In the 1920s, while the world was under siege by an influenza pandemic, the Ku Klux Klan was at its apogee of popularity and political power, spreading falsehoods about Jews taking over the world, Catholic nuns serving as sex slaves, and Black Americans destroying American culture. One hundred years later the world is in the throes of another pandemic; and while the KKK, which was once called the “Invisible Empire” because of its effective control of government, is still relevant, it is QAnon, a diffuse online-to-offline movement based on a network of conspiracy theories, that is now intertwined with much of the Republican Party. Certainly, QAnon’s worldview encompasses longstanding elements of the political far-right, including white nationalism, an anti-government stance, and bigotry — Islamophobia and antisemitism in particular.

The rise of QAnon is not an anomaly, but an extension of the insidiousness of systemic racism in the United States, which allows for both the flourishing of conspiracy theories and the denigration of people of color, immigrants, the politically progressive, and people who do not subscribe to a white, Christianist point of view. Resembling the strategy of the KKK before it, QAnon bifurcates people into two opposing groups: us versus them. Its central premise is that President Trump is leading a clandestine charge against an evil cabal of Satan-worshipping political and media elites plotting against him as part of the Deep State, led by Jews. These elites are believed to drink the blood of children to maintain their youth, not unlike earlier antisemitic blood libel accusations that Jews slaughtered Christian children in order to consume their blood during religious holidays. QAnon cultivates a narrative of white victims who are in danger because of people of color (including Muslims and Jews), immigrants, and liberal elites. In turn, Republican politicians aligned with QAnon are leveraging antisemitism as a virulent weapon for votes in the 2020 election, much like the KKK did one century ago.

QAnon: An Overview
First appearing in 2017 on 4chan, an online imageboard where people also post and share comments, and now present on more visible social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, QAnon’s name comes from the anonymous nature of the sites where it first appeared. Q, who may be a single person or a group of people, is the pseudonym of the unknown originator (or originators) claiming to be a high-ranking government official close to President Trump. Q also stands for Q access authorization, which is a security clearance level used by the U.S. Department of Energy, reinforcing the person’s (or people’s) status in the Trump administration. Q posts ambiguous apocalyptic messages, also known as Q drops, which buttress a conspiratorial worldview often laden with antisemitic tropes. Q drops are purportedly meant to be deciphered by adherents who are in fervent anticipation of The Storm, an event reminiscent of Christian End Times theology during which the corrupt elite making up the Deep State will be imprisoned for their moral failings and sexual depravity, and when QAnon followers will triumph.

QAnon and the Transnational Presidency of Donald Trump
In an internationally coordinated show of force, protestors in alignment with the political far-right, including QAnon adherents, marched in streets around the world on August 29, 2020. From Boston and Berlin to London and Paris, demonstrators flouted physical distancing measures recommended by the World Health Organization with signs declaring war on the political establishment: “Masks are Muzzles,” “Fight the Corona Dictatorship,” and “World Hoax Organisation.” They also carried banners with direct pleas to President Trump: “Please, Mr. President, Make Germany Great Again,” bookended with Qs. The German pleas to President Trump reflect the transnational acceptance of QAnon’s conspiracy theories. Though President Trump is a head of state and should be viewed as part of the same globalist government establishment that the movement rails against, QAnon has grown concomitant with his tenure as Commander-in-Chief. Its worldwide congregation of millions during his presidency can be attributed to the sizeable crossover of white evangelical Christians and its religion-like makeup. “Q” is a longtime staple on posters and T-shirts at Trump rallies. Adherents even revere Trump as an “angel,” the most likely candidate for the unidentified figure of Q, and their savior who will lead the charge to protect them during the imminent Storm.

