CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The political right and the antisemitic influencer problem

Editor's note: The following column was first published in City Journal.

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two Black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had broken out in riots, with mobs of black residents targeting Jewish institutions. Early the next morning, a group of young black men stabbed and beat a Jewish graduate student to death.

As the tensions escalated, the race hustler Al Sharpton organized protests at the scene, portraying Jews as nefarious "diamond dealers" responsible for the global exploitation of blacks. Another round of looting, vandalism, and violence followed.

Flash forward to the present. Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, terror campaign against Israel and created fertile ground for another propaganda war. In the United States, left-wing academics seized the moment to rally support for the "decolonization" of Israel, and in the digital realm, a new anti-Semitism has reared its head. Several influential online commentators—most notably, Kanye West, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate—have used the attention around October 7 to push conspiracy theories and, especially in West’s case, outright anti-Semitism, on podcasts and social media platforms, ostensibly from a "right-wing" perspective.

STOP TALKING, START TEACHING: NEW YORK MUST FIGHT TO END ANTISEMITISM IN OUR SCHOOLS

The two episodes provide a fascinating point of comparison. Antisemitism is an ancient affliction, but it takes a different shape throughout history, depending on the culture, language, and technology of the moment. In today’s case, we see a resurgent antisemitism that has scrambled politics and perpetuated itself in cyberspace. In short, the Crown Heights riots have been digitized.

The Rev. Al Sharpton welcomes then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., to the podium before she addresses a post-midterm election meeting of Sharpton's National Action Network in the Kennedy Caucus Room at the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2018, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The first thing to understand is that Sharpton’s activism was a form of flesh-and-blood ethnic politics adapted to the televisual era. His narrative in Crown Heights was built on a particular grievance, against particular people, in a particular neighborhood. It generated its power on a left-wing trope: that Jews were oppressing poor blacks, and that the government was favoring "white interloper[s]" over native minorities. Sharpton’s desired outcome was tangible: he sought the imprisonment of the driver and, more broadly, cash for his organization, which operated like a mafia protection racket.

The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media "influencers" who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.

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The tenor of this campaign is also new. While Sharpton sought to convey a sense of earnest outrage, the right-wing influencers have adopted a detached, ironic, schizoid tone—hallmarks of postmodern discourse. When Kanye West advertises a swastika T-shirt, it is not because he is signaling support for an organized neo-Nazi movement but because it symbolizes transgression and is bait for digital censorship, which would let him play the martyr. (West’s troubled mental state should not be discounted as a factor here, either.) Online, the narrative gets circulated through left-wing networks, which consider it useful for undermining support for Israel, and through right-wing networks, which find it helpful for building an audience.

FILE – Kanye West attends the Givenchy Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on October 02, 2022 in Paris, France.? (Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

The ironic tone, of course, does not exculpate West and his followers. Nor does it mean that their narratives will be contained to the digital realm. American Jews rightly fear that this postmodern antisemitism will spill into the real world and result in violence, as it has done in Europe and with the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. The dynamics of such violence also reflect the complexities of the new digital culture. Unlike the Crown Heights riot, where Sharpton’s rhetoric was directly mobilizing the mob, the relationship between online discourse and acts of decentralized, memetic violence is often ambiguous.

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There is also the question of cui bono. The simple answer is that Jews provide a convenient scapegoat: Kanye West can pin the blame on a "Jewish doctor" for fallout related to his bipolar disorder; Andrew Tate can shift responsibility to "The Matrix" for his various criminal proceedings. But there is another answer, too, one that reprises the Sharpton model: business. The Internet rewards scandal, shock, and virality, and conspiracy theories enjoy burgeoning market demand. Candace Owens has never been more popular, turning each outrage and accusation into new views, followers, subscribers, and revenues.

This problem has no easy answer—certainly not digital censorship or criminalization of speech. The better approach involves patience: push back on antisemitic narratives and build an establishment capable of both garnering attention and enforcing boundaries of decency. Antisemitic ideologies might be lucrative in the digital economy, but they are poison in the political realm. The Right should reject them and their merchants, just as it rejected Sharpton a generation ago.

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