Insanity, Immorality, Conspiratorial Antisemitism, and Foreign Funding Fun stuff in today’s title! Just as it began to look like we might be reining in our national plunge into insanity, Qatari money promoted conspiratorial antisemitism among right-of-center influencers. Bruce Abramson
Now, on to the topic of the day. Follow the money! Or at least look for it.
Over a decade ago, I began to notice that more and more of my friends were spouting dangerous, hateful, nonsensical garbage. Then I noticed that the problem was hardly restricted to my friends. There seemed to be a groundswell of support for charged beliefs running counter to all available evidence.
You all know some of the top line absurdities, but just to clarify with a few examples: Men cannot become women, the U.S. is not overrun with violent racist cops, and a climate catastrophe is not imminent.
Then came Covid and all bets were off. For three years we were fed a steady stream of nonsense—pronouncements that not only proved to be wrong after the fact, but that made no sense when they were first uttered—yet plenty of “serious” people accepted them as Gospel. Asking basic questions was treated as blasphemy.
Totalitarianism emanated far beyond the weaponization of public health. Violent race rioters burning down business districts were mostly peaceful. An election employing the least credible procedures in American history was the most secure our country had ever seen. Unarmed trespassers wandering through a donnybrook in the Capitol Building sought to bring down the American government. Eliminating cheap and efficient energy was the key to our economic success. An obvious dementia patient was sharp as a tack and in full command of the country.
It was hard to escape the feeling that we were living in an insane asylum—and that the worst of the inmates were firmly in charge. The only plausible alternative was even scarier: We were living through a moral inversion, in which decency was vilified and villainy extolled.
For those of us trapped in major cities, surrounded by erstwhile friends from America’s prestigious credentialed, professional elite, the feeling was even more intense. We were canceled, shunned, destroyed, pushed out of polite company, fired, arrested, separated from our children, rendered unemployable, evicted from our homes, and told that we deserved such perfidy for our outrageous commitment to common sense.
Finally, for those still doubting that insanity and immorality had become rampant, a resurgence of conspiratorial antisemitism laid the matter to rest. Unlike most forms of bigotry, including social antisemitism (i.e., the preference for avoiding Jewish neighbors or coworkers), conspiratorial antisemitism is a debilitating mental illness that brings down societies.
That point requires clarification and amplification. All forms of bigotry and discrimination are crippling. Any society that chooses to sideline some of its best people for reasons of demography has chosen to operate far below its potential. Yet such societies can function, and many such societies have functioned for centuries.
Not so conspiratorial antisemitism. Once the idea that a secret cabal functions as a global puppet-master spreads—and somehow, that cabal always ends up being the Jews—society is doomed. Conspiratorial antisemitism deprives believers of all agency.
For those of us blessed with mental health, bad breaks motivate a searching inventory: What did I do wrong? What could I have done better? Have I been trusting the wrong people? Are there things I can change in my environment? Are my coping skills adequate? Conspiratorial antisemites need no such questions. They already know the answers. Whatever may have befallen them, the Jews are to blame.
Because “the Jews” is an amorphous concept, there’s always some nearby individual Jew who can be held responsible for the hidden collective. And if not, there’s always someone who can be blamed for having sold out to the Jews.
A society riven by conspiratorial antisemitism is a society of individuals shorn of agency, averse to self-reflection, seeking to externalize blame, and eager to foment violence. No such society can exist for long. Yet since the genocidal Gazan attacks of October 7, 2023, conspiratorial antisemitism has surged across America—first among those on the Woke left, more recently among those who claim alignment with the political right.
How has our country fallen into such an abyss of insanity, immorality, and corruption? Turns out—and unsurprisingly—selected opinion leaders and influencers have been paid to spread the madness and the money.
Over the past not-quite-two months, the new Trump Administration has revealed and moved to stop some of the most egregious money laundering operations channeling U.S. taxpayer dollars into anti-American agitprop. USAID has been largely dismantled. ActBlue is coming under increasing scrutiny. The web of toxic NGOs, Open Society, Tides Foundation, public sector unions, and others are not far behind.
