The Russian Roots of US Antisemitism

On 1 March, the day after the United States and Israel launched strikes against the Islamic Republic, Candace Owens told her 7.6 million followers on X, “goyim always must die so the Khazarian mafia can expand their borders.” The post had 1.8 million views. A few days later, Tucker Carlson told his audience that Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement best known for campus outreach, was part of a plot to orchestrate the Iran war, in order to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Temple.

These are not fringe ideas hatched in fetid corners of the internet. The underlying ideas about secret Jewish networks, occultist sects manipulating world events, and non-Jews dying in Jewish wars are outgrowths of an ancient prejudice. And their contemporary form did not emerge from American political culture.

The characterisation of Chabad as a nefarious conspiratorial organisation, references to a “Khazarian mafia,” the idea that Jews are Satanic, and the links between these ideas and anti-Zionism can all be traced to Moscow. Russia’s use of anti-Jewish disinformation predates the Soviet Union. The most widely disseminated antisemitic text in history, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is an early 20^th-century Tsarist Russian fabrication purporting to document a Jewish plan for world domination. It was assembled in part from a 19th-century French political satire that had nothing to do with Jews, with the goal of redirecting social unrest and was subsequently disseminated by the Nazi regime.

Through forged documents, fabricated attributions, and coordinated disinformation campaigns, the KGB regularly weaponised antisemitic tropes to discredit Western institutions and used antisemitism to deepen social divisions. To work, such conspiracies do not need to be universally believed. They only need to circulate widely enough to polarise, distract, and degrade institutional trust.

In 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed the files documenting a Russian disinformation operation that was part of the broader “Doppelgänger” campaign targeting American Jewish communities. Operatives created a fraudulent version of a Jewish newspaper and impersonated Israeli citizens on social media. According to an FBI affidavit, this was a deliberate effort to exploit divisions within the American Jewish community in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.

Moscow has also cultivated Western far-right extremists. The Russian Imperial Movement, designated a terrorist organisation by the US government in 2020, provided paramilitary training to Western extremists on Russian soil. As a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation has documented, Russian military intelligence recruit saboteurs via Telegram. Global intelligence and terrorism analysts at the Soufan Center allege that the founder of “The Base,” a transnational neo-Nazi network that carried out “Operation Kristallnacht” by vandalising synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin, is a Russian intelligence asset.

While Putin publicly claimed that the “denazification of Ukraine” was one of his reasons for invading the country, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that, on Telegram, the invasion was framed as a war against a covert Jewish power structure. As the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented, the same claim was common on social media: “Ukraine is NOT at war with Russia, it’s being SET FREE BY Russia! The Khazarian Jewish Mafia is being brought down.”

The “Khazarian mafia” conspiracy theory is Russian state-adjacent propaganda that begins with the false claim that Ashkenazi Jews descend from a medieval Turkic empire. Though academically debunked and genetically disconfirmed—Jews from the three diverse diaspora groups of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are genetically closer to each other than to non-Jews from their respective regions—the lie is hard to kill. These Khazarian “fake Jews,” the conspiracy theory alleges, secretly control global finance, media, and governments.

The defamation of Chabad-Lubavitch as a covert organisation directing geopolitical events has followed the same trajectory. In October 2022, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council published an official article calling for the “desatanisation” of Ukraine and designating Chabad-Lubavitch a “neo-pagan supremacist cult.” A Security Council superior later issued a formal apology, but it was too late—the claim had already spread far and wide.

Alexander Dugin is a veteran of the antisemitic organisation Pamyat who has been prominent in Russian-imperialist intellectual circles for three decades. His work characterises Jews as descendants of “semi-demons” and worshippers of the Middle Eastern pagan god Baal. Dugin depicts a satanic elite connected to Jeffrey Epstein and Israel, bent on the destruction of traditional civilisation, as the animating force behind Western foreign policy, and frames Western civilisation itself as a “paedophilic civilisation of Baal.” His Foundations of Geopolitics is reportedly assigned reading at the Russian military academy.

These narratives do not flow in a single direction. When the Justice Department released the Epstein files in January 2026, Owens was among the first to connect the documents with the ancient Baal child-sacrifice story. On 2 February, weeks before the Iran strikes, she hosted a livestream that reached millions of viewers in which she claimed that Jews worship Baal and sacrifice children. What followed suggests that foreign state actors were watching. On 11 February, at a state-organised rally marking the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, pro-regime demonstrators set fire to a bull-headed effigy of Baal adorned with both a Star of David and an image of Donald Trump. According to Iran International, an independent Persian-language news network, the Masaf Institute, a group associated with the Iranian propagandist Ali Akbar Raefipour, was involved.

On 2 March, days after Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion began, Dugin published “Iran: The Last Stand against Baal,” fusing that framework with imagery from Iranian state propaganda. Within days, Russia’s state broadcaster, Russia Today (RT), was spreading his message far and wide. According to Google Trends, both US and worldwide search interest in “Baal” surged on 28 February, the first day of the strikes on Iran. People searching for “Baal” were simultaneously searching for “Baal statue Iran,” “Iran Baal,” and “burning Baal”—terms that map directly onto Iranian state propaganda cited by Dugin. A cursory search on X on 9 March 2026 showed that posts mentioning Baal were appearing approximately every minute—a term that, weeks earlier, had no measurable presence in American online discourse. Then, on 12 March, Owens told her millions of followers that “Israel is required to mass murder children because they worship Baal.”

