This letter is for the true believers still stuck in the JQ or Resistance movement—to those who have been in this a few years, who have lost relationships over it, who have an account that nobody at work knows about, and who have started to notice that something doesn’t add up. Perhaps you’re realizing that things aren’t really going anywhere, that ratios on X don’t actually do anything, that your favorite e-celebrities aren’t who they say they are, and your life hasn’t improved at all since joining the “revolution” you think you’re a part of.

I know there’s a lot of animosity toward me. I’ve seen nonstop hatred, defamation, and “critiques” of me from literally every figure for the last several months. Virtually everything they say is an ad hominem of some kind. Not one of them has considered the simplest explanation—that I learned something and changed my mind.

I don’t bother defending myself to these types anymore, and this letter isn’t for them; they won’t listen anyway. It’s for you, because maybe you will.

I’ve made so many people antisemitic over the years. I’ve spread so many conspiracy theories I didn’t know were false until recently. I feel obligated to at least try to snap people out of the lies I helped them believe. That is what I’m doing, because that’s the right thing to do.

Many of you feel betrayed, believe I’ve been bought off, or whatever other conspiratorial claims are circulating. The things I said in 2023 solidify that belief—that if I ever change my position, then my followers should know I’ve either been threatened, bought off, or compromised. I’ve seen the screenshot from The Times of Israel spread like wildfire. However, that claim of mine was no different than some conspiracy theorist saying “I would never commit suicide.” Or “If anything happens to me, you know who did it.”

This is a form of delusional egotism, to think that anyone is so important that someone would assassinate them. And notice that in order to explain my departure from the conspiracy world, the explanation itself is another conspiracy.

The truth is I actually learned new things—new things that I’ve pointed out and shown people on my timeline. The information is there for you to check. And I know it debunks all your beliefs because I held the exact same ones you have for nearly two decades.

Forget about how you feel about me for a second. Focus only on the facts I’m putting out there and see if you can debunk them without feeling that cognitive dissonance and engaging in logical fallacies to keep your beliefs alive. If you can’t do that, then you know something is wrong.

The harsh truth is that you’re in a conspiracy cult led by grifters, some of whom are dark triad figures that profit off your ignorance. I was a true believer, which is why I corrected course and got out. Some of them may be true believers too, but I can’t read their minds. This is why I’ve ignored their attacks—just in case they are, and I don’t want to make them dig in deeper.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.

You may believe these people you follow are heroes that will change the world. The truth is nobody you’re watching is a threat to anybody.

Do you really believe a government considers these people a problem, that there’s a war room in DC or Tel Aviv where men in suits and military uniforms discuss what to do about a guy with a livestream or a podcast? They may annoy the powers that be because they have some influence online. But none of them are keeping anyone up at night.

What people in government actually worry about is that one of their followers might do something violent based on bad information, not that the information is dangerous because it’s true.

The reason these people aren’t a threat is because none of them have secret information. You’re not out on the fringe with them because they’re telling you something elites can’t afford to let out. They got their information from other media figures. None of them are in the Pentagon talking to anyone directly. So unless they are literally government whistleblowers, you need to stop thinking you’re watching someone who knows more than you when you can access the same information they have.

You’re out in the fringe because what you believe is demonstrably false—not because few people agree with you, but because there are better explanations for the same facts that you haven’t seen.

I went back through the things I was most certain about, and I watched them come apart before my eyes. These were beliefs I put my family at risk for years: beliefs that ended friendships and that broke apart my family in 2015—when I stopped talking to one of my sisters for five years, missing her wedding and her missing mine.

These were things I was willing to die for. I put my wife and children at risk in 2024 when I got swatted sixteen times in a row, followed by nonstop harassment for a year straight. None of it stopped me. In fact, it did the opposite every time: I became more extreme because I read it as proof I was right, that I was over the target.

You’d think if I were to “sell out,” it would have been then. But I kept going even harder afterward, for two more years.

But people swatting me, censoring me, harassing me, or being offended by me was never evidence that I was right, any more than it was evidence that I was wrong. Only the facts decide that, and I didn’t have all the facts. I had gaps, and I filled them in with things that weren’t ever proven to be true. That’s what most conspiracy theories are—leaps across gaps that raise more questions than they answer.

What changed me started in 2025, when I saw people I trusted steal from people in the movement, lie about it, lie about me for calling them out, and lie to their followers. But that’s just one person; what about everyone else? I then saw no one cared to help. But why? Ah, because they may lose access to that person’s audience, or it was none of their business. They told me calling it out would just cause drama. But I watched those same people engage in drama constantly, over far smaller things. So it wasn’t drama they were avoiding. Nobody was going to risk an audience over a thief.

This was the first domino.

Then more lies started coming from other “thought leaders”—people who claimed they’d do anything to save their country or their people. These are men who said they were going to take down “world Jewry” and the Rothschild dynasty, and they couldn’t call out a small-time crypto thief for robbing their own followers. Then I watched more of them promote things that contradicted their own message, not once, but several times.

That was the second.

The nonsensical conspiracy theory claiming Israel killed Charlie Kirk was the third.

“Is everyone grifting?” The answer hit me: “YES, and so are you!”

“Me?” I thought to myself. But how? That’s what started the review of everything.

Well, what was I doing? I was streaming and answering questions about the future I couldn’t possibly know. I was responding to the e-celebrity drama, which is no different than high school gossip, beneath me as a man. I was selling nationalist t-shirts and antisemitic books. I realized I wasn’t actually doing anything that would make a tangible difference. I wasn’t going to run for Congress, nor could I, and I wasn’t going to start an institution. So all I was doing was getting paid to talk, to entertain fantasies that were going nowhere. Not only was I in the wrong place, but I was also part of the problem.

I didn’t think of it as a grift at the time. I believed every word. But intent isn’t what makes something a grift—getting paid for something that was never going to work is what makes it one, and that’s exactly what I was doing. I gave the real grifters who were lying an audience and a credibility they couldn’t have manufactured on their own.

So I shut my stream down midstream one night, stopped selling the shirts, and took my antisemitic books down myself. Nobody told me to. I gave up that income because no amount of money was going to keep me in a failed movement full of drama and conspiracies.

That’s how I started my way out the door.

But how did I get in in the first place?

Probably the same way you did: you were lied to, and you lost trust.

For me, they lied about Iraq. So when somebody told me they’d lied about 9/11 and the Holocaust, it wasn’t so hard to believe. By that point, I applied a rule: they lie, so everything they say is a lie too.

That rule feels like healthy skepticism, but it’s the exact opposite of it. Healthy skepticism costs you something every time you engage in it, because there are times that the boring official narrative is simply true. But if your skepticism turns everything into a conspiracy theory, you’re not really checking your beliefs anymore.

And I want to be clear about something: I haven’t forgotten what I learned. I still notice the same things you notice. What changed isn’t that I stopped seeing the pattern; it’s that I found the pieces that were missing from it, and once they’re in, the picture isn’t the one I was drawing.

People say you become who you hang around. Well, let’s look at your social circle: How much of it is composed of people you talk to every day online that you’ve never met? How many of them even know your name? You spend hours a day with people who are anonymous; that’s not a social life, it’s a group chat full of strangers that never ends.

Then there are the influencers you watch: you know their voices, their arguments, and what they allow you to see. Yet, they don’t know you and, frankly, don’t really care about you. You’re in a parasocial relationship with them. If you were arrested tomorrow for something you posted, they wouldn’t know. If something worse happened to you, they’d find out from somebody else’s post, and they’d make a post of their own. You would be their content for a day—if you ever came up at all.

Yet the people in your actual life—the ones who do know and care about you—you’ve been calling “normies” for years because they didn’t take the so-called red pill you think you have. You can’t relate to these people, truly, because they don’t “get it.”

I thought the same way. But the reality is, you actually took the blue pill, getting sucked into a matrix based on lies and conspiracies, led by false prophets who have led you away from the real world, which cost you your real life.

No one took your life from you. You gave it away by thinking you had somewhere more important to be, “in the fight to save your people” or to “expose Group X.” You had to go save the world online, while your real world was neglected.

Perhaps you feel persecuted for the path you’ve chosen. Perhaps you have been. This makes you feel like you’re on the right track, that you must be over the target. But are you? Says who? The cult leaders, the influencers, the echo chamber you’re in?

I’m a free speech guy, but an employer who doesn’t want you representing his business has the right to let you go. If you owned a business and found out one of your employees was publicly posting that your customers were subhuman, would you keep them around? Of course you wouldn’t.

So, if you’re in a conspiracy cult that continuously targets a certain group, and if an organization that was created to defend that group tells your boss what you’ve been saying and that it could hurt his business, they have a right to use their free speech to do it.

That isn’t the state coming for you. That’s a social norm being enforced, like they always have been.

Society has norms, and it enforces them. A lot of what you’re saying, and what I said for years, violates them. So unless you’re in a country where there are actual hate speech laws—which of course I disagree with—your free speech isn’t being taken from you. And even if it was, it doesn’t mean what you’re saying is true.

The irony is that inside the movement, anyone who holds to those norms, or who simply says an official narrative is true, gets called a cuck for it. This means you can’t revise a single position, no matter what you learn, without taking a status hit from people whose opinion is the only currency you have left. The point of this is to hold the cult together.

