America's Groyper Problem

The notion that American anti-Semitism is an outside influence operation rather than a homegrown menace is a comforting story. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Followers of Nick Fuentes punch above their weight in American discourse because they are young and disproportionately online; some foreigners no doubt found this far-right niche useful for generating engagement and revenue. 

But the rise of American anti-Semitism is not a foreign phenomenon, and it is not an online illusion (as outlined in Yair Rosenberg's  piece in The Atlantic). In 2024, David Shor, a data scientist who did polling for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, surveyed nearly 130,000 voters and found that a quarter of young people had an “unfavorable opinion” of Jews—not Israel, Jews—far more than their elders. 

Today, some of the top podcasts in the country regularly feature overtly anti-Semitic conspiracy content, whether it’s Tucker Carlson rehabilitating Hitler, Candace Owens claiming that Israel had a hand in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk, or Joe Rogan hosting a conspiracy theorist who fulminated about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.” 

And it’s not just words. When far-right activists, including a college student named Nick Fuentes, marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” that wasn’t a foreign psyop. When a white supremacist animated by that same fear—that conniving Jews were replacing the white race through mass migration—massacred worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, he wasn’t taking cues from abroad. Neither were the Black nationalists who shot up a Jersey City kosher supermarket in 2019, nor the anti-Israel assassins this past year who attempted to incinerate Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and murdered three people, including a young Jewish woman allegedly shot in the back in Washington, D.C., and an 82-year-old burned to death in Boulder, Colorado.

The reasons for this anti-Jewish eruption are many. Outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza has led some self-styled Palestinian partisans to perpetrate or justify attacks on Jews thousands of miles away. Social-media platforms lowered the barriers to spreading anti-Semitic invective, allowing bigots to find and amplify one another more easily. Algorithms often privilege novel inflammatory content (including conspiracy theories) over careful, factual reporting. Sites such as X no longer pretend to moderate this material, not that they ever did much to impede it in the first place. 

The upshot is this: Whether anti-Semitic content comes from America or abroad, the supply is simply rising to meet demand. Viral Groyper content only goes viral in the first place because it appeals to Americans who share the sentiment. Outside spending and propaganda cannot manufacture what isn’t already there.