"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Presidential administrations come and go, but hatred and paranoia toward Jews is eternal
When Donald Trump was re-elected on November 5, the sphere of conspiracy theorist influencers built up around him was flush with gloating and self-congratulation. Most took their enthusiasm to social media, particularly X, where they extolled Trump’s victory and claimed that it was the beginning of a long reign that would see Trump’s enemies – particularly the Jews and the Zionist lobby – brought to heel before him.
While nobody should be surprised that the antisemitic influencers who had spent years pushing Trump and attacking his enemies were enthusiastic, that reaction didn’t last long. Many of them very quickly soured on the new administration, Trump’s cabinet picks, and the president-elect’s pledge to support Israel and fund its war against Hamas to an even greater extent. Many still extolled Trump as a tactical genius and master troll, but believed his new term was already captured by the Zionist lobby, and that, as one prominent influencer put it, he was leading a cult that was become “a problem.”
Like the best-known antisemitic writers of the past, presidential administrations come and go, but hatred and paranoia toward Jews is eternal. And just as quickly as Trump built up a following among this corner of the “bro podcast” world, he seems to have already lost it over his support of Israel and his willingness to nominate Jews and Jewish supporters to his cabinet. Whatever excitement they had almost immediately had turned into a sense of betrayal.
The young generation of men who built followings treading very old ground were initially excited about Trump’s win. They had breathlessly supported Trump as the candidate who would wreck the “uniparty,” break Israel’s supposed control over US foreign policy, and would make the liberals they hated so much miserable. But as it became clear that his administration would be filled with many of the same figures that they believed to be war-mongering neo-conservative Zionists, a sense of betrayal set in. And it was a quick transition.
No figure might have done more to reinvent himself as an influencer whose entire stance is opposition to Jews than Jackson Hinkle. In between posting photos of himself speaking at a conference in Moscow, Hinkle has been all over the place in his reaction to Trump’s victory and cabinet picks. Hinkle has been vociferous in praising some Trump cabinet selections and decrying others as “deep staters” and betrayals. Despite calling Matt Gaetz a stellar pick for Attorney General and a “staunch defender of PEACE with RUSSIA,” only minutes earlier he was decrying that “ZIONIST & PRO-WAR DEEP STATERS have TAKEN OVER the Trump administration.” He also attacked Trump for apparently promising Netanyahu that he would lift restrictions on US military aid to Israel” – which Trump vocally campaigned on as a way to shore up his support with American Jews.
Ultimately, Hinkle still thinks Trump is the candidate who will bring “peace” to Russia and Ukraine before World War III starts thanks to American funding of Ukraine. But many other antisemitic influencers don’t have even that much faith in Trump, who appears to have already squandered the goodwill he built up during his campaign.
Influencer and blogger Lucas Gage, who has pumped out an endless stream of antisemitic attacks over the past few years to the point of attending a gathering in Kentucky called the “Jewish Problem Conference,” took a much more bleak stance. Banned from X for antisemitic videos, Gage wrote on Substack that he didn’t vote for anyone, and that while he voted for Trump in 2016, both candidates were essentially puppets of the Jews, and it didn’t matter who won.
Nick Fuentes, whose dinner with Trump caused major problems for the former president as he was kicking off his re-election bid in November 2022, was more impressed with Trump’s victory, but it didn’t last. The day of Trump’s win, Fuentes posted on X that he was “deeply satisfied to see him triumph in the end.” The satisfaction didn’t last long, as Fuentes was soon raging against Trump “staffing his administration with neocons” who would push for war with Iran, and claiming that it took a week for Trump to start nominating a cabinet that was “as bad” as his first. Like other antisemitic Trump influencers, Fuentes placed most of the blame on Zionists and “Israel-firsters” who were pulling the strings on Trump – itself a version of an antisemitic trope. And like many other supposed Trump backers, Fuentes went out of his way to say he didn’t vote.
Former MMA fighter turned far-right influencer Jake Shields echoed these sentiments, going from “giving Trump his due” for defeating two female presidential candidates to attacking Israel supporters in his administration, and claiming Trump’s cabinet would “make antisemitism illegal,” while antivaccine video and content creator Stew Peters claimed a few days after Trump’s win that “The Constitution is being replaced with the Talmud” and “Trump is quickly nominating the Judeo-Zionist Dream Team All-Stars to fill every position in his cabinet.”
The young influencers who have built brands around antisemitic content clearly put their devotion to that material over whatever allegiance they might have to Trump. But if content creators like Fuentes and Hinkle have become good at the dance of extolling and attacking Trump at the same time, there is an older generation of authors and intellectuals devoted to antisemitism who have perfected it. And many expressed the same cynicism that no matter who won, nothing would change and Jews would still be in control of everything.
Trump had already lost the support of notorious antisemite and former KKK figure David Duke, who flipped from Trump to perennial third-party candidate Jill Stein in October 2024. Telling his radio audience that Stein was “the only candidate who speaks clearly against the war in the Middle East,” Duke endorsed her as “good for white people, Europeans, as well as all humanity." Stein rejected the endorsement, and Democrats immediately used it in an attack ad.
Other legacy figures in the world of conspiracy theories expressed similar views, such as philosophy professor turned Holocaust denier and Sandy Hook crank James Fetzer. Initially supportive of Trump and a believer in the 2020 stolen election conspiracy theory, Fetzer was still behind Trump even as late as the day before the election, referring to him on the radio as “cautious [about] taking the country to war” and claiming that his cabinet appointees would not be “beholden to the deep state.” But like other influential figures in antisemitism, Fetzer’s tune quickly changed, and just over a week later, Fetzer opened his show by declaring that “Donald Trump is betraying one and all of us. He's appointing one idiot Zionist after another to key positions in the government.”
But if classic antisemites were quickly transforming their support into disgust, there’s one critical antisemitic thought leader who never support him at all: author, Holocaust denier, and “reptoid conspiracy” proponent David Icke. The prolific speaker and conspiracist philosopher has never been shy about raging against Trump as just another cog in the Jewish-funded cabal that controls global banking and politics, created COVID-19, and secretly funded the Nazi war machine. To Icke, they’re all the same, will always be the same, and will always defer to the Jews who are actually running things.
Sure enough, Trump’s victory did nothing to impress Icke – nor did Trump’s appointment of “Zionists” to his cabinet detract from his nonexistent support for the president-elect. Shortly after Trump’s victory was clear, Icke reposted a video from just after Trump’s win in 2016, where he claimed America had “a choice between a catastrophe and a disaster,” and that “people will be disappointed” when Trump goes from self-proclaimed outsider to member of the political establishment.
Icke would go on to assail Trump’s connections to Israel, his support of the Netanyahu government, and his staffing of prominent neo-conservatives and war advocates in his cabinet. “Trump has been owned by Israel even before politics and how anyone could not see how his fake 'rebel government' was bound to reflect this is testament to the power of cognitive dissonance and self-deception,” Icke wrote in a long screed on X on November 14th, assailing the “alternative media” as part of the same psychological operation that he believes has always run American politics.
Still, David Icke’s stance that Trump can’t let him down because he expected nothing of him is a rarity in the antisemitic conspiracist world. Far more occupy the same space as people like Hinkle, Fuentes, and others; seeing Trump as a transformational figure who immediately took their trust and exploited it. Again.
Or as once Trump-extolling Holocaust denier James Fetzer said of Trump’s military picks on the same show where he decried Trump’s betrayal, “this is bad. This is a total capitulation to Israel. I am disgusted.”
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