JTA — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”

This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.

“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”

Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.

He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.

“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”

Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”

“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob — the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”

When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.

Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first........

© The Times of Israel