How Audience Capture Drives Influencers to Antisemitism

Online audiences have become increasingly radicalised by predatory algorithms pushing conspiratorial, schizophrenic narratives and content creators are rewarded for feeding into them.

Back in 2024, Tucker Carlson visited Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. His trip included a video tour of a Russian supermarket, an experience that he declared had “radicalized” him “against our leaders.” The video was subsequently distributed by the Russian state. According to a 2024 Justice Department indictment, RT paid US$10 million to US company Tenet Media to distribute pro-Russian content.

In a February 2026 interview with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, filmed at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport (because Carlson refused to enter the country), Carlson called for genetic testing to determine whether Ashkenazi Jews have a “rightful” claim to the land—a line of questioning that both harkens back to Nazi-era blood-and-soil ideology that included the biological identification of Jews, while also invoking the Khazarian conspiracy theory.

On 3 March, Carlson claimed that Qatar and Saudi Arabia had arrested Mossad agents for planning bombings. Although Qatar’s Foreign Ministry told Al Jazeera that there was no basis for this claim, Russian-language Pravda channels amplified Carlson’s accusation. It was also echoed by Turkish state broadcaster TRT, while Iranian state media treated it as confirmed.

After Carlson devoted a segment of his show to the libellous claim that Chabad had orchestrated the Iran war, Candace Owens tweeted, “Tucker is telling the truth about the Chabad Lubavitch.” She has also described Chabad as “a radical sect of mystic occultists” and advised her followers to find out the location of their nearest Chabad house.

This kind of rhetoric can have material consequences. There have been a series of recent attacks on Chabad celebrations, including that of a man who repeatedly rammed his car into the entrance of Chabad’s Brooklyn headquarters in January 2026. One month earlier, two gunmen inspired by the Islamic State opened fire at a Chabad Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing fifteen people, including a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a ten-year-old girl. Following Carlson’s broadcast, the NYPD announced increased patrols at Jewish locations across New York City.

The Chabad conspiracy narrative did not originate with Carlson, nor did it begin during the current war. The idea that Chabad is a covert network directing Christian soldiers to fight Jewish wars was promoted by a Russian Security Council official as formal government commentary in 2022. As the ADL documented at the time, American far-right commentators were framing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meetings with Chabad leaders as evidence of Jewish orchestration of the Ukraine war, while Russian state propaganda was promoting the idea that Zelensky’s election had brought “the Chabad-Lubavitch sect into power.”

One such far-right influencer is white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whom Carlson spoke to for two hours in October 2025, in a softball interview that attracted 18–20 million views. Fuentes has explicitly praised Putin and celebrated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found that “groypers”—as Fuentes devotees call themselves—produce approximately two percent of all online antisemitic content while generating twelve percent of the antisemitic engagement through coordinated posting designed to create the appearance of organic consensus. Their antisemitic vocabulary has even migrated offline into mainstream political settings. In February, GOP candidate James Fishback gave a gubernatorial stump speech in which he used the word “goyslop”—a term that references the conspiracy theory that Jews deliberately promote degraded cultural products to non-Jews. The audience applauded.  

In New York City, antisemitic hate crimes were 182 percent higher in January 2026 than in January 2025. In 2025, the number of antisemitic offences in Germany reached a record high. In 2024, the most recent year for which they have published numbers, the ADL reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States—a 344 percent increase over five years, and the highest total on record. Despite constituting only around two percent of the US population, Jews were targets of 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes.

In the week following Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, the Blue Square Alliance recorded a 165 percent increase in antisemitic social media activity—the largest single-week spike since 7 October 2023. Posts using the phrase “die for Israel” increased by 2,920 percent. More than 185,000 posts alleged Jewish-orchestrated false flag operations. In the week beginning 28 February, following the first US and Israeli strikes, the Combat Antisemitism Movement recorded a 34 percent increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide, nearly half of which had been directly motivated by the conflict.

China has also exploited antisemitism as part of its strategy of information warfare. Researchers at George Washington University have documented that China’s influence-operations fund a network of sometimes violent activist groups, all of which oppose Israel. The network mobilised opposition to the Iran strikes minutes after they were announced.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was exposed as a fabrication more than a hundred years ago, less than two decades after its publication. But as is the nature of conspiracy theories, that made no material difference to its circulation or influence. By then, the document had already spread widely enough that the lie had become self-sustaining.

Today’s anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are not new—it has just become easier to amplify them. What previously required laborious coordination—printing, distribution, the patient cultivation of local intermediaries and translators—now occurs at platform scale and speed, and in real time, with domestic intermediaries who reach larger audiences than state broadcasters ever could. These ideas do not arrive labelled as foreign imports. They are packaged as plainspoken scepticism, organic political sentiment, and suppressed “truths” that the newly awakened are “just beginning to notice.”

That is precisely what a successful disinformation campaign looks like. Whether Carlson and Owens know the origins of their antisemitic ideas is almost beside the point. What matters is that they have become, by choice or by accident, part of the most effective distribution system Russian disinformation has ever had. Today’s open information environment, which feeds people’s appetite for supposedly suppressed truths, has become the primary vector of antisemitism. The foreign import arrives without a return address, packaged as plain speech, circulated by Americans, and received as homegrown. That is not a coincidence. It is the design.