Kim Dotcom’s Long History of Conspiracism

Since German-born hacker Kim Dotcom fled to New Zealand to avoid extradition for numerous copyright violations by his website Megaupload, he has been spreading conspiracy theories about every subject imaginable while weaving them into an overall plot about Jewish control and “overrepresentation.” Little of this is different from what countless authors, pundits, politicians, and media personalities have spewed for centuries. However none of those terms exactly describe Kim Dotcom, a hacker and internet celebrity whose taste for sticking it to authority now go hand in hand with a prolific belief that Jews are running the world, and personally coming after him.

With Dotcom back in the news thanks to New Zealand authorities finally signing off on his extradition to the US, so too is his devotion to spreading disinformation. Dotcom was once seen as a legendary outsider, hacking his way into the computers of NASA, multiple banks, and the Pentagon – while making and lavishly spending a fortune. And he became a hero to the nascent file-sharing community, turning his illegal downloading site Megaupload into one of the most trafficked and valuable places on the internet.

But since then, Dotcom has become best known for his relentless conspiracism and interference in US criminal cases, as well as his insistence on invoking a vast, nonexistent Jewish plot to run the world. Here is a brief look at how the once beloved (and still beloved by some) internet outlaw has fashioned himself into one of the most prominent vectors of paranoia of the last decade.

Seth Rich and the 2016 US Presidential Election

Dotcom once saw himself as a political agitator, creating the Internet Party in New Zealand and teasing about explosive allegations against the country’s Prime Minister being part of a conspiracy with the US film industry to have him extradited. All of that ended when the Internet Party failed to draw any real support, and finally collapsed in 2018. By then, Dotcom had attracted attention in the US for pushing his way into the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, shot and killed in an unsolved murder that Washington DC police said looked like a robbery gone wrong.

Coming in July 2016, just months before the already-contentious election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Rich’s murder became a flashpoint for a string of conspiracy theories that he had been killed on the orders of Clinton because he had hacked the DNC and given its emails to Wikileaks. None of this was ever true, and Rich was not only a Democrat, but was preparing to leave the DNC to go to work for the Clinton campaign.

In May 2017, nearly a year after the murder and with numerous right-wing news sources spreading misinformation about Rich and his “hacking,” Dotcom began tweeting that he had “proof” Rich was the source of the emails that were given to Wikileaks. He subsequently claimed he and Rich had worked together on matters related to the Internet Party, and that he would testify to Congress as such. Dotcom’s allegations were immediately picked up the far right media, and especially by Sean Hannity, who immediately interviewed Dotcom on Fox News. Meanwhile, the Rich family claimed that Dotcom had attempted to hack Rich’s email, and that they had no evidence either of him hacking the DNC or knowing Kim Dotcom. Dotcom responded by threatening to sue the still-grieving Rich family for publicly refuting the claims, which had no evidence to support them.

Covid vaccine and “rubber clots”

Ultimately, the frenzy over Seth Rich’s death ended with a blizzard of actual lawsuits by the Rich family against right-wing media figures, and multiple retracted stories. But Dotcom’s conspiracism was only rising.

Over the next decade, he spread countless unevidenced theories, particularly about the COVID-19 pandemic. Dotcom tweeted that “the US government gave COVID-19 to the world” while also claiming that the virus was “created in a Wuhan lab” with American funding, claimed without evidence that the COVID vaccine killed more people than COVID, and promoted the anti-vaccine movie “Died Suddenly” with claims that the COVID vaccine caused “rubber clots” in people.

He has also promoted multiple conspiracy theories in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including that the CIA was funding a group of pro-Ukrainian social media trolls being secretly led by a former Republican member of Congress, and that the US was running “biolabs” in Ukraine – a conspiracy theory promoted by multiple QAnon promoters and shared by Russian propagandists and Tucker Carlson.

Investing in Mein Kampf

Virtually all of these conspiracy theories are now standard issue paranoia on much of the American right. But Dotcom’s devotion to sharing antisemitic myths and works seems to dwarf them all – and it has for a decade. In 2014, Dotcom was still able to plausibly deny any sympathetic feelings toward the Nazis after he admitted he bought a copy of Mein Kampf signed by Hitler, claiming he owned it only as an investment.

But over the next ten years, any veneer of politeness would disappear from Dotcom’s accusations about Jews. Claiming he was the victim of a US/Hollywood conspiracy to extradite him, he tweeted in 2015 that the entertainment industry was “mostly run by Jews.” He has been publicly pictured wearing a German Wehrmacht helmet emblazoned with the logo of the SS. And he reiterated the stance that the Jews run the media in 2022 in an exchange of tweets with Kanye West, where Dotcom told the rapper he was “right about criticizing the collusion of Jewish business people in the Entertainment and Media industry” – but took things too far when West praised Hitler.

“Zionist world occupation plan”

All of this, however troubling, pales in comparison to his post from August 2024, where in a lengthy and ahistorical ramble he deemed what might be “the most important post you’ll ever read”, Dotcom heaped praise on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Liberally quoting from what he deemed the “Zionist world occupation plan,” Dotcom claimed the Protocols “provide a simple explanation about why our world is being destroyed, by design” and that they explain Jewish “overrepresentation” the media, politics, and banking.

While he allowed that the document contains “borrowed ideas from several authors,” this was somehow proof that the Protocols are real, that they are being suppressed by Jewish media figures, and that former CIA head Allen Dulles was somehow responsible for implementing the plan while also publicly providing evidence it wasn’t real.

Dotcom’s entire post is inaccurate and nonsensical. The Protocols were exposed as a forgery in 1921, just a year after they were first published in English after being translated from the original Russian. While the original Russian author or authors remain unknown, the sources they pulled from to create the text are widely known, with no link whatsoever to any shadowy organization. Even many defenders of the toxic ideas within the Protocols admit they’re a forgery, merely allowing them to be “based on real ideas.”

While Jews make up a larger proportion of professionals in certain fields than their population number, this likely has much more to do with Judaism’s emphasis on learning and scholarship. And the days of Hollywood studio heads primarily being Jewish ended a century ago.

Not antisemitic or a Nazi?

Despite its blatant antisemitism and inaccuracy, or maybe because of them, the post racked up thousands of shares and nearly six million views. Through it all, Dotcom insists he is “not antisemitic or a Nazi.” And he might actually believe this – it is common for purveyors of antisemitic conspiracy theories to claim they don’t hate “all Jews,” merely the ones who control the banks and media. Given his persona as an outrageous, voracious, and heroic thumb in the eye of authority, it is possible that Dotcom’s posts are all an act to get attention and spark outrage. On the other hand, if he is just antisemitic, he would not be the first. And he won’t be the last.