Tellingly, of his own stance on QAnon and its constellation of conspiracy theories, President Trump has never discounted or negated such views. During a White House news conference in August 2020, President Trump suggested that QAnon followers were patriots, responding to a reporter, “I’ve heard these people love our country.” Furthermore, he flexes the full muscle of his bully pulpit by amplifying QAnon through retweeting related accounts hundreds of times. He also tweeted his endorsement of politicians aligned with QAnon, like businessperson Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he declared a “future Republican Star” and “real WINNER,” congratulating her ultimately successful 2020 Republic primary election campaign for Georgia’s 14^th congressional district. Greene, an adherent of QAnon since its inception, posted a YouTube video proclaiming her support of President Trump in 2017. In the video, she reiterates QAnon’s foundational postulation, “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” In another video, she repeats an antisemitic conspiracy theory known as “The Great Replacement,” which erroneously claims that Jews are orchestrating the mass migration of people of color into majority-white nations to perpetuate white genocide. The video also quotes a Holocaust denier saying, “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.” Her general election victory in November 2020 to the U.S. House of Representatives is all but ensured given that, in addition to the Georgia district’s overwhelmingly Republican make-up, her opponent dropped out of the race in September of this year.

The Anti-Defamation League, the prominent international Jewish organization whose mission is to counter antisemitism, has stated that what it regards as Greene’s failure to disavow racism is “a moral failure and unbecoming of someone seeking elected office.” The Republican Jewish Coalition also issued a rare statement during Greene’s primary runoff that endorsed her Republican opponent. The statement maintained:

 “Dr. Cowan’s opponent, Marjorie Taylor Greene, would take our party in the wrong direction. Greene came to national attention for all the wrong reasons: repeatedly using offensive language in long online video diatribes, promoting bizarre political conspiracy theories, and refusing to admit a mistake after posing for photos smiling side by side with a long-time white supremacist leader.”

Notwithstanding such declarations, however, Republicans in Congress are doing little to thwart Greene’s campaign. While there are detractors within the GOP who are angered by QAnon and the subsequent splintering of the party, including U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and U.S. Representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, their stance is increasingly in the minority. As a bellweather of the future of the GOP, Greene is financially backed by major Republican leaders like Barb Van Andel-Gaby, chairperson of the board of the conservative American think tank The Heritage Foundation, as well as several Republican members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

QAnon, Orthodox Jews, and White Evangelicals
Despite Trump’s explicit endorsement of Greene and implicit support of QAnon, and the antisemitism of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the majority of America’s Orthodox Jews have not yet signaled their disapproval of the President. A January 2020 poll of 1,264 Orthodox Jews in the United States conducted by Nishma Research found that Trump’s approval rating was 68% among the ultra-Orthodox and 36% amongst the modern Orthodox. (For comparison, his national approval rating in 2020 is 42% among all Americans surveyed and 64% amongst white evangelicals surveyed). Though a widely heterogenous group, American Orthodox Jews as a whole share a greater affinity with American white evangelicals than with American Reform, Conservative, and secular Jews on social issues and political views. Both Orthodox Jews and white evangelicals approved of Trump’s 2017 move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

This support is given despite President Trump’s antisemitism, which he himself both counters and promotes. In a speech to thousands of attendees at the 2019 Israeli-American Council National Summit, President Trump testified, “The Jewish state has never had a better friend in the White House than your president, Donald J. Trump.” Continuing, he described antisemitism as a “vile poison” and “venomous creed” that his administration “is committed to aggressively challenging and confronting … in every resource, and [by] using every single weapon at [its] disposal.” However, he countered this public display of support with derogatory comments in private. In 2020, he was reported to have privately commented after phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” repeating themes in his previous statements that Jews are not truly American.

Irrespective of this troubling dichotomy between his public persona and private thoughts, for many Orthodox Jews, President Trump’s antisemitism is secondary to his support of their religious ideals, including his support of Israel over Palestine. In this way they are similar to white evangelicals who take umbrage with President Trump’s personal foibles but continue to support him because of his commitment to white Christian nationalism.

QAnon, the KKK, and the American Presidency
One hundred years ago, the KKK’s racist and antisemitic worldview was espoused by a plethora of American political figures, much akin to QAnon’s prominence within current Republican campaign platforms across federal, state, and local levels. Several American presidents have endorsed the KKK. President Harry S. Truman was a paid member of the KKK, albeit briefly, and in 1915 President Woodrow Wilson validated the views of the KKK when he screened D.W. Griffith’s racist film “The Clansman,” now known as “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House. Praising it as “history written with lightning,” the film, which the KKK leveraged after its release as part of its successful recruiting drive, depicts racist tropes, including a scene in which a white heroine is rescued by a Klansman after being threatened by a predatory, intellectually inferior Black man, a racist portrayal widely – and erroneously — accepted since then as fact.

