This post is dedicated to the impressive volume of emailers, commenters, and mahjong-group dispatchers who have written, with varying degrees of grace, to inform me that I have a left-wing blind spot.

I see you. I hear you. And — because I am nothing if not responsive to constructive feedback — today I am extending the same diagnostic seriousness to the right that I have been extending to the left for the past month.

Here is what I am doing, plainly. The framework I have been applying to the left — antisemitism as a self-replicating conspiracy theory, an operating system that runs across political environments — only matters if it works in both directions. If it only diagnoses one side of the spectrum, it is not a framework. It is a partisan rhetorical move with intellectual decorations. So this piece is the stress test. Same diagnostic apparatus, applied to a different political ecosystem. We will see whether the architecture holds.

Antisemites on the right: I did not forget about you. You were just easier to identify. There is no conceptual heavy lifting required to recognize antisemitism at a tiki torch parade chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The hard work has been naming the version that wears better clothing — the kind that wraps itself in liberation vocabulary and dares you, on pain of professional ostracism, to call it what it is.

I will be honest; it is almost refreshing to spend a post on people who proudly identify as Nazis. There is something almost nostalgic about a movement that puts the swastika on the front of the shirt rather than embroidering it inside the collar of an “anti-colonial liberation” hoodie. Brevity. Clarity. A complete absence of subtext.

OK — that joke, retired. Because the operating system I described in Crash Course[1] — antisemitism as a conspiracy theory, a structural template that swaps in new vocabulary every century while keeping the same bones underneath — does not run on only one side of the political spectrum. It is the operating system.

Once the conservative movement’s preferred Black female commentator. Now: a podcast empire built on questioning the Holocaust, running extended segments on “the Christ killers,” and arguing that “the Zionist lobby” is the hidden hand behind essentially every cultural development she dislikes. The vocabulary has been workshopped for an evangelical audience. The architecture is the architecture.[2]

Has used his post-Fox platform to host Holocaust revisionists in the friendliest available tone, nod along while guests describe Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II, and platform — with the practiced civility of a man who has decided that opening a microphone absolves him of responsibility for what comes out — voices an earlier generation of conservatives flagged as fringe. He is just asking questions. The question becomes the platform becomes the canon.[3]

The easy one. Holocaust denial on camera, “Christ is King” chants, a following of young men who self-identify as “groypers” and have made it their full-time hobby to harass Jewish students online. He is the right-wing antisemite the right-wing antisemites do not bother defending. The costume is the message, and the message is unmistakable.[4]

A Note on the Big Kids Table

Here is the part where I am going to do something I have not done much of, which is give the institutional Republican Party a small amount of credit. The difference, at least at this particular moment in time, between the antisemites on the far right and the antisemites on the far left is that the antisemites on the far right are not currently being given a seat at the big kids table.

(I know. I know. There was that one time at Mar-a-Lago.[5] But I digress.)

Trump, of all people, has actually been shooting off some pointed tweets lately criticizing his former pal Tucker and the lunacy that is Candace Owens.[6] The institutional GOP has been, by 2026 standards, surprisingly clear that this faction does not speak for them. Senate Republicans are not opening for Nick Fuentes at fundraisers. Candace is not getting booked to keynote a Heritage Foundation gala. The Owens-Carlson-Fuentes axis is loud and growing, but it is loud and growing on its own platforms — not on the platforms of mainstream conservative politics.

The same cannot be said for the left.

The nightmare fuel that is Hasan Piker — a Twitch streamer with three million followers who has called Hamas “a thousand times better” than the IDF, said he has “no issue” with Hezbollah, and argued that anyone with “positive feelings about Israel” should be barred from any position of import down to the level of local dog catcher[7] — was interviewed in March 2025 at Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rally alongside AOC, courted by the 2024 Harris campaign as a “Creator for Kamala,” platformed by Rolling Stone, and is currently being embraced as a campaign surrogate by Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.[8]

The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt has called Piker “one of the most outspoken, virulent antisemitic influencers in the world.” Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres has called him “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America.”[9] The Democratic operatives courting him are, by all available evidence, undeterred.

That is the asymmetry. Not in volume of antisemitism on each side — both are significant, and growing — but in proximity to power. On the right, the loudest antisemites are being kept, however imperfectly, on the outside of the institutional tent. On the left, they are being invited in to do the catering.

That distinction matters. It will probably not matter forever. But right now, in 2026, it is real, and it is part of why I have been writing the way I have been writing.

