Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

(thread)

Pay attention to what trends when there's a pressing civil rights battle in our country.

Be aware of the ways in which the far right attempts to hijack the conversations about racism by using antisemitic conspiracy theory to de-center Black pain.

Antisemitism serves an extremely important function for fascists and the far right.

They use it for slight-of-hand narrative strategies that revolve around "noticing" the supposed string-pulling by Jews in moments of fear, uncertainty, and unrest.

These narratives usually remain implicit and gestured/dogwhistled to rather than directly stated in mainstream discourse, but COVID-19 has dramatically changed that.

Anti-vaxxers & even some relatively mainstream dirtbag "leftists" have taken to spreading antisemitic Pizzagate-related theories/rumors about vaccines and microchipping that start with Gates foundation conspiracy theory but ultimately arrive at Israel and Jews like George Soros.

As @TheRaDR has written, this isn't new.

Supposed Jewish malevolent Oz-behind-the-curtain behavior is a frequent narrative, and has a long history of invocation during times of disease and plague.

That means that antisemitic conspiracy has especially strong traction right now.

Speaking of historic tropes, the "outside agitator" is a perennial favorite of racists trying to explain away POC and especially Black outrage and protest at violent racism and brutal state repression of Black community.

"#AntifaTerrorists" is being used that way right now.

The narrative of outside agitators sparking/taking advantage of racial tensions narrative goes back at least as far as the Reconstruction South (farther, really, judging from characterizations of John Brown and anti-slavery voters during Bloody Kansas)

"Carpetbaggers" weren't constructed as Jewish, but the implications of cosmopolitanism (a trope very very much linked to antisemitism) were very much there.

That caricature was very much at play during the Civil Rights movement, when racists used MLK's connections to Northern urban whites and especially socialist Jews as a way to paint him as a mere puppet of malign Northern cosmopolitan influence.

The racists' narrative was very much that Black people are simple, lazy to the point of docility, and submissive when left to their own devices.

The Civil Rights movement, they said, therefore could not be the product of Black-led organizing. It had to be a conspiracy.

This wasn't just a localized fear/concern, either.

It appears that one of the original reasons for Edgar J. Hoover's notoriously evil covert FBI campaign against MLK was King's connection to a Jewish socialist that Hoover already had in his crosshairs.

The outside agitator narrative is profoundly racist not only as a matter of function (its function being use allegations of outside--often Jewish-- influence to subvert Black organizing) but because its core assertion is one of inherent Black laziness/intellectual dullness.

"Outside agitator" are pretty clear in asserting that Black people are too lazy/stupid to engage in organized resistance by themselves.

It also implies that Black people are also too stupid to know their self-interest & engage animalistically when riled up by bad actors.

That implication of Black civil rights protest as outsider conspiracist-sparked & animalistically unthoughtful is one of the reasons it's so racist to lecture Black protesters on what "smart" protest would look like, btw.

It suggests Black people can't think for themselves.

That suggestion that Black people need white "outside agitators" to guide them away towards supposedly animalistic behavior and towards critical thought and correct political action isn't unique to the far right, by the way.

The dirtbag "leftists" at r/stupidpol believe it, too.

And, for all my broader critiques about Jacobin, this particular piece is pretty spot-on.

Whites trying to dismiss Black civil rights action as outside agitator-sparked isn't some far right/far left thing.

Liberals do it, too.

jacobinmag.com/2014/08/who-is…

Now, antifascists have been around since the first days of fascism.

United States antifascism in the form of Antifa as a movement/culture, however, owes a lot of its heritage to British punk resistance to Nazi infiltration of punk/skinhead scenes in the 70's and 80's.

As a result, a lot of Antifa stuff has taken the form of practical, localized resistance to parallel fash attempts to infiltrate urban punk/street culture, which usually takes the form of explicit adoption of European fash-based identity/expression, i.e., Nazi shit.

Nazis and Bircher/neo-confederate fash traditionally haven't traditionally gotten along well, but Steve Bannon's big innovation during Trump's campaign was using MAGA and the alt-right to create ideological spaces that could accommodate/mobilize the impulses of both traditions.

(This is a very simplified version of events, obviously, but for the purposes of this thread I think it's a useful shorthand version)

Having a Bannon-style fascist take the White House fundamentally changed what antifascism looked like in the United States, because it changed what fascism looked like here.

Overt fascism stopped being fringe, and popular fascism stewed together Euro-style fascism and redneck racism-- and their symbols/tactics-- together in new and novel ways.

There'd been overlap before, but this ferment was something unprecedented in both degree and popularity.

As popular fascism began to more and more explicitly appeal to and embrace many of the traditional modes/narratives/symbolisms of traditional American racism, antifascism (and specifically Antifa) became an increasingly visible militant force against that traditional racism.

While Antifa isn't racially heterogenous, it often appears predominantly white in media coverage (for reasons too complex to get into here).

And, white folks militantly organized to engage in street resistance to organized racists throw a wrench "outside agitator" narratives.

"Outside agitator" narratives attempt to paint antiracist organizing as Jewish-led.

They use antisemitic & racist tropes to suggest that a few shadowy (((conspirators))) have riled up an animalistic race too lazy/stupid to resist on its own.

That narrative of "Jews incited animalistic Blacks" is very much tied into by formerly-fringe New World Order conspiracy theories that suggest that the evil Jewish cabal that supposedly runs the world manipulates ignorant Black people into violence & crimes against white people.

Permutations of that New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory have filtered into anti-vaxxer, dirtbag "left," and fairly mainstream right wing spaces.

