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The following analysis was authored by Derek Tassone, research associate for the Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) by CAM:
Antisemites have often turned to new forms of mass media to advance their pernicious cause. During the sixteenth century, the German priest Martin Luther took advantage of an innovative technology at the time, the printing press, to not only launch the Protestant Reformation but also publish the antisemitic diatribe On the Jews and Their Lies.
More recently, in the twentieth century, pundits also turned to nascent communications platforms to establish personal brands, develop political movements, and peddle antisemitism. During the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-area Catholic priest serving the church Shrine of the Little Flower, used the relatively new invention of radio to build an audience of millions, advance his National Union for Social Justice, and propagate Nazi apologia while attacking “international bankers,” a dog whistle referring to Jews.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Patrick Buchanan gained notoriety as a syndicated columnist and cable news personality espousing “paleoconservative” ideas that fueled three failed presidential runs. Buchanan faced criticism for a number of antisemitism-tinged claims, including, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its ‘amen corner’ in the United States.”
Governments and political parties, not just individuals, have also utilized popular media to spread antisemitic messaging. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis relied heavily on the regime-sponsored newspaper, Der Stürmer, to advance their antisemitic agenda, dehumanizing Jews and presenting them as enemies of the German people, laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Soviet Union turned against the State of Israel, the Communist Party mouthpiece Pravda embraced anti-Zionism, portraying the Jewish state as a successor of the Nazis and invoking antisemitic tropes to demonize and delegitimize Israel to the Soviet people.
Today, in 2025, we stand at the dawn of the next media age. The proliferation of podcasts over the past several years, first accelerating in 2020 and 2021, is only intensifying. Some commentators and researchers have argued that the 2024 U.S. presidential race was the “podcast election,” with both major party presidential and vice presidential candidates appearing on numerous podcasts to campaign.
With this development, historical patterns are holding true, unfortunately, and the podcast medium has rapidly become another nexus for the mass dissemination of antisemitic content. With episodes of popular podcasters, such as Joe Rogan, Theo Van, and Candace Owens, reaching millions of impressionable listeners, it is crucial to call attention to this problem early on.
By countering lies in new media forms, the truth can be brought to light. CAM has been at the forefront of analyzing trends in antisemitic discourse, shining a light on conspiracy theories related to the JFK assassination and the devastating Los Angeles fires, as well as the problem of antisemitism on gaming platforms, while showcasing unique solutions.
As we expose this latest trend, podcasters committed to truth and fairness must promote constructive and healthy discourse that rejects antisemitism and nurtures the health and vigor of liberal democracies and Western civilization.
Historical Background: Antisemitic Ideas in Popular Media
Father Coughlin
Father Charles Coughlin was a Canadian-born Catholic priest who moved to the Detroit, Michigan area in 1926, establishing a new church, the Shrine of the Little Flower. A gifted orator, Father Coughlin created in 1927 the first Catholic service on radio, a rapidly-emerging medium of mass communication. The first commercial radio station in the United States began broadcasting in 1920, and ten years later 40.3% of American families owned a radio set. By 1940, the rate had jumped to 82.8%.
Father Coughlin was at the forefront of this new media environment, and his local Detroit-area radio broadcast was distributed nationally by CBS in 1930. At the peak of his popularity in the 1930s, Father Coughlin had tens of millions of weekly listeners and received so much fan mail that a new post office had to be built in Royal Oak, Michigan, to process the average 80,000 letters he was sent each week.
While Father Coughlin first began to address politics during the 1932 presidential election, he was a supporter of then-Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, by 1935 he had turned against President Roosevelt and the New Deal, forming his own political organization, the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), which he touted via both his radio broadcast and a publication called Social Justice.
Spearheading this movement, Father Coughlin, who had previously invoked the antisemitic “Shylock” character from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to criticize usury, shared and highlighted antisemitic conspiracy theories with his legions of followers.
Following the November 1938 Nazi pogrom in Germany and Austria known as Kristallnacht, Father Coughlin took to the airwaves to excuse the violence, falsely claiming that “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted,” which he attributed to the Soviet “atheistic Jews and Gentiles” who had supposedly murdered more than 20 million Christians and stolen “40 billion [dollars]…of Christian property.”
Also in 1938, Father Coughlin’s Social Justice published a version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous debunked text, originating in the Russian Empire in 1903, alleging a Jewish plot for world domination.
Father Coughlin continued his antisemitic crusade into the 1940s, accusing Jews of pushing the United States into the Second World War. However, after Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war on Germany and Japan in December 1941, public and governmental attitudes turned swiftly against Father Coughlin, and in May 1942 the new Archbishop of Detroit ordered him to cease all non-pastoral activities or else be defrocked.
While Father Coughlin did halt his hateful broadcasts and publications, over the course of more than a decade he had helped normalize antisemitic conspiracy theories. In a 2021 paper published in the American Economic Review, University of Toronto researcher Tianyi Wang found that:
places more exposed to Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic and isolationist radio program in the late 1930s were more likely to form a local branch of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, sell fewer WWII war bonds, and harbor more negative feelings towards Jews in the long run.