The Part That Is Keeping Me Up at Night

The above figures are adults with audiences and brands. They are bad. They are also the easy part.

What is happening on TikTok is something else. Something younger. Something less coherent. Something more dangerous — because the boys absorbing it do not yet have the conceptual scaffolding to recognize what they are being sold.

If you have not spent any time on the “looksmaxxer” internet — a corner of TikTok populated by teenage boys obsessed with optimizing their physical appearance to attract women — count yourself lucky. The communities are organized around theories of male attractiveness so specific they have their own vocabulary (canthal tilt, hunter eyes, mandible angles), and over the last year or two, they have become an extraordinarily efficient pipeline for radicalization.[10] It is the American Psycho morning routine, open-sourced and scaled to a generation, and the recommendation engine is not subtle about where it ends up.

Why? Because the operating system runs hot in young men who feel, accurately or not, that they are losing. The looksmaxxer is told he is not getting laid because his bone structure is wrong. He is not getting hired because the system is rigged. He is not getting respect because someone is hoarding it. Once you accept the premise that you have been denied something rightfully yours, you start needing a story for who took it.

The story, on these platforms, is not subtle. It is “Jewish” — not “Zionist,” not “globalist” — straight up, named, in the captions and the comments and the duets.

And the most disturbing data point of the last six months: clubs in major American cities are being filmed doing coordinated Sieg Heil salutes during specific drops in popular songs. Boys laughing, arms up, recording it for TikTok under hashtags that are themselves coded references to Jewish power. We’re just joking, the comments say. It’s a meme.

Sure. The Hitler salute, in 2026, in a Miami nightclub, performed in unison by twenty boys to a viral beat. A meme. Got it.[11]

Why Girard Predicted This

A brief detour, because if you have not read me before you may not know who I am about to keep citing.

Rene Girard, a French literary critic who pivoted into anthropology and spent the back half of his career at Stanford, focused on one question for almost forty years: why do human communities, at every scale, over and over, converge on a single target when the collective pressure builds? Why does the choreography of that convergence look the same across cultures, across centuries, across causes?

His answer begins with mimetic desire. The claim is simple: desire is not original to the person experiencing it. We learn what to want by watching each other want. Status, partners, jobs, lives, sneakers, abs — almost all of it is borrowed. Advertising operates on this. Social media weaponizes it. The dating economy runs on it. The reason teenage boys all want the same shoes, the same body, the same girl is that each of them is reading the others’ wanting and converting it into his own.

When a community is collectively wanting the same things and the supply does not stretch, you get rivalry. Multiply rivalry across an entire society and you get what Girard called a mimetic crisis — a pressure system with no release valve, social cohesion fraying, frustration accumulating with nowhere to go.

The relief mechanism societies have repeatedly reached for is the scapegoat. Pick a target — different enough to mark, embedded enough to make sense as a symbol — and load the accumulated anxiety onto it. The unanimity of the choice is what makes the violence feel like justice rather than mob rule. Nobody pauses to interrogate whether the target actually caused the problem. The crowd moves as one. The pressure dissipates.

Girard wrote in the abstract. He was too good a scholar to spell out the empirical pattern. He did not have to. The historical record names one population that Western civilization has, more reliably than any other, fed into the scapegoat mechanism every time the pressure has built.

Now apply that to the looksmaxxer. He is a young man fed an algorithmic stream of content that tells him to want a very specific kind of life, body, status, and female attention. He wants those things because everyone else does. When he cannot have them — because almost no one can — the mimetic crisis kicks in. Resentment builds. The pressure rises. And right on schedule, the scapegoat mechanism arrives to bleed it off.

The conspiracy theory does not need to be invented. It is sitting on a server farm somewhere, fully assembled, ready to autocomplete the sentence the moment the algorithm needs to fill the slot. Two thousand years of European cultural memory, on demand, indexed and searchable.

Those nightclub videos are the entire architecture, compressed into a six-second clip. The “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scene from Cabaret, restaged for TikTok and set to a Kanye song.

Here is the part of the analysis I have not put in print before, but that I am increasingly certain is true.

The rise of antisemitism on the left and the rise of antisemitism on the right are not independent variables. They are reinforcing each other. Each one is, increasingly, the recruiting tool for the other.

