This week, leftists on multiple social media platforms debated whether the acronym “ZOG” is an accurate or acceptable descriptor for the United States government. The term “ZOG,” which stands for Zionist Occupied Government, was popularized by The Turner Diaries — a 1978 novel by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce. Pierce was the founder and chairman of National Alliance, a white supremacist political organization that once had an annual income of $1 million. The neo-Nazi organization The Order, which was modeled after a militant white supremacist group in The Turner Diaries, committed armed robberies and funneled the proceeds to the leaders of several neo-Nazi organizations, including Pierce. Members of The Order also assassinated talk show host Alan Berg. Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh had a copy of The Turner Diaries in his possession when he was arrested and had been known to sell and distribute copies of the book. In The Turner Diaries, white supremacists rebel against a “Zionist Occupied Government” and ultimately exterminate Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, and Jewish people. As someone with antifascist politics, I have long considered any use of the term “ZOG” to be an obvious indication that someone held fascist beliefs and likely harbored fantasies about “cleansing” society of marginalized people. So, why are some people on the left using this language? To break down what’s happening and why this issue matters, I talked with my friend Shane Burley. Shane is the author of Fascism Today and Why We Fight, and a co-author of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kelly Hayes: Some people on the left have debated the term “ZOG” this week. Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve seen regarding that controversy and offer some background on the term “ZOG”?

Shane Burley: So the term “ZOG” is an abbreviation for Zionist Occupation Government (sometimes Zionist Occupied Government, or other variations). This is in no way a neutral descriptive term; it comes from very explicit neo-Nazi antisemitism and has become one of the primary ways fascists understand not just Israel and Zionism but the ruling class in general as what they believe is a distinctly Jewish phenomenon.

Part of why I think this is difficult for some on the left to reckon with is that many of these terms we use regularly do not have centralized definitions. Their meanings can be heavily contested. The meaning of Zionism itself is frequently debated, meaning different things to different people. Generally, from leftist critics of Israel, we understand Zionism as a political project to colonize historic Palestine and maintain a specifically Jewish state whose existence hinges on the preferencing and hegemony of a Jewish demographic majority. The alternative to that would be some of the different proposed arrangements that help to ensure democracy, equality, and safety for all residents of the region, at least if someone from a dependably left-wing perspective is speaking.

For neo-Nazis, Israel is simply one small element of what Zionism is, which they see as the political operationalism of Jewishness itself. Zionism is the project of global Jewish control by which Jews seed themselves into dominant institutions to manipulate them and turn them towards supposedly homogenous Jewish interests. Those interests are the destruction of the white race and “traditional” societies, often through perversion and thought control, so that Jews can ultimately rule over them. Unlike supposedly natural and normal empires and states, which in this formulation emerge from the white volk and are part of a supposedly harmonious white ethnic identity, ZOG is a parasitic, diseased manifestation of an outside influence, using the best Aryan traits against Aryan interests so that they can further centralize resources, power, and hierarchies. There is a ruling class in this formulation, but it’s not the capitalists: instead, the true rulers are Jews, and the non-Jewish ruling class are either puppets of ZOG or soon to become puppets.

This term came from neo-Nazi projects in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of explaining why the federal government was a lost institution: it had been captured by an alien influence. We have to consider how white nationalism reconstituted itself after the Civil Rights Movement made gains in undoing legally sanctioned segregation and Jim Crow laws and made public and legislative expressions of open racism less acceptable. Now, racists could not just run for office or push communities towards racialist conclusions; they had to engage in a revolutionary struggle because the government was no longer run by and for the white man: ZOG was now in control. And ZOG will use non-white people, queer rights, feminism, pornography, finance capitalism, and other systems to further undermine white sovereignty, identity, and flourishing. Fascist movements have always had a revolutionary character and that only became more important during this period, but they also mix class resentments with racial ones. So, while they may play on working-class white people’s anti-immigrant xenophobia, they want to connect that xenophobia with rising mortgage rates, the epidemic of family farm foreclosures in the 1970s, and other geopolitical strife. The way you link those very different social issues is ZOG: the same forces that are telling your kids being queer is alright are also those sending troops to foreign wars and outsourcing your job. This all becomes one and the same: the forces of modernity financially exploiting you and undermining “traditional” life, and the complex political system enacting this is the shadow government that hides its true face.

So ZOG was never just meant to just be about Israel, but it also used the language of a growing anti-Zionist movement. This was also a period of time when fascists began to appropriate some of the language of the New Left, particularly amongst the European New Right and neofascist leadership. They wanted to present the racist backlash of American whites as a national liberation struggle, and they made a case that a “nationalism for all people” model can work because, they argue, all peoples have a central enemy:........

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