Most of the people telling you to “never back down” are anonymous. They can’t be fired over this. Nobody is going to call their family. Their kids, if they have any, aren’t going to hear about it at school. Yet they’re telling you to hold a line while standing nowhere near it. Or they’re multi-million-dollar e-celebrities that have enough money to shield themselves comfortably from cancel culture. You don’t. You’re the one with a name and a job, and you’re carrying all the weight they aren’t.

Think about this: if you went quiet tomorrow—just stopped posting, kept your views to yourself—what would the movement lose? No argument is refuted. No ground is given up. Nobody even notices. You’ll notice you’re just another cog in the machine. Even when big influencers die, it keeps going without them.

So the fury that comes from these “friends” of yours can’t be about damage, because there isn’t any. It’s about the demonstration. If you leave, everyone can see that leaving is an option, so they have to shame you to keep you in your place.

Think for a second about whose disapproval you’re actually concerned about. Faceless accounts will call you names. A few will announce they never trusted you anyway.

Who cares?

Who are they, anyway? You don’t know their faces, what they do for a living, or whether the account is even a real person. You’ve been letting strangers in cyberspace make decisions about your real life, keeping you in check, all while in the real world, you have a job and a family and a street you live on, where none of them matter.

You must realize they’re not your friends. They’re not going to make your life better. What they want is you to stay in line and hold the cult together so that everyone inside can keep drawing comfort off it.

I know that’s hard to hear, because the praise and the support do make you feel special. But there’s nothing special about living according to lies that can’t stand even the slightest scrutiny.

Logic doesn’t give us the truth; it only tells us if our argument is valid, which is why I don’t think you’re stupid, and I haven’t been attacking people for what they believe. The smartest people can believe the dumbest things, so long as the conclusion follows from the premises.

But I know all your movement’s arguments, and I held them longer and harder than most.

If you realize what I’m saying is true, that you’re wasting your life, here’s the good news.

If you’re an anon, you don’t have to apologize to anybody. I was a public figure who promoted things that I now know are false. Nobody made me apologize, and nobody could have. I did because it’s in my nature to correct myself, and as a public figure, I’m obligated to correct the record for people who follow me. I apologized for my behavior and rhetoric because it was embarrassing and unhinged.

I also offended all kinds of people throughout these years, I betrayed my country, and I even hurt my family. So I actually owed a lot of people an apology, and it didn’t hurt to give it. In fact, I felt great doing it. I texted my entire family with one. Everyone was happy to see it.

There’s no shame or humiliation in doing the right thing, like the cult convinces you there is.

I never did this for money or for fame. I was a true believer, and true believers will tell the truth, even if it makes them look stupid, turns people against them, or means admitting they wasted a lot of their life. A grifter does the exact opposite.

So if you’re anonymous, understand what that means: you can leave today, and not one person will ever know you were there.

If you’re public, it costs more, but it’s still only one sentence: “I was wrong, and I apologize.” Sure, some people won’t forgive you, but the ones whose opinion was ever worth having will. Either way it’s not your problem. You’re not there to make people like you or even believe you. You’re there to make things right. That’s not submission. That’s humility. That’s being human.

Your movement has no doubt given you one thing: a sense of belonging—with people you’ve never met, who don’t know your name, led by e-celebrities who wouldn’t notice if you disappeared. But everything else is a loss: the friends and family, the job, and the person you used to be before you got “red-pilled.”

You’re allowed to want a life back; an ordinary life, and join the rest of humanity, where the people around you know your name and would notice if you were gone.

It’s still there. The only thing standing between you and it, is being willing to accept that maybe you’re wrong, and you should go check your beliefs again to make sure.

I’ve been wrong, yet I’m still here, and my life has improved drastically. None of these online people matter to me because I stopped letting them matter. You can too.

The real world is complicated, with a lot of moving parts, and the conspiracy cult took me out of it—made me feel hopeless, black-pilled, with no way forward except fantasies that solve nothing and get people hurt.

I know the same has happened to you. Your life is just another one lost to it. But I know you can get yours back, just as I got mine.

Think about everything I said here honestly and deeply.

I hope you take my advice and change your life.

I officially walked away from antisemitism in February, after fourteen years as one of the more prominent antisemites on the internet. I’ve spent the last several months correcting the record—debunking the beliefs I used to hold in hopes that others realize the truth. I’ve also spent a lot of time talking with Jewish people: rabbis, Zionists, and people across the whole range of opinion. What’s in this letter came out of those conversations.

I’m writing to you because your organizations know who I am. I was on your lists, my words and actions were documented, and I was labeled accordingly. You used your freedom of speech to counter my freedom of speech. That’s fair. You also used your influence to reduce access to finances and reduce my reach on certain platforms. That’s within your rights too; you can ask others to boycott me.

So, why would I want to help you fight antisemitism now?

I want to help because I’ve seen what it does. It hurts Jewish people, and it also cost me fourteen years of my life, hurting friends and family I cared about. I also care about what’s true, and many of the things I believed weren’t. The claims I defended fell apart when I actually went back to check. I’ve seen the inside of these belief systems in a way your analysts can’t. So let me talk about my experience and what may have prevented it from ever happening.

My journey into antisemitism started in 2012. I was a young veteran trying to make sense of my world, learning everything I could after feeling betrayed by my government. This led me into the world of conspiracy theories, which inevitably led to antisemitic ones, and to reading Mein Kampf along with dozens of other such texts. I repeated things I found persuasive, and I said them in public. Nobody had ever walked me through why any of it was false.

It was when I went public that I started getting called names, being labeled, and put on lists. Here’s what labels tell someone in that position. They don’t say, “This is false.” They say, “This is forbidden!” And “forbidden” implies there’s something there to hide. Instead of an answer, I got confirmation—not that I was wrong, but that I was over the target.

And it wasn’t only the label. It was what the label produced—the lost income, the lost reach. That’s the moment the door shut, and that’s when I became a true believer.

I’ll tell you honestly: after that, nothing you could’ve done would’ve worked. Every sanction was a credential. Every list was proof. If I was lying, why was anyone bothering to silence me? I used that argument myself. In fact, it’s the same argument extremists have always used. It’s the kind of argument that recruits people, because it’s a hard argument to answer when the only reply is more enforcement.

So, there were two windows. In the first one, I was reachable, and information probably would have worked. In the second, nothing would have. The label arrived in the first window—the one where it does the most damage and achieves the least.

Had someone in 2012 said, “What you’re repeating is an antisemitic trope; here is the specific material on where it comes from and why it’s false,” I may never have become extreme at all. I can’t prove that. But I know what the alternative produced, because I lived in it for fourteen years.

What I’d most like you to consider, because it’s about effectiveness rather than fairness: when you take down a prominent antisemite, you remove a supplier, but you don’t remove the demand. The antisemite, when debanked, deplatformed, doxxed, or fired, is seen as a martyr, reinforcing the belief that Jews run everything. The antisemite, now with “street credit,” comes back stronger. But even if he does quit, within a week there’s another to replace him, and the audience is still there. If enforcement were reducing the belief, the replacements wouldn’t find anyone waiting. Yet they always do. That replacement rate is the clearest evidence that the strategy isn’t achieving its goal.

Most of the people who were funding and supporting me were anonymous followers. They weren’t the people saying things out loud. Your enforcement is calibrated to stop those who are seen and heard. But the loud ones are the symptom: the money and the belief sit with people who have never said a word in public and never will. This is who your methods cannot reach, by design, because the whole point of those methods is to make people stop talking.

Every claim that can’t be said without destruction is a claim that goes unanswered in public. The question doesn’t disappear; it just stops being asked where you can hear it. And then the only people still answering it are antisemites, because they’re the only ones willing to engage with it at all. So, who do you think will win the person over? The antisemites, because they’re the only ones willing to have the conversation and answer the person’s questions.

This is why debunking is crucial.

You have the documents, the researchers, the actual answers to the specific claims that recruit people. I don’t know why they aren’t used in the one exchange where you’d have the better material, but when they aren’t, the argument goes to people who can’t win it on the merits.

I’d also ask you to look at your own numbers. The ADL’s 2025 Audit recorded 6,274 incidents, down a third from the year before. Campus incidents fell by two-thirds. Meanwhile assaults rose—assaults involving a deadly weapon went from 23 to 32—and the J7 task force, which the ADL co-founded, called 2025 the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks in the diaspora in over thirty years.

One year proves nothing by itself. But what would you expect those numbers to look like if a strategy were suppressing public expression without touching private belief?

One of the many reasons I stepped away is that I watched the JQ movement stop caring whether a claim was true—only whether it hurt Jews or Israel—and the tent kept getting bigger to make room for anyone who’d repeat it. The conspiracy theory claiming Israel killed Charlie Kirk was the icing on the cake.

There’s also the rise in violence against Jews. I was never violent, and I always condemned violence. But I called Jews demons, rats, and parasites. Once you’ve convinced someone that a group isn’t human, condemning violence doesn’t count for much—somebody can decide to act on what you told them. I didn’t want to be part of that. I knew I took my speech and theatrics too far, and part of why I’m doing all this now is to make things right. But my good intentions aren’t enough to make a difference on their own; information in this information war is the only thing that will.

