When Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary election to Ed Gallrein, he began his concession speech by remarking, “I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”The comment capped off a series of persistent attacks upon Israel and Jews that saw Massie repeating antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in the United States. He isn’t the only figure on the Right to go in such a direction. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens nowadays sound a lot like the antisemite Nick Fuentes. The former brought Fuentes on his show to talk about “organized Jewry,” and the latter thinks the Jews killed Charlie Kirk.People understandably wonder how antisemitism has managed to surge on the Right in recent years. Part of the answer may lie in the rise of conspiratorial thinking over the last decade. The two often go hand in hand, and elements of the former could facilitate the latter.
Modern conspiracism’s foe has usually been a vague, amorphous “deep state” that can seemingly include anyone, provided you try hard enough. Historically, however, this has not been the case. Based on Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories in America have always had a clear target for their ire: freemasons, Catholics, Jews (again), communists, and so on.
