Is the spike in anti-Semitism in American politics really just a carefully engineered illusion?
Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s platform X began displaying the location of every account on the site, and the resulting picture was surprising. Some viral MAGA influencers railing about “my tax dollars” funding foreign wars turned out to be posting from Pakistan or Russia. Thirst-trap accounts featuring attractive Israeli soldiers were revealed to be operated from India. Heart-wrenching accounts of suffering in Gaza were traced back to Europe. And a number of overtly racist accounts promoting Nick Fuentes—the young white supremacist and admirer of Hitler—were exposed as foreign-run.
In the aftermath, some observers suggested that the anti-Semitism coursing through the platform was largely an inauthentic foreign intrusion into American debate, with little real domestic support.
“Groypers are in shambles right now,” crowed Eyal Yakoby, a student activist who has testified before Congress about anti-Semitism on college campuses, referring to Fuentes’s supporters. “It’s all a foreign psyop,” he added. The libertarian journalist Robby Soave echoed that view, writing that “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.’ 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.”
It’s an appealing narrative: that American anti-Semitism is primarily the work of outside manipulators rather than a homegrown danger. But it’s wrong. Fuentes’s followers punch above their weight in U.S. discourse because they are young, hyperonline, and prolific. Foreign actors have certainly discovered this far-right niche as a convenient vehicle for engagement and profit. Yet the growth of American anti-Semitism is not a foreign plot, and it is not merely a digital mirage.
Last year, the data scientist David Shor—who has done polling for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign—surveyed nearly 130,000 voters and found that about one in four young Americans held an “unfavorable opinion” of Jews—not Israel, Jews—far more than older generations. At the same time, some of the country’s most popular podcasts now feature unabashedly anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives. Tucker Carlson has flirted with rehabilitating Hitler’s image. Candace Owens has claimed that Israel played a role in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk. Joe Rogan has hosted a conspiracy theorist who ranted that a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”
And this isn’t just rhetoric. When far-right activists including a college student named Nick Fuentes marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” that was not a foreign operation. When a white supremacist, animated by the same paranoid belief—that scheming Jews were “replacing” white people through mass migration—slaughtered worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, he was not following orders from abroad. Nor were the Black nationalists who attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City in 2019, or the anti-Israel extremists last year who allegedly tried to burn Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro alive and killed three people, including a young Jewish woman reportedly shot in the back in Washington, D.C., and an 82-year-old who was burned to death in Boulder, Colorado.
Many forces have converged to produce this eruption of anti-Jewish hatred. As older generations pass away, living memory of the Holocaust has faded. Anger over Israel’s war in Gaza has pushed some self-described supporters of Palestine to rationalize or perpetrate violence against Jews thousands of miles away. Social media has made it trivially easy to spread anti-Semitic abuse and for bigots to find and amplify one another. Algorithm-driven feeds often reward the most provocative and incendiary content—including elaborate conspiracies—over careful, verified information. Platforms such as X now barely even pretend to moderate this material, not that they were ever especially effective at stopping it.
The result is simple: Whether the content originates in the United States or overseas, the supply of anti-Semitism is rising to meet an existing demand. Groyper content only goes viral because significant numbers of Americans already find it compelling. Outside propaganda cannot conjure hatred from nothing.
Consider a parallel from electoral politics. In 2022, Democrats spent millions of dollars boosting Republican primary candidates who denied the 2020 election results. The strategy often worked: Many of these extreme candidates won their primaries and then lost to Democrats in the general election. Some Republicans complained that Democrats had meddled in their nominating contests to elevate weaker opponents, but that framing was a way to avoid confronting their own voters’ preferences. Democrats didn’t fabricate the election deniers’ positions; they simply amplified them—and Republican primary voters liked what they heard.
Foreign-run Groyper accounts work much the same way. They are sales pitches tailored to a market that already exists. The “product” is bigotry and conspiracy thinking—and there is no shortage of buyers.
None of this is to say that astroturfed campaigns don’t matter. They absolutely can warp public debate and inflame tensions. For any online marketplace of ideas to function, users need to be able to distinguish real voices from fake ones, domestic actors from foreign operators. X’s location disclosure was a modest but welcome step in that direction.
But it would be a dangerous mistake to conclude from this that America’s ugliest impulses are primarily imported. The country’s pathologies, including anti-Semitism, are not chiefly the work of foreign propagandists. Outside actors may exploit the cracks in American society, but they did not create them. They can fan the flames—but they didn’t start the fire. That was us. And only we can put it out.