Because few if any Trump voters have ties to these deadly creatures of the left, pushback will come entirely from those who are (temporarily) out of power. The Democrats, who both benefit from the largesse of these rogue actors and front for them, have been caught flatfooted. Their entire operation had been honed to enforce compliance. They have no concept of persuasion, few persuasive skills, and no arguments holding any salience outside their own deranged and morally debased core.
That’s not true, however, of funding flowing from another source: Foreign governments whose interests are antithetical to our own. The two most important such governments run China and Qatar. Both have bought friends throughout the entire American political spectrum.
China, of course, would like to supplant the U.S. as the world’s major power. Its interest in crippling the U.S. is obvious. But what of Qatar? Few Americans know much about this small peninsula Emirate. Yet they should. In many ways, Qatar is the single greatest threat to our efforts to regain our national sanity.
As a small absolute monarchy, the Qatari royals realized long ago that they were better off trying to be smart than trying to be strong. So they set themselves up as the world’s foremost propaganda shop playing to all sides—a Switzerland for the modern age. Qatar hosts both an important American military base and most of the world’s noxious Islamist groups. Both the U.S. and Iran count it as an ally. It positions itself as the ultimate mediator. And it poisons the world.
Al Jazeera is the jewel in the Qatari crown. A globally important news organization, it’s a pure propaganda site (comparable to, though with a better reputation than the Russian regime’s propaganda site, RT.com). Al Jazeera promotes and popularizes the worldview of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical, supremacist Islamist organization. Al Jazeera has seeded its journalists throughout American media—most successfully at the still-important Washington Post.
Granted, such a bold claim warrants documentation. My proclamation that al Jazeera is a propaganda site hardly makes it so. And plenty of documentation is available. An excellent starting point is David Reaboi’s 2021 book, Qatar’s Shadow War. From there, feel free to chase down his references or run a quick search for follow-ups.
Of direct relevance, however, is Qatar’s current strategy. In 2017, realizing that its virulent antisemitism would play far more poorly with the new Trump Administration than it had under Obama, Qatar went on a charm offensive, inviting many Jewish American influencers to Doha and showing them an excellent time. It paid some dividends, but apparently not enough. This time around, the Qataris are trying a different tack. They’ve targeted influencers who play well with Trump’s base and seeded their programming with conspiratorial antisemitism.
Candace Owens may have been their easiest pickup; it’s even possible she’s doing their dirty work without direct support. A lightweight thinker, prone to epiphanies, and showing no allegiance to any ideal other than herself, she seemed ideal. Her big problem, however, is that she’s gone so over the top that she’s lost all credibility.
Tucker Carlson is more intriguing. He’s had a long career, and until fairly recently gave no indication of antisemitism—much less conspiratorial antisemitism. His current incarnation as an “independent” is proving much more problematic. Like al Jazeera itself, Carlson now interleaves genuine high-quality content with hateful garbage—not just antisemitism, but overt anti-Americanism emanating from antisemitic sources.
The kindest interpretation of Carlson’s downward spiral into conspiracism is that he’s been bought. It’s certainly possible that, in each of his previous guises, his employers restrained his worst instincts. The challenge remains that he’s intensely entertaining, engaging, interesting, and informative on many issues. Disentangling his conspiracism from those obvious merits is tough work, particularly for those lacking the background knowledge to see it.
Is Joe Rogan starting down a similar path? I’ve heard more than a few Rogan podcasts, and I’ve always found him engaging, entertaining, and genuinely interested in learning multiple perspectives. Will his exposure to conspiracism teach him that it’s a deeply toxic perspective? I certainly hope so. Only time will tell.
As to Theo Von and the various other podcasters who will follow in his wake, I confess: I haven’t listened often enough to have any independent opinion. But I can say that anyone who books the likes of Ian Carrol or Darryl Cooper has taken a step in the wrong—and a dangerous—direction. That’s not to say that I favor silencing such voices; I don’t. It is to say that those who’ve earned large platforms must use them responsibly. Amplifying conspiracies—even intriguing conspiracies—represents a deep abuse of public trust.
So that’s today’s thought. Once again, it ran longer than I anticipated. And it does tie in to my opening announcement in an oblique way. Both this essay and my most recent book stemmed from my need to understand (which I believe I have) and arrest (which I most certainly have not) America’s slide into suicidal insanity and immorality.
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