In my experience, going after only public figures doesn’t tackle antisemitism at its roots. Antisemitic beliefs have to be confronted early, when someone has just picked them up and they haven’t crystallized yet. I don’t think censorship or other means of control can do that, especially because they feed into stereotypes about Jewish power.

And there’s what this does to the words themselves. If everything offensive is antisemitism, then nothing is; and if everyone is an antisemite, then nobody is. Even Kenneth Stern, who drafted the definition the IHRA version is built on, has objected to it being used to police speech. When a label lands on someone who repeated something they didn’t understand, it stops being a warning and becomes an opinion, and it’s worth nothing on the day somebody actually dangerous comes along.

And then there’s what it does to the person. Suddenly they’re outed, and their life is destroyed. When they look for the cause, they find out a Jewish organization contacted their employer. They’ve been told that Jews have the power to destroy people’s lives, and then they experience it. Now, it’s no longer a conspiracy theory to them. The antisemites say, “See, we told you.” The person who wasn’t an antisemite before becomes one.

That’s not two sides. That’s one chain, and it has a link in it that’s under your control. This outcome can be avoided by a simple method: separate the claim from the person, and deal with the claim first.

“This person is repeating an antisemitic trope, and here’s the material on why it’s false” is a statement about a claim. It can be checked, and it gives the person an off-ramp. If they read it and stop, you were right, and you got the outcome your organizations exist to produce.

Notice I said “stops,” not “apologizes.” A forced apology is a demonstration of power over a person, and to someone who already believes you hold that power over people’s lives, it’s proof rather than correction. In my experience, a person who actually changes their mind apologizes on their own. But even if they don’t, the problem is still solved. The most important thing is that the behavior stops.

“This person is a vicious antisemite” is a statement about who someone is. There’s nothing to do with it except accept it or fight it, and someone who doesn’t believe it about themselves will fight it, which means walking straight toward the people who told them this would happen.

I’m not asking you to abandon naming someone an antisemite but to use it only when there’s no choice. If you supply the material first and the person reads it and keeps going, you now have a case nobody can answer: “We gave them the documents, and they continued.” That’s a far stronger public position than a label applied cold, and you get it by waiting rather than by giving anything up.

I’m also aware that each of your organizations has a limited capacity, and not every person is reachable. Some antisemites know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care, and your organizations have every right to act accordingly.

I was a true believer who didn’t wake up until I saw the fallacies of my own beliefs. A Jewish man named Jake Turx reached out to have coffee. He and I talked man to man. I could bring up any lingering belief I had, no matter how taboo, and he challenged it—kindly, and with the information I lacked. Meeting a Jew like him showed me that walking away had been the right call.

That’s all I’m asking for, and one man did it over a cup of coffee. He went after the claim and left the person alone.

Nobody tried anything like this in 2012, when it would have cost one conversation. The one time it was tried, it worked. Unfortunately, it happened fourteen years later than it needed to.

I want to say something about Canary Mission specifically.

After I left, they asked if I’d like to write a piece for them explaining what changed. I did (here).They read it and published it, and they took me off their list. They decided that a listing shouldn’t be permanent and that a man who had changed should be able to show it. That took one person reading one document and making a call. Many antisemites believe there’s no way back once their lives are ruined. Many Jews believe an antisemite never really changes. That’s the same belief from two directions, and the olive branch is what disproves it both ways. This is what I meant in February when I talked about building bridges between communities.

I’m not telling you how to run your organizations. I’m here to help the people fighting antisemitism understand how antisemites think, while also showing other people why your organizations do what they do.

The best way to reduce antisemitism, in my view, is also the way that stops creating more antisemites out of people who are misguided by misinformation and conspiracy theories. That’s how all of our communities become better informed and safer.

But that kind of safety seems to be at risk. In a country built on free speech, lists, doxxing, debanking, deplatforming, and pressure on employers feel like Soviet Russia. To a people who were hunted within living memory, dehumanization, claims of deportation, violence, and in worse cases calls for extermination feel like Nazi Germany.

Obviously, these are not the same thing: losing your livelihood isn’t anything like being killed. But both sides are hearing the other through the worst thing that ever happened to them, and each time that happens, the other side gets more certain it was right.

I hope you take my advice seriously, and that it shapes how you fight antisemitism from here—more toward prevention than reaction.

If any of this is useful, I’m happy to talk further.

Sincerely,

Lucas Gage

I’ve been going back through my old beliefs one at a time and checking them. This article is about debunking the belief I held that Israel killed JFK and RFK.

For this I had to go back to the documentary that convinced me: Laurent Guyénot’s Israel and the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers, which covered the deaths of JFK, RFK, and JFK Jr.

I found it very convincing at the time. I promoted it by uploading it on my Rumble channel so my audience could watch it too.

Later, when experimenting with AI music, I wrote a rap song titled “Kennedy Killers,” which was based on notes I took while watching Guyénot’s documentary.

I’m going to post the verses but leave out the chorus, because there’s nothing in it to check; it’s four lines of assertion about Jews and lies, and it makes no claim anybody could test. The verses are where the actual conspiracy claims live, and these are the claims that can be checked.

Every claim in those verses came straight out of his documentary, so debunking my own lyrics is debunking his film.

The first half of verse one:

The international clique of the sick and wicked,

The Dallas Citizens Council are the ones who did this.

Once done, the Jews made the moves and bore false witness,

And created the cover story with their Warren Commission.

They blamed it on Lee Harvey who was not the mastermind,

He was shot and killed by the Jew Jack Rubenstein.

Some jews even tried to blame the Cubans for this crime,

But the truth lies behind what made Ben Gurion resign.

“Their Warren Commission”

The Warren Commission had seven members: Earl Warren, Richard Russell, John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs, Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and John J. McCloy.

It turns out that none of them were Jewish. That’s seven names I could’ve looked up in two minutes; and I never did it once, because the song wasn’t written to find anything out.

“The Jew Jack Rubenstein”

Jack Ruby was born Jacob Rubenstein, and he was Jewish. He was a Dallas strip club owner with organized crime connections who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in a police basement in front of television cameras. But nobody has ever demonstrated a Mossad link ever since.

The fact that he was Jewish is a fact about Jack Ruby; it’s not a fact about the assassination. I used his birth name because “Rubenstein” sounded more Jewish than “Ruby” to make the point that he was a Jew and therefore must have been tied to a Jewish conspiracy.

“Some Jews even tried to blame the Cubans”

Look at that line. There’s no name in it.

Which Jews tried to blame the Cubans? I never said it, because I didn’t know, because there was nobody in particular. I just assumed that any excuse other than “the Jews” was a cover-up by “the Jews.” The line exists so the stanza has four bars.

That’s not an accident; it’s what a claim looks like when it was never meant to be examined. I had a whole category of theory about Cuba, which plenty of serious people have argued for real reasons, and I assigned it to “some Jews” and moved on.

“What made Ben Gurion resign”

JFK really did pressure Ben Gurion over Dimona. That’s not a conspiracy claim; it’s declassified diplomatic history. In 1963, he demanded regular American inspections and warned that the American “commitment to and support of Israel” could be “seriously jeopardized” without them. You can read the correspondence at the National Security Archive.

And it’s true that Ben-Gurion announced his resignation on 16 June 1963, the same day JFK’s letter was due to be delivered. So it seems like JFK’s pressure caused him to resign. The thing is, it never was delivered. Ben-Gurion cited “personal reasons” and told his own Cabinet the reasons were “my own, and I am keeping them to myself.” It surprised his own party.

That is a real coincidence, and it’s why this claim is convincing.

But for JFK’s pressure to have caused the resignation, Ben-Gurion had to have quit over a letter he never read. Either he somehow knew what was in it and resigned to get out from under it—which nobody has ever shown—or two things happened on the same day.

And resigning was something he did before. He’d quit once already, in January 1961, over the Lavon Affair, and came back after the election. A man with a history of resigning—resigned again.

Whatever made him quit in June 1963, the inspections he was supposedly escaping went ahead without him.

Now for the second half of verse one:

A jew named Oliver Stone put out the movie J.F.K,

Produced by the jew Arnon Milchan to blame the C.I.A.

The Jew who filmed Kennedy getting his head blown off that day,

Was Abraham Zapruder who sold it for one hundred and fifty k.

The magic bullet theory was physically impossible,

It’s why LBJ had Kennedy’s body stolen from the hospital.

It was created by jew Arlen Spectre and spread like gospel,

To cover up the fact that there were multiple hostiles.

“A Jew named Oliver Stone”

Although Oliver Stone’s father was Jewish, his mother was Roman Catholic, and both were non-practicing. Stone was raised in the Episcopal Church. His family’s name was Silverstein, but they changed it to Stone in the 1920s because of antisemitism.

So what’s the claim here? That Stone made JFK because he knew Israel actually killed JFK, so the entire purpose of the film was to cover up this conspiracy for the Jews.

“Produced by the Jew Arnon Milchan to blame the C.I.A.”

This one I got right and wrong.