NWO is sort of the unified theory of antisemitic conspiracy. That Gates/Soros vaccine & Pizzagate stuff? It's very much tied in.

We're at a moment where extreme antisemitic NWO conspiracy theory has-- with the assistance of Bannon, the dirtbags, and anti-vaxxers-- jumped from very fringe LaRouche leftist and relatively fringe right (Bircher/neo-confederate fash racism) and into the mainstream.

That antisemtic conspiracy theory is deeply useful for reinforcing the already-mainstream & long-used, implicitly antisemitic "outside agitator" narrative people in the United States often wield to try to undermine public perception of the legitimacy of Black antiracist struggle.

Antifa throw a wrench in the "outside agitator" narrative, however.

"Outside agitator" hinges on the racist suggestion that inherently animalistic Black people are being manipulated into violent action by diabolical Jews taking advantage of Black unintelligence from the shadows.

Once white people start engaging in antiracist street action meaningfully, that narrative is largely shot.

It's hard to paint antiracist action as the result of manipulation of a supposedly animalistic/unintelligent race when the supposedly superior race is taking part, too.

White solidarity in the form of an even modest visible antifascist presence undermines the anti-Black insinuations of the outside agitator narrative unless that presence can be explained away.

How do they explain that presence away?

By doubling down on the antisemitism.

That's how I end up with articles like this soiling my mentions.

The racists have to explain how white people got involved in action supposedly driven by Black animalism, so they need a supposedly extra-diabolical Jew to pin white presence on.

thewashingtonstandard.com/antifa-useful-…

The Washington Standard writer is smart enough not to explicitly name Jews or even Soros, but the last paragraph is an airhorn of a dogwhistle.

The manipulation that spawned the misguided white children of antifascism? It's "well-funded."

We all know what that's a reference to.

"Soros-paid protesters" is such a universal antisemitic right wing meme that all you have to do is HINT at paid protest to immediately invoke it.

While Soros does fund some political action, "Soros-paid protesters" has become a popular antisemitic trope divorced from reality.

Where the outside agitator narrative portrays Black protesters as operating against their own self-interest as a result of "cosmopolitan" (read: Jewish) manipulation of their supposed animalistic ignorance, the Soros narrative portrays white protesters as just fecklessly greedy.

That in and of itself is an invocation of another aspect of antisemitic conspiracy theory, and specifically NWO conspiracy theory's suggestion that non-Jewish white world "leaders" are simply willing and paid puppets to the "real" wealth-hoarding Jewish world rulers.

The paid protesters theory implies that somewhere up the imaginary hierarchy of Antifa, there are willing puppets taking Soros money so they can pay feckless and/or naively idealistic young whites to lend their bodies to the Black unrest supposedly masterminded by Soros-led Jews.

It's also worth mentioning that a very big part of the history of contemporary antisemitism involves hyper-wealthy capitalists targeting workers and especially Black workers with antisemitic NWO conspiracy theory propaganda.

Henry Ford, the leading employer of Black people in the post-WWI United States, very heavily targeted his workforce with antisemitic NWO conspiracy theory, and used company-distributed "newspapers" and literature to do it.

Wealthy white industrialists feared unionization and sought to turn their workers against it by characterizing labor organizers as dangerous Jewish Communists covering for the supposed Jewish cabal that was the "real" cause of worker misery and suffering.

It's that wealthy white industrial concern about labor organizing and supposed Jewish Communist conspiracy that initially drove Hoover to begin an investigation of MLK that resulted in a brutal FBI campaign of harassment against King that ended only with his death.

There's nothing more American than white supremacists using antisemitic conspiracy theory as a way to sow doubt about Black protest, even when white people join that protest in solidarity.

When whites act in solidarity with Black protesters and it becomes difficult for racists to suggest civil rights protest is just a function of secret Jewish manipulation of supposedly inherent lazy/animalistic Black traits, white supremacists double down on their antisemitism.

The story becomes one of paid and staged protests, and the racists make broad appeals to the notion that diabolical Jews planned it all from the sidelines, that their supposed wealth-hoarding greed gives them the resources necessary to pull off mass paid protest.

Intersectionality isn't just important for "include everyone" reasons.

It's important because oppressors almost always battle liberatory movements by leveraging multiple oppressions at once to appeal as broadly as possible to irrational hatreds.

What we're seeing right now is a perfect example.

Even though most Black people aren't Jewish, racists are effectively weaponizing antisemitic narratives to undermine the perceived legitimacy of popular Black resistance to police brutality.

Distracting people with stereotypes of one supposedly evil oppressed people (in this case, the Jews) in order to distract from or seemly delegitimize the anti-oppressive resistance of another oppressed people (in this case, Black people) is a strategy as old as oppression itself.

To effectively counter white supremacy's deployment of this strategy, we need to be able to call out that deceptive sleight-of-hand for what it is.

More generally, we need to educate ourselves about how this strategy is most often deployed in the US, and give it no quarter.

Just like racism is often used to prop up antisemitism (see: Henry Ford), antisemitism is very often used to prop up racism (see: right now, and also Henry Ford again).

It's not a coincidence that white supremacists peddle racism and antisemitism both.

When "Soros" starts trending at a moment of political uncertainty or unrest, be very clear that it's almost certainly because white supremacists are trying to leverage antisemitism in order to to distract from and ultimately to silence the voices closest to the pain.

Know it for what it is, call it out, and make sure the people around you understand what's going on.

It's easy to overlook antisemitism, and even when we recognize it we tend to underestimate its influence and impact.

That's the thread.

Thanks for reading, and thoughts of solidarity to everyone doing the work of resisting white supremacy right now. 🖤❤️