Wilson himself wrote of the KKK in laudatory terms in his 1902 multi-volume work History of the American People: “The white men were roused by an instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” It was during President Calvin Coolidge’s administration that more than 30,000 KKK members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House on August 8, 1925 in an eerie semblance of the transnational QAnon march in August 2020. Donned in robes, but with faces showing, in a powerful and almost militaristic display of unity, they foreshadowed President Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan by calling for “America for Americans,” meaning a United States inhabited and governed solely by white Protestants.

Even though President Coolidge refused to review the parade, the KKK was so mainstream that a journalist described it at the time as “the most vigorous, active and effective organization in American life.” Its members were white men and women in American cities, urban and rural, large and small. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans’s portrait even made the cover of Time magazine in 1924. In October 1925, at the annual meeting of the American Legion in Omaha, Nebraska, perhaps in response to the KKK demonstration earlier that year, President Coolidge, arguably progressive even by modern standards, called for all U.S. citizens to be regarded as Americans with the following remarks: “whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years of the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to​day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”

Nevertheless, despite such objections such as Coolidge’s, the KKK rebranded itself to the white American public in its second wave in the 1920s to reach an estimated four million members, or almost 4% of the population in the United States. Advanced not by overt racism, but by the insidious notion that to be a Klan member was to protect America for true (white) Americans, the KKK established urban centers in Detroit, Portland, Denver, and Indianapolis, each with tens of thousands of members, wielding significant political influence in government.

Notably, the percentage of Americans publicly affiliated with the KKK during its political zenith in the 1920s is nearly the same as the percentage of Americans today who agree with QAnon’s conspiratorial theories. According to a June 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 5% of American adults agree with QAnon’s conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was “intentionally planned by powerful people” as mostly or partly true. 20% of American adults believe it is probably true.

The KKK, QAnon, and the Media
Antisemitic conspiracy theories have always abounded through mass media — even before the tech giants created conspiracy theory-enabling environments, with endlessly reverberating echo chambers on Facebook and Twitter, as well as infinite, algorithm-driven rabbit holes on YouTube that are now weaponized by QAnon adherents. In 1924, influential business magnate Henry Ford praised the KKK in the New York Times as “a patriotic body, concerned with . . . the preservation of the supremacy of the true American in his own land.” In a move that received praised from Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published in 1920 one of the most antisemitic tracts in history, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as subsequent antisemitic articles such as “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” This latter title underscores the antisemitic belief that Jews are a stealth threat to global economic security, political stability, and social order. The fraudulent “Protocols” also advance this same theory by purporting to reveal an intricate plot by Jews planned at the World Zionist Congress in 1897 to overthrow ruling governments across the world and join with the Freemasons in eradicating Christianity.

 QAnon adherents continue to advance antisemitic accusations that Jews are working to take over governments around the globe. Previously called the New World Order or Zionist Occupied Government, the new antisemitic byword for Jews is “globalism,” which has been used repeatedly by President Trump, including when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019.

Antisemitism is a potent armament in the arsenal of political far-right organizations from the KKK to QAnon, even if brandished a century apart. Both organizations are tied to terrorism and pose national security threats to the United States. A 2019 FBI bulletin cites conspiracy theories, and organizations like QAnon that leverage them, as “very likely [to] motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to engage in criminal or violent activity.” There have been multiple incidents of violence in the United States associated with QAnon, from death threats and standoffs to murders. Moreover, in 2020, antisemitic violence sharply increased, shifting from offline to online attacks made capable by QAnon’s proliferation on social media. Correspondingly, American antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century led not only to the murders of Jewish Americans, like the lynching of Leo Frank, but also to the failure of the United States to provide a haven to Jews desperately seeking to flee the Holocaust in Europe.