It’s true that Arnon Milchan is Jewish, and he was an Israeli intelligence operative. His work as a spy reportedly ended in the mid-1980s. He admitted it himself on Israeli television in 2013 that he worked for Lekem from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and his work included buying components for Israel’s nuclear program. In 1985, a man named Richard Kelly Smyth was indicted over illegal krytron shipments routed through one of Milchan’s companies.

What I got wrong is the one word the whole line depends on.

JFK came out in 1991, and Milchan didn’t produce it. He has no credited role in the film at all. Oliver Stone directed it, Stone and Zachary Sklar wrote it, and the producers were A. Kitman Ho and Stone himself. Milchan helped finance it—Stone went looking for money, and Milchan made a deal with Warner Bros. to put up the budget because he was eager to launch his new company, Regency Enterprises.

So he wrote the check; he didn’t write the film.

The claim is that Milchan’s role, because he was an Israeli spy, was to direct the blame at the CIA to keep the heat off of the Mossad. It’s a real argument, and it’s why the claim held up for me. But there are three problems with it:

1. He had no hand in what the movie says. Redirecting the blame requires control over the content, and the man with that control wrote it, directed it, and produced it.

2. Stone came to Milchan, not the other way around.

3. The film’s thesis wasn’t anybody’s to redirect. JFK is adapted from Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins and Jim Marrs’s Crossfire. The CIA-and-anti-Castro-Cubans theory is Garrison’s, and Garrison wasn’t writing it; he was a New Orleans district attorney who prosecuted a man over it in open court in 1969. Twenty-two years before the film, and before Milchan was in the movie business at all.

And here’s where it comes back on my lyrics: Garrison is also where the Dal-Tex claim comes from. He named that building as a probable sniper position in 1967. So two of the lines I wrote trace back to the same Louisiana prosecutor, and his theory was in a book and a court record decades before Israeli money touched any of it.

You can’t redirect attention toward a theory somebody else already published and took to trial.

Now let’s look at what the film actually did.

In October 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. It forced the National Archives to build the JFK Records Collection and created a review board with the power to compel disclosure. The review board itself partially credited the film’s conclusions with getting the Act passed.

Millions of pages have come out since. 99% of the collection was public by June 2023. Another 77,100 pages came out in March 2025.

So, ironically, the two Jews I named in that verse helped bring about the largest forced opening of the archives in the history of the case. If you’re protecting something in those files, that’s the last thing you’d want to happen.

And after thirty years of those releases, nothing has pointed at Israel. Which leaves two options: either the operation failed so completely that it exposed everything it was built to hide, or there was nothing in there to hide.

But the real problem is that the claim can’t lose. If the movie had blamed Israel, that proves Israel did it. It blamed the CIA, so that proves Israel redirected. If no movie had been made at all, that proves suppression. Every outcome confirms the theory, because its unfalsifiable.

“Was Abraham Zapruder who sold it for one hundred and fifty k”

What I didn’t know until doing research for this article is that at least thirty-two people are known to have filmed or photographed in Dealey Plaza that day, and nobody has ever found it suspicious that any of them were there with a camera, because nobody went looking for them.

I noticed the one who was Jewish, because that’s what “noticers” do.

And it gets worse for the theory: Zapruder didn’t plan to film the motorcade. He’d thought about seeing it downtown and skipped it because of the rain. He showed up to work that morning without his camera. His assistant, a woman named Lillian Rogers, told him the weather had cleared and pushed him to go home and get it.

He’d been an amateur filmmaker for over thirty years. It was his hobby. He owned a good camera, and a presidential motorcade was going past his office window.

And then there’s what he did afterward, which I left out of my song.

He gave the film to the Secret Service the same day, on the condition that it only be used for the investigation. When Life Magazine bought the rights for $150,000, he gave $25,000 of it to the widow of Officer J. D. Tippit, the Dallas policeman shot that afternoon. And he asked that the amount he’d been paid never be made public.

I put the $150,000 in the song, but I left out the generous donation he gave to Tippit’s wife, because I had no idea until now.

“It’s why LBJ had Kennedy’s body stolen from the hospital”

Something real happened at Parkland, and the man it happened to is the reason I can’t use it.

Texas law required an autopsy in the county where a death occurred. Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County medical examiner, said so at the time and tried to stop the body from leaving. There was a heated argument, and JFK’s aides physically shoved Rose and a policeman out of the doorway to get the casket through. Rose said afterward, plainly, “The law was broken,” and that a Texas autopsy “would have assured a tight chain of custody on all the evidence.”

So the irregularity is real. I wasn’t making that up.

Here’s what I didn’t know: Earl Rose rejected the idea of a conspiracy. He accepted the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a lone gunman shot JFK. In 2003, he said that a lot of the conspiracy theories would never have gotten started if he’d been allowed to do his job.

And nobody told me the body was taken because Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t leave Dallas without her husband. That was the reason given in the room. There’s nothing tying Lyndon Johnson to that decision, and yet I put his name in a song.

“Created by Jew Arlen Spectre” / “multiple hostiles”

Specter was indeed Jewish; he was on the staff, and he did develop the single-bullet theory.

“Physically impossible” is where I overreached. It was called the “magic bullet theory” because there were critics who thought it preposterous that a bullet could enter and exit several people yet remain in near-pristine shape. However, the theory has been tested and reconstructed many times over sixty years, and the people who’ve done the work don’t agree with those who doubt it. I find it hard to believe, but I can’t say it’s impossible, because I never did a single piece of work that would let me say that.

But the real load in that stanza is “multiple hostiles,” which implies there were many shooters that day. There is evidence that gives people the idea this was the case: the JFK dictabelt—a police radio recording. The House Select Committee on Assassinations used it in 1978 to conclude there was a “high probability” of conspiracy, with a shot from the grassy knoll. Four of its twelve members dissented from that finding at the time.

Then in 1982, the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel, and it found unanimously that the acoustic analysis did not support a knoll shot. And it found something I’d never heard about that recording: the impulses everyone was calling gunshots were recorded about one minute after the President was shot—after the motorcade had already been told to head for the hospital.

Here’s the first half of verse two:

They found a sniper nest in Zapruder’s Dal Text H.Q.

There’s no chance all this just randomly leads back to Jews,

This was a Mossad job to kill a US President that refused,

To let Israel have nuclear powers that they would abuse.

Kennedy also sided with the Palestinians and their plight,

He was supportive of Nasser who also put up a fight,

The point is, all Kennedy wanted to do was make things right,

But the jews couldn’t risk it and exercised their might.

“A sniper nest in Zapruder’s Dal Text H.Q.”

I have never found any evidence that a sniper nest was found in the Dal-Tex Building. However, Zapruder’s office was in the Dal-Tex Building, on the fourth floor. So in my own song, the same building is both the sniper’s nest and the office of the cameraman—who, in my version, is in on it.

“This was a Mossad job to kill a US President that refused, to let Israel have nuclear powers”

The problem with this line is that inspections continued after JFK’s assassination.

Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agreed in principle in August 1963, before JFK was killed that November. American inspections of Dimona ran annually from 1964 to 1969—six of them total—and stopped only when Nixon ended the practice.

So the thing Israel supposedly murdered an American president to prevent began two months after he died and continued for six years.

“Kennedy also sided with the Palestinians” / “supportive of Nasser”

This one is more or less right.

JFK did pursue a rapprochement with Nasser. They exchanged five letters in his first months in office alone, and he extended food aid to Egypt over objections at home. He also backed the Johnson Plan—an American proposal on Palestinian refugees that Israel disliked and that went nowhere.

So JFK’s Middle East policy really was less automatically aligned with Israel than what came after. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s the historical record, and you can read the correspondence at the JFK Library.

I want to point at this stanza because it’s the only place in the whole song where I was describing policy instead of listing names. And it’s the only part that survives.

The last half of verse two:

These are the real reasons JFK was killed,

It had nothing to do with ending the Fed or silver dollar bills.

It had everything to do with him refusing to break his will,

And this caused the jews to kill our president with their shills.

And just to be safe, they had to kill RFK ,

Because they knew he didn’t believe what happened on that day.

And if he became president he would have found out their play,

So they hired Eugene Thane Cesar to make him go away.

“It had nothing to do with ending the Fed or silver dollar bills”

The irony of this line is that it actually rejects a well-known conspiracy theory, that JFK was assassinated by “The Bankers” because Executive Order 11110 would have undermined the Federal Reserve. Well it couldn’t, and it didn’t.

“So they hired Eugene Thane Cesar to make him go away”

The funny fact about this stanza: I got the order of his three names wrong, but I was unable to edit the lyrics after the AI rendered it as a track.

Some people believe that Thane Eugene Cesar killed RFK, including his son, RFK Jr.

The Pruszynski tape from the Ambassador Hotel pantry, the only recording made in the room where RFK was shot, by freelance journalist named Stanislaw Pruszynski. A man named Philip Van Praag analyzed it for a Discovery documentary and said there were around thirteen shot sounds—more than Sirhan’s eight-round revolver could hold.

Everybody else who examined it disagreed. Philip Harrison and Professor Peter French in the UK: no more than eight. Steve Barber, Chad Zimmerman and Michael O’Dell in the US: no more than eight. Robert Berkovitz: eight impulse events.

Van Praag never produced a written report or a peer-reviewed publication. His estimate of where Pruszynski was standing depended on syncing a “thump” with news footage, and other analysts couldn’t find that thump on the tape at all.