Picture a 18-year-old college freshman, raised in a household that voted blue in every election of his lifetime, who arrives on campus in 2026 expecting to find his people. What he finds instead is the activist class he assumed he was joining celebrating the murder of Jewish embassy workers as “resistance,” shouting down a Jewish speaker for being a Zionist, and framing Israel as the unique source of evil in the international system. He is not Jewish. He is paying attention. And what he is noticing is this: the coalition that has spent his entire adolescence telling him he is the problem — the white male, the colonizer, the oppressor — has now decided that there is one group it is acceptable to hate openly. And the group it is acceptable to hate openly is, by every metric the algorithm shows him, doing pretty well at exactly what he has been told to want.

He is, at this moment, three TikTok recommendations away from a Tucker Carlson interview that will explain to him why all of it makes sense.

Now flip the experiment. This version’s 18-year-old did not get his politics from a household. He got them from the algorithm. His teenage years have been spent in looksmaxxer streams, Fuentes-adjacent group chats, and comment sections where the trope is named openly and rehearsed daily. He is not waiting to be recruited. He has been recruited for two years. He turns 18, sees a campus encampment chanting “globalize the intifada,” and notices, with quiet satisfaction, that the loudest progressive voices in the country have, for once, identified the same enemy he has. Not because they share his politics. Because they share his villain.

The far left and the far right do not need to coordinate. They share a script. They cast the same role. They name the same hidden hand. They differ only in costume and, for now, in social respectability. And every act of antisemitism on one side functions, somewhere downstream, as a recruitment poster for the other.

The horseshoe is not a metaphor anymore. It is the architecture rendering itself, in real time, on opposite sides of a stage that turns out to be a single closed circuit. The far-left activist and the far-right groyper believe they are sworn enemies. They are reading the same script. They are casting the same villain. The wardrobe department is just better at one of the two productions.

Same Disease. Different Costume.

Same operating system. Exactly the same operating system. The Candace Owens audience and the BDS rally crowd are reading from the same group chat, and I do not mean that metaphorically. The vocabulary differs. The fashion differs. The political tribe differs. The architecture is identical.

The right calls him a globalist. The left calls him a Zionist. The looksmaxxer calls him “them” or simply drops a Juicebox emoji. The nightclub kid does not call him anything. He just does the salute and laughs.

Different costumes. Same character. Same script. Same century.

To the podcaster who insists he is just asking questions: questions are not a costume. The questions you keep asking have answers — answers your audience is busy supplying in your comment section, in language you would rather not be quoted defending. You are not a journalist. You are an open mic with a furrowed brow. The fig leaf is fooling fewer people than you think.

To the comment-section warrior who is sure “globalist” is just an economic descriptor: friend. You and I both know who the globalist is. You know what he looks like. You know what last name he has. You know exactly which photograph the meme is going to use. The plausible deniability has not been plausible for at least a decade. Stop pretending.

To the looksmaxxer who has concluded that his bone structure is a Jewish conspiracy: I am sorry your life is not what you wanted it to be. So is mine, in different ways. So is everyone’s. The promise that there is a hidden cabal responsible for the gap between your expectations and your reality is the oldest scam in Western civilization. It has been sold to your demographic — young, frustrated, male, looking for a story — for two thousand years. The salesmen are not original. You are not the first generation they have worked. You will not be the last unless you notice what they are doing.

To the kid in the nightclub: it is not a meme. It has never been a meme.

I do not have a blind spot. I have a publication schedule. The left-coded version of the conspiracy theory has been more interesting to me as a writer because it is harder to identify — and, in 2026, more proximate to political power. The right-coded version is also a problem. A serious one. One that is metastasizing into spaces my Boomer readers will never go and would not understand if they did.

The boys who learned the salute on TikTok are going to grow up. They are going to apply for jobs. They are going to date your daughters. They are going to vote.

Different aesthetic. Same disease. Same century.

You have the framework now. Use it.

[1]See Jaclyn S. Clark, A Crash Course in the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory, The Times of Israel.

[2]On Owens’s Holocaust denial, “Christ killers” content, and Zionist-lobby framing, see Candace Owens (ADL backgrounder); Who Is Candace Owens—and Why Her Antisemitic Rhetoric Poses Real Risks for American Society (AJC); Candace Owens departs Ben Shapiro’s website after antisemitic commentary (Washington Post, Mar. 22, 2024).

