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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
So many right-wing American podcasters have made highly-publicized visits to Moscow in the last few years that there seems to be a non-stop shuttle ushering social media influencers to the Russian capital. Candace Owens was only the most recent in a long list of American media personalities who have traveled Russia to praise it — and denigrate their own country at the same time.
Along with Owens, there’s also Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Jackson Hinkle, and most famously, of course, Tucker Carlson, the crown prince of the podcast ecosystem. During his repeated trips to Moscow, he’s pronounced Russian bread, the Moscow Metro, and even the Russian political system as superior to America’s. And it’s hard to ignore the fact that these pro-Russian influencers are also America’s most outspokenly antisemitic voices.
Is there a connection? Yes, the Russians amplify and celebrate them because antisemitic propaganda has been an instrument of Russian political warfare for well over a century.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is perhaps the most famous forgery in world history. The 1903 document first appeared in the Russian press, assuring its audiences it was revealing the recorded minutes of secret meetings of Jewish leaders conspiring to “take over industries, infiltrate governments and use a stranglehold on the media to advance their hidden agenda at the expense of non-Jews.”
In fact, the “Protocols” was authored by Russia’s Tsarist Security Service, Okhrana. According to one Russian historian, Okhrana produced the forgery to promote the belief “that the prime cause of discontent among the politically minded elements in Tsarist Russia was not the repressive policy of the bureaucracy, but a world-wide Jewish conspiracy.”
That is, it was an instrument of domestic policy that defended the ruling powers — what looked like homegrown liberal movements challenging the failures of Tsarist autocracy were in fact just cover for an insidious cabal of Jews, with internal and external agents determined to subvert “Mother Russia.” However, since the “Protocols” was published shortly after the Dreyfus affair and the concomitant rise of antisemitic movements throughout the West, it found fertile ground far beyond Russia, including in the United States.
In 1920, industrialist Henry Ford repackaged the “Protocols” in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent, which brought the Russian forgery widespread American attention. Indeed, the Nazis contended that American interest in the “Protocols,” supported by an influential business leader in the world’s most successful democracy, gave its claims legitimacy.
This circular reasoning helps explain the enduring success of the “Protocols” — because Russian spies amplified antisemitic themes already in circulation for many hundreds of years, proof the document was “real” was that it corroborated what antisemites already believed. For instance, according to Hamas’ 1988 charter, “the ultimate goal of Zionism is to expand Israel’s borders from the Nile River to the Euphrates,” a plan “embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and [the Zionists’] present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.”
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets’ distributed the “Protocols” and other antisemitic texts throughout the Palestinian territories — the pamphlet is still popular in the Arab world — to support another wildly successful information warfare operation: the weaponization of Palestinian nationalism.
This campaign primarily served foreign policy aims. By identifying Israel as an imperial power occupying lands to which Jews had no natural claim, the Soviets ensured that the Third World stayed allied with the Soviets and against Israel and America, Moscow’s superpower rival. Palestinian terrorism, in this view, wasn’t indiscriminate violence against Israeli civilians. Rather, it was part of a righteous struggle for freedom against the most rapacious of the world’s imperial powers, the Jewish state.
According to Ion Pacepa, chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service and reputedly one of Yasser Arafat’s handlers: “‘Imperial-Zionism’ was a modern adaptation of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded antisemitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.”
What we’re seeing in America’s right-wing podcast sphere today is a hybrid form of these two separate but related Moscow-born currents — “Protocols”-inspired antisemitism and Soviet-engineered anti-Zionism.
For instance, when Tucker Carlson alleges that the joint U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran was started by Chabad for the purpose of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, he’s drawing on antisemitic conceits formalized by the “Protocols” — Jews use their secret power to force others to abandon or undermine their own interests in order to advance Jewish interests. When Carlson says that Israel is conducting a purposeful genocide in Gaza to wipe out Palestinian existence, he is sourcing Moscow’s Cold War campaign to label the Jewish state as a singularly destructive force keen on destabilizing the globe.
It was Carlson who first introduced Alexander Dugin to a broad American audience with a 2024 interview in Russia. Dugin is a Russian philosopher sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” — but given his social media status probably better understood as “TikTok Rasputin.” His regular posts on social media platforms prophesying the impending doom of the West have captured the demoralized imaginations of American youth convinced that their birthright has been spent on sustaining foreign powers, namely Israel.
Dugin doesn’t traffic explicitly in antisemitic conceits but rather alludes to the “Protocols” when he claims what’s responsible for the suffering of young Americans is Western liberalism — i.e., the camouflage, according to the “Protocols,” the Jews hid behind to destabilize Russia. The answer to Western malaise, according to Dugin, is to embrace the Russian Orthodox Church, a traditional petri dish of antisemitism, and promote “multipolarity” — the foreign policy thesis holding that America must share power with its adversaries, China and Russia.
In other words, Dugin’s campaign is specifically designed to get Americans to turn against their own country. To accelerate that goal, Dugin and the Russians promote the podcast antisemites — Carlson, Owens, Jones and the rest — as an instrument to sow division and destabilize America through the same political warfare tactics they’ve mastered over the last century.
What makes it especially disturbing isn’t just that this digitally turbo-charged campaign of antisemitism reaches a global audience with an immediacy that 19th-century Russian spy services could have only dreamed of. No, the bigger concern is that the Russians are gambling that at long last they’ll succeed in using antisemitism to set their rival America on fire.