So “the audio proves there were more shooters” was one analysis in each case, each rejected by the other analysts.

But Guyénot repeats the claim of 13 shots, and says Cesar sold his gun quickly to get rid of the murder weapon, implying he was the one who actually killed RFK.

However, the record shows that on the night of the shooting, Cesar was carrying a Rohm .38, by his own account, not a .22. He owned a .22 Harrington & Richardson separately, and on 24 June 1968, eighteen days after the assassination, he showed that weapon to an LAPD sergeant named P. E. O’Steen, voluntarily. He sold it to a man named Jim Yoder on 6 September 1968, three months after the shooting.

So it wasn’t the gun he had that night, and he handed it to a police officer two and a half weeks after the killing.

Now the part that’s real: in a 1971 interview Cesar told the LAPD he’d sold the pistol before the assassination. That’s false. The researcher William Turner, who thought there was a conspiracy, tracked Yoder down in 1972 and found the receipt—dated, with Cesar’s signature on it.

So Cesar lied about the date. Turner was on the conspiracy side, looking to build the case. The same receipt that shows Cesar lied is the receipt that shows the gun wasn’t disposed of quickly.

Then there’s Dan Moldea. Moldea spent years investigating this and Cesar was his prime suspect. He said that if the test came back bad he’d spend every waking hour bringing him down. He arranged a polygraph, which Cesar passed—on not firing a weapon that night and on not being part of any plan. A second examiner blind-scored the charts and got the same result. Moldea’s conclusion was that Cesar “proved to be an innocent man who since 1969 has been wrongly accused.”

And this is where I have to be honest about my own standards, because I used to cite Sirhan’s polygraph as proof he was telling the truth about not remembering.

Cesar passed one too.

If a polygraph is good enough to believe Sirhan, it’s good enough to believe Cesar. If it isn’t good enough for Cesar, then it was never good enough for Sirhan. I was leaning in one direction, and I’d never noticed, because “noticers” rarely check whether their standards point both ways.

Now let’s step back and look at the whole track, and notice the line I put in the middle of verse two, because that line is the song telling you its own method:

There’s no chance all this just randomly leads back to Jews

That’s the entire argument. That’s what many antisemitic conspiracy theories basically boil down to: name Jews, and that’s all you need.

The Dallas Citizens Council had prominent Jewish members. Arlen Specter was Jewish. Jack Ruby was Jewish. Abraham Zapruder was Jewish. Arnon Milchan is Jewish. Oliver Stone is Jewish. Junius Myer Schine’s (Jewish) family owned the Ambassador from the day it opened in 1921 until 1971. The Academy Awards were held there six times. The Coconut Grove was in it. Presidents stayed there.

A family owned a famous hotel for half a century, and a man was shot in it, and I put that in the column marked evidence, just because the family who owned it was Jewish.

If RFK had given his victory speech in a different building that night, the owner of that building goes in the song instead, but only if he were a Jew, otherwise it wouldn’t count.

Here’s the test, and you don’t have to trust me to run it. Pick any group you like, in advance. Then go through the same event and list everyone in it who belongs to that group. You will find them, because they’re there—people are near things. Then build your documentary.

If the method works on any group you choose before you start looking, it isn’t finding anything. It’s just confirming what you picked.

What’s interesting is how my belief in the Dancing Israelis strengthened my belief that Zapruder knew about the JFK assassination in advance. Two events, where Jews just happened to be there to record the events. It feels like a pattern.

But it’s only a pattern because you have to ignore everyone else taking video or pictures on those days, decades apart. Nobody counts the tragedies with no Jewish cameraman at all. You never see the denominator, so the pattern looks like design when it’s just what’s left after you’ve discarded everything that didn’t fit.

One thing does not dissolve, and I’m not going to pretend it does: Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy found that the shot that killed RFK entered behind his right ear from about an inch to an inch and a half away, with powder burns. Witnesses had Sirhan in front of him and several feet off. That’s a real forensic problem that nobody has resolved in fifty-eight years.

I still don’t know what to think about the official narrative of the RFK assassination. I think something about it is off.

Perhaps Cesar fired back at Sirhan and accidentally killed RFK. Or maybe RFK Jr. is right: Cesar was in on it. Either way, there hasn’t been anything that links this assassination to Israel.

An unexplained wound is an unexplained wound; it’s not a perpetrator.

Ultimately, every reason I had for blaming Israel or “the Jews”—the names, the proximities, the coincidence of a resignation, a producer’s background, a man with a camera, a family that owned a hotel—fell apart when I looked at it. Only the forensic question survived.

When I was completely blinded by antisemitism, I wrote a song that was sure of its premises and conclusions, only for it to fall apart checking it against reality, as has been the case with every other antisemitic conspiracy theory I have reexamined since.

During my 20 years in conspiracy circles—14 of them in the JQ movement—I’ve met or talked to virtually every leader or influencer in it. It became clear to me that some of them are true believers, while others are opportunists and, in worse cases, bad actors. I’ve also noticed many of these movements become cult-like, with cult leaders who promise everything but provide nothing tangible. But what I want to focus on here isn’t the people, but rather the relationship between them and the people who follow them.

A cult leader needs an audience that never checks his claims or challenges his authority. The member needs somebody who can give him comfort, meaning, and certainty in our harsh and uncertain world. Each one hands the other exactly what he needs, and that’s why neither of them can afford to let it end.

That is the foundation of the relationship, not truth.

We’ll start with the leaders.

Notice how they never correct themselves. Not about a prediction, not about a source, not about somebody they destroyed who turned out to be innocent. Think about what that implies: they’re selling their audience that they’re infallible. But you and I both know that no human is perfect, so how is it possible that the men at the top are never wrong?

Because they have to pretend to be right no matter what.

It’s all an act, and the business can’t survive without it. The second one of them admits he got something wrong, he’s told his audience that checking is allowed.

How many conspiracy cult leaders claimed the world would end in 2012? How about humanity will be depopulated by 90%? Whatever happened to the FEMA camp coffins? Weren’t we supposed to “Eat the bugs and live in the pod”? There was a man who said billions would die from the COVID jabs by 2025—why haven’t they?

None of it happened because none of it was true.

Did one of these people who sold these narratives ever come back and say, “I got that wrong”? Or did they move straight to the next one while everybody forgot the last one?

The newest cult formed is the Charlie Kirk conspiracy cult led by Candace Owens. She’s the perfect example of a cult leader who keeps getting it wrong and never loses a follower for it. Wrong about Brigitte Macron, which got her sued. Wrong about the Egyptian planes, which the flight logs disproved. And she’s gone from the bullet that killed Charlie not being a .30-06 to an exploding mic, and then back.

Has she retracted any of it?

A record nobody checks isn’t a record; it’s content. As long as these cult leaders keep pumping out new content, there will always be an audience to consume it.

Now look at how they make money: super chats, merch, memberships, meme coins, sponsorships—some of them going as far as casinos and shady supplement companies. Every single one of those depends on the audience staying angry, scared, and tuned in.

So if the truth ever hurt their income, which one do you think they’d pick?

Now let’s look at the members of their communities: they need answers, and they need certainty.

Human societies are messy and don’t always provide them cleanly. And it’s true that our institutions have lied, our governments have lied, and our leaders have lied. Conspiracies do happen. But the leaders of these cult movements make the world look as terrifying as possible, and then—what do you know—they just happen to be the ones with all the answers to make things better.

Once a follower believes this person is trustworthy and is being persecuted by the system because he has the truth, everything the cult leader needs has already been handed over. The member won’t check because checking puts the certainty at risk. He’ll accept that the leader is never wrong, because only somebody who’s never wrong can give him certainty. And he’ll defend him against outsiders, because an attack on the man is an attack on the ground he’s standing on.

Nobody has to coordinate any of this; both sides just do what the position requires. Both sides get what they need. The leader gets money and status. The member gets the feeling of being informed, the feeling of being in a resistance, and a room full of people who agree with him.

What he doesn’t get is a single thing that was advertised.

Ask any of the cult leaders running on a fringe what their plan is—you’ll get something vague that isn’t a plan. Ask how many people have to be “woken up” before anything improves—nobody can give you a number. That’s not a bug: a business doesn’t want its customers to graduate.

And what have they ever achieved? Another useless collab, another seminar, another “debate,” another “discovery” of a conspiracy that they never proved to anyone?

The worst kind of cults are these political movements based on conspiracy theories because they require political action in the world. They are the type that can inspire violence, riots, and assassinations, because people think they need to get in the streets and fight the government or take out certain figures. No one’s rioting about flat earth.

But these movements don’t capture the hearts and minds of the people, and there’s always a faction inside them reading the Turner Diaries and thinking we need a race war. I’ve seen these groups come and go because they’re not based in any practical solutions; it’s always unpragmatic and delusional idealism.

To illustrate how much of a failure these groups are: Imagine a toy factory that’s been running for 60 years and has never produced a single functional toy. Would anybody keep funding it? Yet these fringe movements still exist, and they’re still funded by the small base of people who fall into this kind of thinking.