[3]On Carlson’s September 2024 interview with Darryl Cooper, in which Cooper called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” and described Holocaust deaths as an unintended consequence of Nazi resource constraints, see Republican lawmakers slam Tucker Carlson after his friendly interview with Holocaust denier (Jewish Insider, Sept. 2024); Tucker Carlson hosts man who says Nazis didn’t plan the Holocaust (Jerusalem Post); White House condemns Tucker Carlson ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview (CNN, Sept. 5, 2024).

[4]On Fuentes’s Holocaust denial, “Christ is King” rhetoric, the Groyper movement, and harassment of Jewish students, see Who is Nick Fuentes and Why Is His Antisemitism Dangerous for America? (AJC); Fuentes Delivers Antisemitic, “Christian Nationalist” Rant to Fellow White Supremacists (ADL); A recent history of America First streamer Nick Fuentes’ Holocaust denial (Media Matters).

[5]Trump hosted Fuentes alongside Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago on November 22, 2022, days after announcing his 2024 presidential run. See Trump hosted Holocaust denier at Mar-a-Lago estate during visit with Kanye West (CNN, Nov. 25, 2022); Trump talks with white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner (Axios, Nov. 25, 2022).

[6]In an April 2026 Truth Social post, Trump attacked Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones as “NUT JOBS” with “low IQs” over their opposition to U.S. action against Iran. See Donald Trump Slams ‘Nut Jobs’ Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones (Variety, Apr. 2026); Trump bashes MAGA media figures over their Iran war criticism (NBC News); Donald Trump insults Tucker Carlson, Kelly, Owens, and Jones over Iran comments (Jerusalem Post).

[7]On Piker’s reach (∼3 million Twitch followers), his statement that “Hamas is 1,000 times better” than the IDF, his stated lack of “issue” with Hezbollah, and his proposal that anyone with “positive feelings about the state of Israel” should be barred from any position of import down to “the local dog catcher,” see Hasan Piker: What You Need to Know (ADL); Hasan Piker — Twitch Streamer Who Spreads Antisemitism to Millions (AJC); Hasan Piker favors Hamas, is pushing Dems to be anti-Israel (JTA, Apr. 27, 2026); Hasan Piker doubles down on Hamas support (Jewish Insider, Apr. 2026).

[8]On Piker’s political proximity: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat for an interview with Piker at Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Las Vegas in March 2025; the 2024 Harris campaign featured him as part of its “Creators for Kamala” outreach; Rolling Stone profiled him during the campaign; and as of April 2026 he is a campaign surrogate for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. See Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Sit Down With Social Media Personality Who Defended Hamas (Algemeiner, Mar. 21, 2025); Hasan Piker on DNC Chaos, Creators for Kamala (Rolling Stone); Influencer Hasan Piker gives Michigan’s US Senate race some heat (WDET, Apr. 8, 2026); Hasan Piker divides Democrats as party grapples with young male voters (Newsweek).

[9]ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt described Piker as “one of the most outspoken, virulent antisemitic influencers in the world” in his keynote address at ADL’s 2026 “Never is Now” conference. See Jonathan Greenblatt calls out Chris Van Hollen, Ro Khanna at ADL’s national conference (Jewish Insider, Mar. 2026); see also the ADL’s published profile, Hasan Piker: What You Need to Know. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres described Piker as “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America” in his official letter to executives at Twitch and Amazon. See Congressman Ritchie Torres Writes to Executives at Twitch and Amazon: Hasan Piker is Dangerous (House.gov); see also Rep. Ritchie Torres warns of ‘amplification of antisemitism’ on Twitch, including ‘poster child’ streamer Hasan Piker (AOL News).

[10]On the documented convergence of looksmaxxing communities, the broader manosphere, and antisemitic radicalization through algorithmic platforms, see From Masculinity to Conspiracy: The Manosphere’s Turn Toward Antisemitism (Blue Square Alliance, 2026); The Manosphere Is a Pipeline to Antisemitism (Nexus Project); A Dangerous Convergence of Misogyny and Nazism (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism); TikTok’s Spiral of Antisemitism (Journalism and Media, MDPI).

[11]In January 2026, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Sneako, Myron Gaines, and 19-year-old looksmaxxer streamer “Clavicular” (Braden Peters) were filmed throwing Nazi salutes and singing along to Kanye West’s track “Heil Hitler” inside Vendome, a Miami Beach nightclub. Footage circulated widely on TikTok and X. See Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate and other right-wing influencers filmed singing Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’ at Miami nightclub (JTA, Jan. 20, 2026); Streamer Clavicular Sparks Outrage with Nazi Salutes at Miami Club (National Today).

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