves as polar opposites, curve toward each other at the extremes. It used to be a tidy poli-sci abstraction. It is now just, like, a Tuesday on X.
And nowhere is the horseshoe more perfectly visible than on the Jewish question.
The far-right hates Jews because it believes Jews are secretly running the world — rigging the economy, controlling the media, engineering wars, replacing white Christian populations. The far-left hates Jews because it believes Jews are secretly running the world — rigging the economy, controlling the media, engineering wars, oppressing the Global South. Same diagnosis. Same shadowy cabal. Different branding agency. The right calls him a globalist. The left calls him a Zionist. Identical character. Different costume.
Case in point: put Nick Fuentes next to Ana Kasparian.
Fuentes is the Holocaust-denying white nationalist who has built a livestream empire warning his followers about Jewish “neocons” dragging America into wars, Zionist money buying Washington, and Jews weaponizing the Holocaust to shield themselves from honest criticism.
Kasparian is a progressive commentator with millions of YouTube subscribers whose recent content has featured sharp attacks on the Israel lobby, on American military aid to what she characterizes as an apartheid state, and on a Jewish state she treats as uniquely malign in the international system.
Politically, they could not present more differently. Fuentes livestreams from a dimly lit home studio and leads packed rooms of young white nationalists in “Christ is King” chants, a crucifix thrust overhead. Kasparian is shot in studio with a professional chyron. Fuentes’s audience is rebranded 4chan. Kasparian’s audience still thinks of itself as the progressive resistance. Transcribe the content, scrub the political tells, hand it to a stranger, and you would have a hard time guessing which side of the horseshoe the text came from. Because the text contains the same message. A small, powerful, well-funded Jewish interest is pulling America’s strings, against your interests, and the reason you cannot quite see it is that they are very, very good at hiding it.
That is what the conspiracy-theory structure does. It is a framework, not a party platform. It bolts onto Christian nationalism. It bolts onto anti-imperialist socialism. It has been bolted onto fascism and communism, theocracy and secularism, capitalism and anti-capitalism, for two thousand years. Every new host convinces itself that its version is the morally serious one — that whatever those people are saying about the Jews is obviously deranged, but what we are saying is just, you know, the facts.
Watch a Nick Fuentes clip. Then watch a BDS rally. Try to shake the feeling that they are reading from the same group chat.
Once you learn this history, you cannot unlearn it. Once you have the framework — the scapegoat mechanism, the conspiracy-theory structure, the assimilation bargain, the zombie pipeline, the horseshoe — what is happening right now stops looking like a series of isolated incidents and starts looking like what it is. The oldest pattern in Western civilization, reassembling itself in contemporary language. The Stranger Things Upside Down version of the Enlightenment. Same architecture. New paint.
You see it at dinner parties, where otherwise lovely people turn out to have very firm opinions about Jewish loyalty they did not know they had. You see it on college campuses, where Jewish students are quietly disinvited from progressive spaces for the crime of not denouncing a country most of them have never lived in. You see it in the media, in the NGOs, in the international institutions that have turned demonizing the world’s only Jewish state into a cottage industry with its own merch line.
And you see it in the Jewish community itself — the confusion, the self-doubt, the persistent feeling that something is happening to us but we do not have the words for it. We do have the words. We have always had the words. We just stopped using them, because using them made other people uncomfortable, and four generations of well-meaning assimilation taught us our job was to keep other people comfortable.
What You Can Do About It
I did not write this to leave you feeling hopeless. I wrote it because understanding is the first step toward refusing to accept this.
If you have read this far, you already have more of the framework than ninety percent of the people currently forming opinions about this on the internet. Give yourself credit. Then give yourself homework. Read Girard. Any of it. His work builds the best existing account of why communities scapegoat, and once you have his framework, you will see the pattern everywhere. Read Nirenberg. Read Horn. Read Tabarovsky’s essays, most of them free online. Read Weiss. Read the footnotes. Build the vocabulary.
Because here is the thing about a conspiracy theory this old: it survives because every new generation meets it fresh, without knowing where it came from or what it was called last time. Ignorance is its natural habitat. It thrives in the dark.
The lights are on now. Once you see the architecture, you will never unsee it. You will recognize the scapegoat being built in real time. You will hear the zombie script before the chorus kicks in. You will notice who is cast as the powerful, hidden, conspiratorial villain of whatever moral panic is currently trending — and you will see the casting is, somehow, almost always the same.
It is real. It is ancient. And for the first time in a very long time — because we finally know what we are looking at — we can do something about it.
[1]René Girard develops the concept of mimetic desire most accessibly in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), and more systematically in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford University Press, 1987).
[2]See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). For his most reader-friendly treatment applied to the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, see I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2001).
[3]David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013).
[4]Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021).
[5]See, among other work, Izabella Tabarovsky, “Demonization Blueprints: Soviet Conspiracist Antizionism in Contemporary Left-Wing Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (2022); “Understanding the Real Origin of That New York Times Cartoon,” Tablet Magazine, May 2, 2019; and her essays in Fathom Journal. See especially “Zombie Anti-Zionism,” Tablet Magazine, July 30, 2024.
[6]Bari Weiss, “End DEI,” Tablet Magazine, November 7, 2023.
[7]James Kirchick, writing in Tablet Magazine, as quoted by Weiss in “End DEI.”