Not only is this kind of thinking inapplicable to the United States to begin with, but look at who gets picked to carry it: drunks, drug addicts, gamblers, pornographers, scammers, criminals, and all-around degenerates getting boosted and treated like authorities. Our enemies figured out they can bypass the MSM entirely with social media and make these e-celebs to poison the minds of our citizens.

Take the clearest example. Scott Ritter served prison time for unlawful contact with a minor—a 2011 Pennsylvania conviction, a public record, and nobody disputes it. He’s been platformed nonstop ever since, including on Russian state media, and presented to audiences as a credible authority on war and intelligence.

It’s not an accident. A man with something behind him is easier to steer than a man without.

You don’t have to be a convicted hebephile to be a useful idiot for our enemies. I know how because I was used in the same way. There was a reason I ended up on Russia Today, on the front page of the Tehran Times, and on Press TV. My rants and my song didn’t go viral because of the MSM. They went viral because Russia, China, Qatar, and Iran love amplifying any American who helps us turn on each other.

I was a useful idiot, and I didn’t know it. A lot of the people getting boosted right now are in exactly that spot, knowingly or not. How many of them do you think will ever realize it? And if they do, how many would admit it?

Now look at what’s actually being sold: that these people are the resistance against a monolith that controls everything.

These are people whose main activity is drama with each other—feuds, callouts, response videos, and content. Does that look like a resistance or a business?

Does any government on earth really take them seriously? Are commentators with microphones the resistance to the best-armed militaries in history? Is a man streaming while he plays video games a threat to brute force? If anything, they will use them as boogeymen to advance their own agenda.

These fringe movements believe only extreme radical change can fix anything—a race war or accelerationist terrorism. And they push ideologies that are antithetical to America in every way, yet they claim to be pro-America.

A lot of them, especially in the JQ movement, are living in 1933. They talk like we’re in an interwar European capital where a few hundred men could take a government building and own a country by morning. They don’t account for Continuity of Government protocols, or a command post in the air that keeps running if Washington stops existing, or a succession list that goes through the whole cabinet, or surveillance infrastructure that didn’t exist in any form a century ago.

There’s no Capture the Flag. There’s no marching up to the White House and winning. The state isn’t a king you can depose; it’s a bureaucracy with backups. So the uniforms and the marching aren’t a strategy. It’s historical cosplay.

The more sophisticated grifters won’t sell this kind of LARP; they focus more on promoting the same failing ideas but without the uniforms. Despite their better optics, they’re still selling a fantasy that will never happen.

This is precisely how the model works, because a product that can’t be delivered never has to be. What actually moves things is boring—institutions, elections, budgets, laws, and courts—and it takes becoming a serious person, which is exactly what the fantasy saves everybody from having to do.

Ultimately, the e-celeb and the fan parasitize each other. None of them actually care about each other, only that the other delivers on the deal. If the e-celeb dies, the fan goes to the next one. If the fan dies, the e-celeb doesn’t even know his name.

It’s an online ecosystem of people feeding off each other for entertainment, comfort, and a sense of belonging—and only one side of it is getting paid.

I’ve been spending a lot of time going back and reviewing my previous beliefs, many of which were antisemitic and tied to conspiracy theories of Jewish world domination. Naturally, this leads the antisemite to conclude that I’ve been compromised in some way, whether through blackmail, selling out, or being threatened by the Mossad—all of which is just another conspiracy theory. They have to come up with some kind of theory, because the alternative is that the belief they’ve invested in has cracks in it.

I’ve seen critiques from the least sophisticated people in these circles to the most, and they all share the same underlying claim: that there’s something wrong with me. It’s impossible that I learned something new and that I’m being genuine. But I understand where they’re coming from: “How can he go back after ‘noticing’ everything he noticed? How could he forget all the dead kids he saw in Gaza? There’s no way!”

The thing my former allies fail to understand is that I still see the same exact patterns I’ve seen before, and I’ll never forget the kids who’ve been blown to pieces in Gaza. The difference is, I no longer see those things with a tunnel vision that makes the world black and white, that removes all nuance and lacks the important details and context. Those are the things that separate truth from fiction, and conspiracy theorists, especially grifters, simplify things to the point they become a fiction by eliminating all the various and messy factors that come with reality.

The most important part of my transition is this: none of my beliefs changed because of censorship, threats, or shaming. In fact, those three things strengthened my beliefs in antisemitic conspiracy theories, because it seemed like powerful Jews had something to hide, confirming that I was “over the target,” which is a self-sealing mechanism. What changed my mind was being shown all the cracks in each theory that were either filled in with lies or facts that were exaggerated to the extreme.

This is why the most effective way to debunk conspiracy theories is to provide people the details that the theories are missing. But the details only land if they come from someone the person can actually hear them from, and that turns out to be the harder problem.

And here’s the part I can’t do anything about: nothing I say about my own motives can settle it, because I’m the source in question. Anything I offer as evidence of sincerity is exactly what a bought man would offer, which makes my testimony about myself worthless to the person who needs convincing. The organizations fighting antisemitism have the same problem, and most of them don’t know it.

So what should we do to fight antisemitism? I’ve been asked this question by many Jewish people.

I’ve told them they need an army of influencers like Nick Matau—people educated enough to debunk antisemitism with the details, the statistics, and the historical facts that expose the cracks in these theories, so that people stop believing in them rather than being destroyed for believing them.

Nick works a regular job and has to find time after hours to debunk people on TikTok and YouTube, while the other side has bot farms, e-celebrities making millions pushing lies, and followers echoing their narratives because social media incentivizes all of it—no doubt supported by foreign actors. Billions of people are getting their education from that machine, and for the next generation it’s more influential than any newspaper.

Someone like Nick, who is doing extremely important work, shouldn’t be squeezing it in around a day job. He should be able to do it full-time. The same is true of Brandon Martinez, who was as antisemitic as I was, snapped out of it, and helped me do the same. He does serious work and has said he keeps other jobs to support himself, while the people pushing these narratives travel the world doing collaborations without a worry.

Notice that Nick and Brandon work for opposite reasons. Nick was never in it, which is exactly why an antisemite can’t dismiss him as self-interested. Brandon was in it as deep as I was, which means he can’t be dismissed as ignorant, and he knows which claims are load-bearing. Those are the two things that actually reach someone inside, and neither of the men doing it has anyone paying for it.

Right now all the money goes to organizations that identify people, catalogue them, pressure their employers, and publish reports on rising antisemitism. That approach has had decades and a great deal of money behind it, and there is still no evidence that it makes anyone stop believing.

And here’s the part the organizations are least likely to want to hear. If someone already believes Jews run the world, no appeal to Jewish victimhood can land: not the Holocaust, not the pogroms, not the expulsions. The frame has already classified Jews as powerful, and a powerful group claiming to be a victim doesn’t read as a victim. Worse, it reads as confirmation: “Look how the Jew uses it to stop you from criticizing him!” The suffering becomes another exhibit for the prosecution.

This isn’t unique to Jews either. Watch what happens when White Americans or Europeans raise concerns about demographic change or being disenfranchised by “anti-racist” policies. The answer comes back: “You’re the majority, you hold the institutions, and you don’t get to complain!” The grievance gets laughed at regardless of which parts of it are true. It’s the same exact mechanism. “The Jew” is replaced with “The White Man.”

Which is why the most effective messengers have to come from outside the group being accused.

This isn’t a PR trick; it’s the structure of verification. You don’t audit a company’s books with that company’s accountant, and you don’t settle a claim about a group by consulting only that group. If someone thinks “these people are lying,” then those people are the one set of witnesses whose testimony can’t be trusted.

This is also the answer to the problem I started with. My own account of my own motives can’t resolve anything, because I’m the person in question. What does resolve it is other people independently arriving at the same place, which is why the handful of people who’ve publicly said they think I’m sincere did more for my credibility than every interview I’ve given.

This is why having non-Jews debunk antisemitism isn’t optional. It’s the concept of social proof, where other people validate the facts about you, and it’s extremely important, because in order for someone to check the facts, they need to get them from a place outside of the source in question. If Jews are the only ones debunking antisemitism, the antisemite will see it as a cover-up: “Of course the Jews are going to defend the Jews!”

I’m not writing this as an outsider offering theory. I spent fourteen years producing the material that creates this problem. And here’s the part that should really hit hard: I had already heard Jews say exactly what Nick and Brandon have said, but it never reached me because I thought Jews were liars, so anything they said was discounted before I heard the end of the sentence. What got through came from non-Jews validating what Jews said, including people who had lied to me about Jews and whom I later caught lying about other things.

That’s social proof, and it works like star ratings on a product.

So what needs to happen to effectively fight antisemtism?

1. Debunkers specializing in specific topics and conspiracies need the backing to do it full-time.

2. Outreach to the people who aren’t actually antisemites yet. Most of the people repeating these lines picked them up secondhand and have never been given a reason to doubt them.

3. Safe and civil exchanges between people who can actually argue, aimed at the conspiracy theories themselves. That’s how you compete with the machine on the other side instead of handing it new martyrs. That means inviting the biggest names to talk about what they believe, in public, at length, without being shamed, blamed, or punished.

Since I left, a steady stream of people have reached out to talk, some out of curiosity, some to understand how someone gets out. That’s the bridge-building I said months ago I wanted to do, and it’s working better than I expected.