Facing History with Courage and Hope to Counter Antisemitism
As evidence of the exploitation of antisemitism by the KKK and QAnon for political power demonstrates, history repeats itself when we do not face it with courage. It is only appropriate, then, to look to history for solutions to present-day ills. Significantly, history teaches that the trajectory of the quintessential American experiment of democracy is at stake this election cycle, much like it was a century ago at the height of the KKK’s political power. In his prescient 1925 essay “The Shape of Fear,” sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois sourced the symbiosis of the Ku Klux Klan and the American political landscape to the “leaders of the United States who have been willing to subscribe to a religious dogma that they did not honestly believe and yet which they were willing that the mass of people should think they were believing.” Almost one hundred years later, these words are strikingly apt. As if writing today, DuBois explains in part Trump’s equivocations, coded language, dog whistles, and overt antisemitism. These are all strategies to engage a mass of people in order for them to think he believes the same as they do. Trump wants his language to be interpreted by QAnon followers in a manner that suits their worldview. Much like Q drops and conspiracy theories themselves, his language is self-reinforcing. Just as each Q drop is regarded by adherents as confirming their allegations against the liberal elite, so, too, do President Trump’s words reify what adherents want to believe.

Prominent Democrats have decried Trump’s antisemitism, such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Despite these declarations, however, fewer than half of American adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center know that 6 million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. This ignorance perpetuates antisemitism, as does Holocaust denial. To refuse to acknowledge the existence of an event as devastating as the Holocaust is to be willfully blind to its causes.

An education addressing the different facets of antisemitism, from its history to its current manifestations, will make strides toward cultivating compassion and ensuring that the Holocaust is never denied nor forgotten. However, an education by itself is not enough. Indeed, despite education on the Holocaust in the United States and around the world, antisemitism has only increased. In America, institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. work to ensure the lessons of hatred that facilitated the Holocaust are learned in conjunction with other genocides like the one committed against the Batutsis and their political allies in Rwanda. Even in Germany, where students visit former Nazi concentration camps in order to witness history firsthand, antisemitism continues. Compounding the issue, Holocaust survivors who embody living history are passing away so what was once tangible is now consigned to history books to be retold, mistold, or forgotten.

In November 2014, author of Night and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who himself passed away in 2016, addressed an audience at The Cooper Union in New York City during a panel discussion entitled “Genocide and the Jews: A Never-Ending Problem.” At the beginning of his remarks, Wiesel observed, “Things change, anti-Semitism remains.” One hundred years have passed and antisemitism is still a potent weapon exercised for political power. Not only by the KKK in the 1920s and QAnon in the 2020s, but also by political parties in the United States and in many European countries that facilitated the Holocaust — from the Donald Trump-wing of the Republican Party to Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany). It is not a coincidence that as white nationalism is gaining traction in international geopolitics, so, too, is the rise of the antisemitism. The need to acknowledge, learn about, and address the systemic causes of antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust is more dire than ever.

Only by understanding how antisemitism is enabled by people and institutions can such messaging be effectively countered. Only by recognizing that silence is complicity will the full scope of the apparatus that permits antisemitism today be dismantled. Only by taking a stand against antisemitism with everyday choices in language and action will antisemitism be eradicated. The relentless lesson of history is that positive change toward peace has almost never come from the head of state or government, but has mostly been fomented by people on the ground.

Wiesel also spoke of the individual’s power to enact change, asking, “Can we really learn from each other? If not, what are we doing here? If we can, why don’t we?” He answered optimistically, even though he endured unimaginable horrors at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, “I believe we can. God has given man the power of words. With these words we can build castles. We can bring hope or despair — it’s always in our hands.” The choice is ours to make.

Americans face a critical juncture in November 2020 should the elections proceed and the results be validated: the path of equity and justice or the path of racism and fascism. By choosing the former, we will have finally faced history with courage and hope, rejecting antisemitism at the ballot box. If we choose the latter, not only are we are doomed to repeat history in despair, we will be complicit in the continuation of hate. I choose to vote for hope.

 

Sara Kamali, Ph.D. is the author of the forthcoming Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War against the United States (University of California Press, 2021) and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. You can subscribe to her newsletter through her website to receive updates and other writings every month, and follow her on Twitter @sarakamali. 

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.