Why Antisemitism Is Still the Barometer of Civilisation

The internet didn’t invent antisemitism. It just made stupid people better at it.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Nazis are bad.

This should be the most obvious sentence ever written. Yet here we are, watching parts of the right platforming Holocaust deniers while exhausted conservatives wonder how they ended up fighting lunatics on both flanks. The woke left spent years making Jews the acceptable target of progressive rage, masquerading as “anti-Zionism”. Now the antisemitic right is trying the same trick, just with different adjectives. Note how both extremes mirror each other in the same obsessions with identity, victimhood, and moral exhibitionism.

This isn’t really a left-versus-right problem. It’s a psychological deformity among internet-addled minds whose critical faculties – if they had any to start with – have been short-circuited by tribalism and a sense of their own inadequacy.

Jews always become the target of this political psychopathy, which is why antisemitism remains such a powerful barometer of civilisational malfunction.

The pattern is grimly familiar. It starts with legitimate criticism – corporate power, media bias – all true enough. Then comes the slide, almost imperceptible at first. Who really controls it all? Add a few names – a something-stein here, a someone-berg there – and suddenly you’re “noticing patterns”. The gentle slide gains momentum, with an audience cajoling you to name the problem. Within months, you’re sharing quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion while still insisting that you’re just “asking questions”.

Look at the pattern on both ends, and we see a clear overlap. The woke left discovered that antisemitism was permissible as long as you called it “anti-colonialism”. When progressive activists are criticised for intimidating Jewish students, attacking synagogues, and repeating Hamas talking points, they feign innocence. We’re not against Jews, we’re against Zionism.

Now the antisemitic right is playing the same language games with different vocabulary. Instead of “anti-colonialism,” they use “anti-globalism”. “Zionist entity” becomes “rootless cosmopolitans”. The terms change, but the target remains the same.

And because the woke left effectively normalised antisemitism, the antisemitic right can point to that precedent. If progressives can obsess over Jewish power, why can’t we?

What characterises both movements is what I’ve come to think of as “narcilism”: the poisonous cocktail of narcissism and nihilism mixed in the algorithmic saloons of social media.

Both movements attract people desperate for meaning and an explanation for their own failures and disappointments. Both offer a story in which the believer is uniquely enlightened, surrounded by “sheeple” who refuse to “wake up”.

This is moral exhibitionism for the internet age. The woke activist and the groyper¹ are the same creature, one in a keffiyeh, the other in a MAGA hat. Both are performing righteousness for an online audience that rewards extremism with attention.

Historical revisionism is thriving online because it offers psychologically gratifying narratives to people who lack the critical powers or intellectual curiosity to uncover obvious lies. For the same reasons, it’s especially attractive to younger people searching for meaning and spiritual nourishment in Western societies that increasingly provide neither.

Take the adolescent unfamiliar with 1930s history beyond the very basics. They see a YouTube video suggesting Hitler “had some good points about banking” and receive it as insight. Another who has never read any history confronts Churchill for the first time as the subject of revisionist allegations. It turns out that he was the true villain, not Hitler. Ooh, that’s wild! They think they’ve discovered a hidden truth. In reality, they’ve just been met by the algorithm.

The woke left, also historically illiterate, decides Israel is a settler-colonial project because they’ve never read a long book and think “indigenous” means whoever seems less Western.

Both are conspiracy theories that attract people who want to feel smarter than everyone else without doing the “boring” work of reading – an activity increasingly foreign to a TikTok-addled generation.

And both inevitably locate Jews at the centre because antisemitism is the oldest, most durable conspiracy theory in human history.

What we’re looking at is a catastrophic failure of education. The statistics are alarming. In the UK, a third of young adults couldn’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto. One in five Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth. Across all nations surveyed, large portions were unaware that six million Jews were murdered. In Poland, 47% said they had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion on social media.

Commonsense conservatives spent years fighting woke lunacy, exhausting themselves battling pronoun madness, institutional capture, and the war on reality. Just as that campaign seemed winnable, they turned around to discover their own side colonised by lunatics rehabilitating Hitler and spreading century-old conspiracy theories.

The test of moral sanity here is straightforward. Can you condemn antisemitism on your own side as readily as you condemn it on the other? Can you defend Jews without qualification, without pivoting to criticism of Israel or hedging about “both sides”?

Increasingly, more people – including some elected to positions of power – are failing this test. Don’t be fooled by the pretence of even-handedness. The woke leftist condemns right-wing antisemitism while excusing Hamas. The conservative opposes woke antisemitism while nodding along to “globalist” conspiracy theories. Both have decided Jews are useful symbols in their political battles, but undeserving of consistent protection.

This is why antisemitism remains the most reliable barometer of civilisational health. It reveals when a society has lost its attachment to truth, when tribal loyalty has replaced rational thought, and when performance has become more important than principle.

The Holocaust is the most well-documented event in history, not least owing to the enormous volume of meticulous records kept by the Nazi regime itself. Six million Jews were murdered.

Any movement that treats this statement as negotiable or open to debate has disqualified itself from rational discussion and strayed into historical fabrication or delusional conspiracism.

Nazis are bad.

It shouldn’t need saying. That it does tells you everything about the madness of our current moment.

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1. Groypers are followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes who use irony and memes to spread far-right ideology online.