What I’m describing here is the same thing at scale, with institutional support behind it.

The alternative is the existing playbook, which has had decades and a great deal of money and has coincided with the problem getting worse. Keep running it, and nothing will change, because every person it crushes is a demonstration of the exact power the conspiracy says they have.

I’d rather be debunked than destroyed. That was true of me when I was at my worst, and I’m sure it’s true of everyone else that is still in these circles.

We in the West are in an information war. Not everyone wants the two sides to talk. Plenty of people on both ends say so out loud: the other side shouldn’t be debated; it should be destroyed. And the few who do try to talk get hit from both directions. The toll is high.

I left the movements I was in convinced that bridges have to be built and that it’s the only way forward. What I want to explain here is why almost nobody builds them.

It comes down to two mechanisms I wrote about a few weeks ago in The Seven Preconditions of Conspiracy Thinking—self-sealing and the echo chamber. That piece was about how a person gets into a conspiracy theory. This one is about what two of these mechanisms do to each other once they both exist and why the space between them is so expensive to occupy.

Suppose someone says, “The Jews did 9/11.” Someone reports it to an organization that tracks antisemitism. That organization gathers information and shares it with every other anti-hate organization. Together, they launch a campaign to destroy him—job, reputation, platform, whatever is reachable. The people who agreed with him watch the destruction and conclude that he was telling the truth, because, as the quote that’s always misattributed to Voltaire goes, “To know who rules over you, find out who you can’t criticize.” And people see what happened to him for saying what he did, concluding that’s the group that runs everything. Then more of them say it, louder, forming the echo chamber that confirms their claims.

Despite what you may believe, both sides of this issue are not being irrational. The people doing the destroying are responding to ideas that led to expulsions and mass murder. The people watching are responding to what they just saw happen to a man for speaking, which other historic figures, who did the previous expulsions and mass murders, claimed would happen.

The cycle doesn’t need anyone to be coordinating it, because each side’s response is exactly what the other side requires in order to keep this loop going.

This loop is created by what I call self-sealing: credibility gets assigned by conclusion rather than by source. Once that’s in place, there’s no longer any evidence that can count against the belief, because all the evidence arrives pre-interpreted.

The echo chamber is what guarantees the cycle keeps firing, and it does it by punishing anyone who tries to slow it down. Ironically, both sides are in self-sealed echo chambers, while they believe only the other is, creating this loop that actually depends on the other.

Say in one room that the man who just got caught saying something antisemitic is probably confused rather than evil, and you’ll be told you’re defending a Nazi. Say in the other room that a particular criticism isn’t antisemitism—that the claim is simply wrong rather than sinister—and you’ll be told you’re making excuses for people who want you dead. In both cases the response isn’t an argument but a reclassification. You stop being a member in good standing and become someone to be watched.

Most people would rather not deal with that, so they comply. Not out of cowardice, but out of arithmetic. Staying quiet costs nothing, whereas speaking up could cost them everything. The result is that the only voices left in each room are the ones producing exactly what the other room needs to hear. Each side’s loudest members manufacture the other side’s evidence, and the people who could have interrupted it have been quietly subdued.

I should be very clear about this, because “both sides are in self-sealed echo chambers” is one sentence away from “both sides are equally wrong,” and that isn’t what I’m arguing.

The triggers are not evidentially equal. One side is reacting to institutions that lied about matters of war and death—we invaded a country over weapons that weren’t there, and I was in it. The other is reacting to pogroms. The claims are not the same kind of claim. One asserts that a hidden group controls the world, which is a statement about reality that can in principle be checked. The other asserts that a stated idea is dangerous, which is a statement about speech and consequences.

The failure modes are nowhere near each other in scale. When the enforcement side gets it wrong, an innocent man loses his job and his name. When the conspiracy side gets it wrong at scale, you get the twentieth century. Regardless, the same mechanisms are at work, and they must be made known.

We must take this seriously and ask, what will this unchecked loop cost society in the next twenty years?

People who believe in conspiracy theories are not going to disappear. With the advent of the Internet, they’re now able to spread like wildfire overnight. In addition, a share of them are young, and they are going to end up in offices, in media, in staff jobs, or in government. If no conversation ever happens, then that cohort arrives in power with its beliefs fully sealed and never once seriously contested.

On the other side, the old guard watching them arrive will reach for the only tool it has practiced, which is destruction at scale. That is not a de-escalation. It’s war.

But the danger many people fail to see is that every anti-American, anti-West actor would love nothing more than to see those of us living in the West spend the next two decades destroying each other rather than finding ways to build bridges and counteract the psyops that created these divisions in the first place. That’s the gap our enemies want widened, because a wider gap does their work for them.

So why doesn’t anyone else want to build bridges?

For the grifter, it’s because there’s no money in it; for our enemies, it’s because it could unite us; and for the disheartened, it’s because they think it’s impossible.

I disagree that it’s impossible. In fact, I know it is possible, because the way I snapped out of all the psyops was because someone decided to walk on the bridge I created to find common ground, in hopes of healing wounds and preventing further damage from occurring.

But nobody walks onto a bridge for free, because it costs the same thing from either end. A Jewish man who says out loud that some guy’s question was ignorant rather than evil pays what I pay for saying a claim about Jews is false. Both of us get told we’re helping the enemy. That’s the toll, and the bridge doesn’t get built by anyone unwilling to pay it.

The only way a bridge can be made and crossed is if we all step out of our self-sealing echo chambers and take heat from the disbelievers for doing so and risk the possibility of failure. But if we don’t try to build bridges properly, then we can only blame ourselves when things continue to get much worse as the gap widens further and further, until no bridge could be built at all.

If you’re actually a truth seeker, then finding out you’re wrong is part of the process, and it’s a good thing. It means you just discovered that you didn’t have the truth and can now move closer to finding it.

But almost nobody sees it this way.

People feel stupid when they find out they’re wrong, especially when they’ve been duped. Underneath that feeling is another that pains their ego: they feel that they were wrong, rather than that the belief was wrong.

Notice that this isn’t always the case with every belief; it’s in specific cases.

A person who holds a belief can turn it over, argue the other side, and let it go if it doesn’t add up, without any defense mechanisms getting in the way. A person who is held by a belief defends it the way he’d defend himself, as if insulted by someone.

The longer you’ve held a belief, the more likely it’s the second one.

People are reluctant to double-check their beliefs at all, and they’re most reluctant exactly where it matters most—where they’ve invested the most time, money, and emotion. If you’ve held something for decades and then learn it was false, that isn’t a correction; that’s a massive paradigm shift. And if you built your life on it, it’s going to hurt—a lot.

Which brings up why people don’t change their minds so easily.

Denial is free. Correction is expensive.

Denying something requires nothing. You wave it off, you don’t look into it, you go on with your day, and your life stays exactly as it was. But to correct yourself, you have to change how you think, how you act, and how you deal with the people around you. You might have to leave a social circle or a job or have to go back to people who trusted you and tell them you were wrong about something you told them with total confidence.

When someone is held by a belief, they identify with it. Identities don’t dissolve so easily under evidence, because ego guards them hardest. They dissolve when holding them costs more than changing them. In other words—pain.

If you tell someone that some trivial thing they learned from a Snapple cap is wrong, they won’t resist it with every fiber of their being. But tell someone they’re wrong about their religion, politics, or judgment of someone they trusted, and now you’re not discussing trivial matters. Now you’re talking about the most important thing that matters to them—who they are.

The world we live in has raised the price of being wrong. Public certainty gets attention, agreement, and reach. This is why con men and grifters can dupe people in desperate situations, where uncertainty is so painful; even a semblance of certainty is enough to create some kind of comfort. However, someone who openly revises a position he’s known for gets read as weak or unreliable, because the person who’s not going with the herd must have been rejected by it.

Changing one’s mind used to be a private matter, or at worst a local one. Now everything someone has ever said is on the Internet—retrievable, timestamped, and permanent. And there’s an entire business in retrieving and reacting to it, mocking or shaming the person to protect the herd.

The clip of a man contradicting himself is a product, which means there are people whose income depends on your never updating in public. They don’t care what you believe. They only care that the clip performs. So the cost of revising isn’t just what it does to you internally; there’s a public bill, payable to an audience that includes people who profit from your having to pay it and those who will harass you for doing so.

Which produces something strange: a lot of people have already changed their minds privately and keep performing the old belief anyway. The incentive was never to be right. It was to never be visibly wrong.

Every incentive available is pointed at staying exactly where you are.

Being smart is no protection either, because an intelligent person produces better defenses. He’ll find the flaw in the study, the problem with the source, the motive behind the messenger—and he’ll find them fast, and they’ll be more sophisticated than the reasoning that built the belief in the first place. His intelligence has gone to work for the defense instead of the investigation. That isn’t a failure of thinking; it’s thinking aimed at self-defense, because protection is cheaper than revision.

I’ve written about this before: doxastic involuntarism, the position that belief isn’t subject to the will. It’s the majority view in epistemology, and you don’t need a philosophy degree to check it.

Let’s demonstrate this to you right now.

