New York Times: anti-globalism = antisemitism

Debate rages over the extent to which the protests on the political left constitute coded or even direct attacks on Jews.  But far less attention has been paid to a trend on the right: For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots. 

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in. 

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.”  “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats.  The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions. 

This language is hardly new — Mr. Soros became a boogeyman of the American far right long before the ascendancy of Mr. Trump.  And the elected officials now invoking him or the globalists rarely, if ever, directly mention Jews or blame them outright.  Some of them may not immediately understand the antisemitic resonance of the meme, and in some cases its use may simply be reflexive political rhetoric.  But its rising ubiquity reflects the breaking down of old guardrails on all types of degrading speech, and the cross-pollination with the raw, sometimes hate-filled speech of the extreme right, in a party under the sway of the norm-defying former, and perhaps future, president. 

In a July 2023 email to supporters, the Trump campaign employed an image that bears striking resemblance to a Nazi-era cartoon of a hook-nosed puppet master manipulating world figures: Mr. Soros as puppet master, pulling the strings controlling President Biden. 

~ Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Alex Lemonides, "How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel," The New York Times, May 9, 2024

The Economist: "How Joe Biden manages the war between Israel and Hamas will define America's global role"

As massed israeli troops await the command to invade Gaza, two hulking us Navy aircraft-carriers have been sent to support Israel.  Their task is to deter Hizbullah and its sponsor Iran from opening a second front across the Lebanese border.  No other country could do this.  The carriers are a 200,000-tonne declaration of American power at a time when much of the world believes that American power is in decline. 

The coming months will test that view.  It is hard to exaggerate the stakes.  On October 20th President Joe Biden called this “an inflection point.”  He warned of the need to repulse Hamas’s terror as well as Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.  China’s threat to invade Taiwan lurked unspoken in the background.

~ "American power: indispensable or ineffective? How Joe Biden manages the war between Israel and Hamas will define America's global role," The Economist, October 28, 2023

Michael Rectenwald on the Trump adminstration and the Left

Most importantly, however, Trump has represented a thin line of defense, however tenuous, of American liberties that stand in the way of global and governmental and extra-governmental order that thrives on lockdowns, masking, muzzling, banning, blacklisting, down-ranking, memory-holing, gaslighting, deleting, canceling, censoring, pre-censoring and obliterating dissent and dissenters. 

~ Michael Rectenwald, "The Google Election," Ludwig von Mises Institute's "Symposium with Ron Paul," 22:20 mark, November 7, 2021

Carroll Quigley on the globalism movement

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act.  In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.  I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s to examine its papers and secret records. 

I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments.  I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

~ Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

Ed Bugos and the end days for American empire

Locally we have the Cultural Marxists pushing to erase the conservative cultures of the West and institute progressive programs similar to what Mao did in China for his 5 year plan, and internationally we have the globalists pushing for a new world order.  Both are effectively exploiting the end days for empire and the demise of the current financial/monetary system.

~ Ed Bugos, private note, December 10, 2020

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995