You can't defeat anti-Semitism with conspiracy theories
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Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has won praise even from opponents for her interrogation of university presidents, given their appallingly misjudged answers about the appropriate response to calls for Jewish genocide. But this has also drawn attention to Stefanik’s own politics.
It is vital to condemn the revolting, genocidal horrors of 7 October, and to insist on the need to protect Jewish people – like everyone else – from harassment, threats and intimidation. But can any politician tenably claim to be protecting Jewish people while promoting conspiracist thinking?
In September 2021, Stefanik released an ad alleging that Democrats’ illegal immigration policies were not just too lax – a reasonable critique – but that behind them lurked an ulterior motive: a “permanent election insurrection”. The ad claimed: “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington”.
Eight months later, she was accused of having inspired the Buffalo mass shooter, who used the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory to try to justify massacring black Americans. Her spokesperson denied this, and accusations of racism. That’s fair, but it misses the point.
The ad promotes the notion that those in power are engaged in nefarious plots, and exercise infinite control. How exactly is Biden going to ensure that those migrants’ US-born descendants will vote Democrat forever? And talking of “insurrection”, Stefanik condemned the invasion of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – but backed the claim that the election was fraudulent.
Promoting conspiracist narratives is not only dangerous in itself. However unintentionally, it risks enabling anti-Semitism. In March, Stefanik attacked the Manhattan District Attorney responsible for prosecuting Trump, calling him “Soros-backed”. This is not explicit anti-Semitism.
But Stefanik surely knows the far right cast the billionaire George Soros as a conspiratorial Jewish ‘puppet-master’. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was perpetrated by a man convinced Soros is ‘the Jew that funds white genocide and controls the press’. So it seems a curious complaint to make, particularly as Soros himself denied given the DA any money, even if his son has.
Stefanik began as a moderate Republican, but has chosen to back Trump. With that come Trumpian narratives. Since at least 2017, when Trump was reluctant to condemn neo-Nazis who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’, many have expressed concern about Trumpism’s relationship with anti-Semitic conspiracism.
This often involves raising cases like Trump’s meeting in November 2022 with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who this month called for the execution of “perfidious Jews”. But this risks guilt by association – one of the building-blocks of conspiracism. The problem is less about who shares dinner, more who shares a narrative about power.
That horribly influential forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion sought to discredit democracy and the press by casting them as the tools of deceitful, malignant, all-powerful Jewish plotters, bent on destroying nation-states and creating global tyranny. In April, Trump denounced “the corrupt, rotten and sinister forces trying to destroy America”, among them the “globalists”, the “war mongers” and the “vultures” who “got rich bleeding America dry”.
The “biggest threat” to America was its own ‘high level politicians’. His accusations stirred real issues, from immigration and crime to exploitative business, but Trump cast all this as deliberate destruction by ‘‘villains and tyrants”, and “demonic forces”. He said nothing explicitly anti-Semitic, but it’s not hard to see who this narrative emboldens.
Stefanik’s exposure of the presidents’ dangerously flawed thinking was a public service, but invoking conspiracy theories risks undermining this. If we’re serious about defeating anti-Semitism, we must challenge the totalised, paranoid stories about power on which it feeds.
Phil Tinline is the author of ‘The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares’