By weaponizing an emerging form of mass communication, radio, Father Coughlin fomented anti-Jewish hate and undermined America’s interests.
Patrick Buchanan
Patrick “Pat” Buchanan served in the Nixon administration as an assistant and speechwriter for Vice President Spiro Agnew and later a special assistant to President Richard Nixon, as well as in the Reagan administration as Communications Director, emerging as a television personality on an increasingly popular media format — cable news.
Starting in 1980 with the formation of Cable News Network (CNN), Americans quickly adopted cable news as a primary means for digesting current events, with more 50% of American households hooked up to cable by the 1988-1989 television season, a sharp increase from 25% in 1981.
Buchanan, who was a seasoned syndicated writer, was an original host of CNN’s “Crossfire” news program from 1982-1988 and would later become a regular guest on NBC‘s “The McLaughlin Group” and CNN’s “Capital Gang.” He was also a frequent MSNBC guest until he was fired in February 2012. During an August 1990 episode of “The McLaughlin Group,” Buchanan made an antisemitic assertion that “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” exploiting the stereotype that Jews and Israel control U.S. policy.
In 2004, during a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer in which Buchanan sought to defend himself against accusations that he was “Father Coughlin of the modern era,” he once again invoked an antisemitic claim, positing that the United States had “outsourced Middle East policy to [Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon.”
Capitalizing on the growing popularity of yet another new method of mass communication, cable news, Buchanan utilized his position in this new ecosystem to push antisemitic tropes charging Jews with outsized influence and control over American foreign policy. His accusations and methods were both an echo of the past rhetoric of Father Coughlin and a forerunner of current podcast discourse.
Antisemitism in Podcasts: The Latest Exploitation of Popular Media
Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper on the “Joe Rogan Experience”
Last month, on March 5, the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, hosted by former comedian, UFC commentator, and actor-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan, released a new episode featuring an interview with Ian Carroll, a self-described “independent researcher” and host of the “The Ian Carroll Show” on YouTube.
The “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast is the most popular podcast in the United States today. Within three weeks, more than 3.4 million people had watched the Ian Carroll episode on YouTube. The “Joe Rogan Experience” enjoys 19.6 million YouTube subscribers and 14.5 million Spotify followers (according to Bloomberg reporting from last year). What distinguished this specific episode, however, and merits examination, was the content of Caroll’s conversation with Rogan.
During their two-and-a-half hour discussion, Carroll repeated false, antisemitic allegations to Rogan’s massive audience. He claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was “clearly a Jewish organization [sic] working on behalf of Israel and other groups” and besmirched the “Rothschild banking family,” an oft-invoked boogeyman for antisemites to allege neafrious Jewish domination of global finances.
Caroll has previously accused Israel of controlling the United States and even “global politics,” claimed “Israel did 9/11,” and said that “Israel certainly did their best to embellish and inflame the history books [sic] telling of the tale,” referring to the Holocaust.
Just eight days after the Carroll interview, Rogan hosted another guest with an antisemitism track record, pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper. Cooper had previously downplayed the Holocaust and trafficked in WWII revisionism during an interview with Tucker Carlson, casting British leader Winston Churchill as the primary antagonist (rehashing a claim made by Pat Buchanan in his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World) and falsely arguing that the Holocaust happened because Nazi Germany was unprepared to hold the number of prisoners it took, whitewashing the systematic, industrial-scale genocide of European Jewry with the pithy line “millions of people ended up dead there.”
The March 13 interview with Cooper, which has gotten more than one million views on YouTube, was rife with alarming claims by Cooper. He peddled Holocaust revisionism and Nazi apologia, claiming Hitler did not approve the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and sympathetically explained Hitler’s antisemitism, arguing it stemmed from a feeling of being “manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the Jews who own the theaters and put out the films and whatever else.”
“I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people,” Cooper added.
Theo Von
On March 5, podcaster Theo Von published an episode featuring Candace Owens, a conservative influencer who has recently drifted drastically to the far-right, making numerous antisemitic statements and accusations. During the interview, Owens claimed that AIPAC, an American lobbying group supportive of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, and Israel exert control over American foreign policy. Taking an even darker turn, she also alluded to conspiracy theories proliferating online accusing Israel of assassinating President John F. Kennedy in 1963, suggesting that “JFK got shot” because he supposedly wanted AIPAC to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
“Netanyahu runs shit,” she added.
An Emerging Front in the Fight Against Antisemitism
The mainstreaming of antisemitism through podcasts is an alarming new development that demands vigorous scrutiny. Podcasters platforming antisemitic claims and conspiracy theories expose millions of people, who may look to podcasters as credible information sources, to false, hateful, and dangerous notions that incite hatred and violence toward Jews.
Podcasts are here to stay, at least for as long as they remain captivating and compelling to their listeners. The medium is not the problem. What is urgently needed are adequate responses to manifestations of antisemitism on podcasts.
Media coverage of these podcast episodes that fact-checks misinformation is certainly a good start. Even more importantly, it is vital that a new generation of podcasters, dedicated to spreading the truth and countering antisemitic hatred, is nurtured and supported.
Only by leveraging new media formats effectively, as antisemites have so often done throughout history, can false narratives be deconstructed and marginalized.
