(thread)

Pay attention to what trends when there's a pressing civil rights battle in our country.

Be aware of the ways in which the far right attempts to hijack the conversations about racism by using antisemitic conspiracy theory to de-center Black pain.

Antisemitism serves an extremely important function for fascists and the far right.

They use it for slight-of-hand narrative strategies that revolve around "noticing" the supposed string-pulling by Jews in moments of fear, uncertainty, and unrest.

These narratives usually remain implicit and gestured/dogwhistled to rather than directly stated in mainstream discourse, but COVID-19 has dramatically changed that.

Anti-vaxxers & even some relatively mainstream dirtbag "leftists" have taken to spreading antisemitic Pizzagate-related theories/rumors about vaccines and microchipping that start with Gates foundation conspiracy theory but ultimately arrive at Israel and Jews like George Soros.

As @TheRaDR has written, this isn't new.

Supposed Jewish malevolent Oz-behind-the-curtain behavior is a frequent narrative, and has a long history of invocation during times of disease and plague.

That means that antisemitic conspiracy has especially strong traction right now.

Speaking of historic tropes, the "outside agitator" is a perennial favorite of racists trying to explain away POC and especially Black outrage and protest at violent racism and brutal state repression of Black community.

" #AntifaTerrorists" is being used that way right now.

The narrative of outside agitators sparking/taking advantage of racial tensions narrative goes back at least as far as the Reconstruction South (farther, really, judging from characterizations of John Brown and anti-slavery voters during Bloody Kansas)

"Carpetbaggers" weren't constructed as Jewish, but the implications of cosmopolitanism (a trope very very much linked to antisemitism) were very much there.

That caricature was very much at play during the Civil Rights movement, when racists used MLK's connections to Northern urban whites and especially socialist Jews as a way to paint him as a mere puppet of malign Northern cosmopolitan influence.

The racists' narrative was very much that Black people are simple, lazy to the point of docility, and submissive when left to their own devices.

The Civil Rights movement, they said, therefore could not be the product of Black-led organizing. It had to be a conspiracy.

This wasn't just a localized fear/concern, either.

It appears that one of the original reasons for Edgar J. Hoover's notoriously evil covert FBI campaign against MLK was King's connection to a Jewish socialist that Hoover already had in his crosshairs.

The outside agitator narrative is profoundly racist not only as a matter of function (its function being use allegations of outside--often Jewish-- influence to subvert Black organizing) but because its core assertion is one of inherent Black laziness/intellectual dullness.

"Outside agitator" are pretty clear in asserting that Black people are too lazy/stupid to engage in organized resistance by themselves.

It also implies that Black people are also too stupid to know their self-interest & engage animalistically when riled up by bad actors.

That implication of Black civil rights protest as outsider conspiracist-sparked & animalistically unthoughtful is one of the reasons it's so racist to lecture Black protesters on what "smart" protest would look like, btw.

It suggests Black people can't think for themselves.

That suggestion that Black people need white "outside agitators" to guide them away towards supposedly animalistic behavior and towards critical thought and correct political action isn't unique to the far right, by the way.

The dirtbag "leftists" at r/stupidpol believe it, too.

And, for all my broader critiques about Jacobin, this particular piece is pretty spot-on.

Whites trying to dismiss Black civil rights action as outside agitator-sparked isn't some far right/far left thing.

Liberals do it, too. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/who-is-an-outside-agitator/

Now, antifascists have been around since the first days of fascism.

United States antifascism in the form of Antifa as a movement/culture, however, owes a lot of its heritage to British punk resistance to Nazi infiltration of punk/skinhead scenes in the 70's and 80's.

As a result, a lot of Antifa stuff has taken the form of practical, localized resistance to parallel fash attempts to infiltrate urban punk/street culture, which usually takes the form of explicit adoption of European fash-based identity/expression, i.e., Nazi shit.

Nazis and Bircher/neo-confederate fash traditionally haven't traditionally gotten along well, but Steve Bannon's big innovation during Trump's campaign was using MAGA and the alt-right to create ideological spaces that could accommodate/mobilize the impulses of both traditions.

(This is a very simplified version of events, obviously, but for the purposes of this thread I think it's a useful shorthand version)

Having a Bannon-style fascist take the White House fundamentally changed what antifascism looked like in the United States, because it changed what fascism looked like here.

Overt fascism stopped being fringe, and popular fascism stewed together Euro-style fascism and redneck racism-- and their symbols/tactics-- together in new and novel ways.

There'd been overlap before, but this ferment was something unprecedented in both degree and popularity.

As popular fascism began to more and more explicitly appeal to and embrace many of the traditional modes/narratives/symbolisms of traditional American racism, antifascism (and specifically Antifa) became an increasingly visible militant force against that traditional racism.

While Antifa isn't racially heterogenous, it often appears predominantly white in media coverage (for reasons too complex to get into here).

And, white folks militantly organized to engage in street resistance to organized racists throw a wrench "outside agitator" narratives.

"Outside agitator" narratives attempt to paint antiracist organizing as Jewish-led.

They use antisemitic & racist tropes to suggest that a few shadowy (((conspirators))) have riled up an animalistic race too lazy/stupid to resist on its own.