Take God’s existence. Choose, right now, to believe the exact opposite position you have on the matter. You can’t. Nobody can. You’re either convinced of God’s existence or you’re not, based on what you believe is evidence for or against, and the only thing that can change your mind is evidence convincing enough to change your belief.

This inability to change your belief at will means that if you’re holding something false, you were given the evidence that led you there or kept from the evidence that would have led you elsewhere. Nobody handed you what you needed to see to change the belief. That’s not a defect in your character; that’s an input problem.

Sometimes the inputs were manipulated: facts get left out; facts get twisted. There’s an entire business model built on doing manipulation, because most people are reasonably honest. They might shade the truth on small things, but they don’t sit around all day constructing elaborate lies, so it doesn’t occur to them that anybody else does either, which makes them the perfect prey for professional grifters and cult leaders.

This is a vulnerability, not a form of stupidity. Your inexperience with professional deception isn’t a flaw; it’s what comes from not being the kind of person who does it. If you’ve never met a con man, you have no particular reason to suspect that the man explaining the world to you is one.

So being wrong isn’t a verdict on you. But that doesn’t leave you with nothing to do, either. Your job is to question your beliefs by asking: What is this belief actually doing for me?

Has it made your life better? Has it gotten you anywhere? Has it given you a single thing you can point to? When it’s one of the intense ones, the answer is usually no.

I’m not saying believe whatever feels better—you can’t choose to do that anyway. I’m saying a belief should be held because it’s true, and nothing else.

Shedding false beliefs can be painful, but each time your sense of yourself comes through intact, the next one you shed is less painful.

And that’s why being wrong is okay; it’s part of the learning process and healing process, which will only make you stronger and wiser, that is, if you’re willing to go through some growing pains to become stronger and wiser.

That’s a choice you can make.

I used to believe that American foreign policy in the Middle East was all about Israel, that everything from Beirut to Baghdad had to do with orders from Tel Aviv, and that anyone who said otherwise was either naive or a shill. If only we took Israel out of the picture, we’d no longer have any reason to be in the region. The wars would stop; we could close down our bases and bring all our troops home.

It’s a nice fantasy, but we have to focus on reality.

Let’s go back in time and see what America said its interests were in its own documents.

February 18, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt writes to his Lend-Lease administrator: “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” That’s the State Department’s published record of American foreign relations, which opened American military aid to the Saudi kingdom. Israel wouldn’t be established until 1948, so clearly this wasn’t because of Israel.

In August 1945, the United States signed a lease on an airfield at Dhahran—the first American military facility on the Arabian Peninsula. Again, before Israel’s existence.

January 23, 1980, Jimmy Carter’s State of the Union. He calls the Persian Gulf a region “of great strategic importance,” notes that it holds more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil, and points out that Soviet troops in Afghanistan now sit within 300 miles of the Strait of Hormuz, through which most of that oil has to pass. Then: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Out of that speech came the Rapid Deployment Force, which became US Central Command (CENTCOM) in 1983—the headquarters that has run every American war in that region since.

In 1987 and 1988, the US Navy flagged Kuwaiti oil tankers under the American flag and escorted them through the Gulf because Iran was attacking shipping. It was the largest naval convoy operation since WWII. This was not done for Israel.

When a frigate, the Samuel B. Roberts, hit an Iranian mine, the Navy responded by sinking Iranian ships and shelling Iranian oil platforms.

America battled at sea with Iran to protect Arab oil exports, not Israeli ones.

And the clearest case of all.

In the 1980s, America supported Saddam Hussein against Iran. And in 1991, America destroyed his army. During the Gulf War, we pressed Israel not to retaliate for Iraqi missile attacks, and Israel stayed out.

Now the material interests, with actual numbers.

In 2024, roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day moved through the Strait of Hormuz. That’s about a fifth of global petroleum consumption and more than a quarter of all seaborne oil trade. Close to a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas goes through the same strait, most of it Qatari.

Although America is now a net petroleum exporter, and very little Gulf crude reaches American refineries, the price of oil is global, not local. A closure of Hormuz raises the price at a gas station in New Jersey whether or not a single barrel in that tank came from the Gulf. The market doesn’t care where you bought it, and it’s why the US Navy is still there.

Our bases follow from the same logic for a different reason: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Diego Garcia—every one of those leases is with an Arab or British host government. If American policy in the region were simply about Israel, you’d have to explain why our military hardware sits on Arab soil, paid for with Arab cooperation, and why the Gulf monarchies keep renewing.

Despite many people falling for the conspiracy theory that all terrorism is really the CIA or Mossad, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Iranian proxies have killed Americans in Beirut, at Khobar Towers, at two embassies in Africa, on the Cole, and in New York on 9/11. If these people realized that they were being duped by the RGB propaganda machine, they’d understand why we must maintain our military presence in the region.

What about Iran getting a nuclear weapon?

I also used to think it wouldn’t be a bad thing, that it would actually prevent WWIII. But Iran getting a nuclear weapon would cause Saudi Arabia and Turkey to follow suit, which matters to Washington because of oil and bases and treaty commitments. Russia, our enemy, sells arms and buys influence there. China, our enemy, buys the oil and builds the ports. And the Gulf states are among the largest customers for American weapons, which is both an industry interest and a way of keeping those militaries dependent on our equipment rather than Chinese or Russian.

How does any of this benefit Israel? If anything, it benefits the military-industrial complex.

Let’s not forget the petrodollar.

The petrodollar also gives America the sanctions power that comes from controlling dollar clearing, which is the most-used instrument in American foreign policy and runs entirely on the fact that the world’s oil money moves through American banks. It creates a standing bid for Treasury securities from the largest exporters on earth, which lowers what the government pays to borrow. And it means the energy trade of the planet runs through plumbing we can see into.

Iran sells outside the dollar, and Russia sells to China and India in yuan and rupees. BRICS is the multipolarism’s attempt to get around our sanctioning power. But Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar all still use dollars—the Saudis still insist on dollars from Chinese buyers who would much rather pay in yuan. If we leave the region, and our enemies fill the power vacuum, why would those governments keep selling oil in our currency? Why would Riyadh keep insisting on dollars from Beijing once Beijing is the one guaranteeing its security instead of us?

None of this has to do with Israel.

But it would be disingenuous to say that Israel has nothing to do with our foreign policy.

The alliance is real, and the lobbies are real. AIPAC files under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, spends money, runs primaries, and is very good at its job. They openly brag that 95% of their candidates get elected. American policy on Israel-specific questions—aid packages, vetoes at the Security Council, the language used about settlements—is demonstrably shaped by domestic political pressure.

The problem with the “Israel-controls-everything” narrative is that it doesn’t explain the Fifth Fleet, the Carter Doctrine, CENTCOM, Hormuz, and forty years of balancing Iraq against Iran. At this point, the conspiracy theorists have to shift to claims of Greater Israel to justify our presence, that we are there to help Israel expand its borders. But as I’ve shown, we have had interests in the region before Israel’s existence.

The deeper claim isn’t that Americans support Israel; it’s that the American government has been captured by it—through assassinations, espionage, and the threat of Mossad-backed terror attacks—so that every politician complies out of fear. But that theory needs Israel to be omnipotent and desperate at the same time. You don’t run a spy inside naval intelligence, as Israel did with Jonathan Pollard in the 1980s, to get information from a government you already own. You also don’t have to buy primaries in public, under federal disclosure law, one district at a time.

What the theory has to ignore is everybody else who wants the same things for their own reasons. There are roughly 7.5 million Jews in the United States. There are tens of millions of evangelical Christians, and Christians United for Israel alone claims over ten million members. There are nearly four times more Christian Zionists in America than there are Jews, and they hold that position because of what they believe about scripture.

And ethnic solidarity in American politics is completely normal. Irish-Americans cared about Ireland and acted on it. Cuban-Americans shaped policy toward Cuba for fifty years. Greek-Americans got an arms embargo imposed on Turkey in 1974. Nobody calls it capture when anyone else does it.

What about Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom? I was part of both, so I want to weigh in on this.

People will tell you the war party was Jewish. Indeed, several prominent neoconservatives were, and some of them had Israeli security in their arguments; I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the founding statement of the PNAC was signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Dan Quayle; the men who actually made the decision were Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and Tenet. And this is what I got wrong for 15 years: even where the advocates were Jewish, the arguments weren’t about Israel. They were about oil, a collapsing sanctions regime, a hegemon in the wrong place, and an administration that had just been hit by the worst terror attack in American history—on 9/11.

I’m convinced that the attitude must have been to take out every enemy we had in the region, doing so while Americans were willing. The reasons for the war were certainly propagandized, and there were special interests behind it, but it also did serve as a message to Islamists: if you attack us, we will bury you. And since then, there hasn’t been a large-scale terror attack from a jihadist group on American soil in 25 years.

Now let’s imagine what actually disappears if we cut Israel out of the picture: we lose an intelligence partner, a weapons development partner, and a domestic political constituency. I’d assume the Israelis would then have to seek a partnership with Russia or China for their own survival.

What doesn’t disappear is the oil. The strait doesn’t move. The bases stay where they are, on Arab land, under Arab leases. The question of who controls the Gulf still has to be answered by somebody, and America losing influence in the region doesn’t benefit us whatsoever, but it does benefit our adversaries.

If you still believe everything we do in the Middle East is because of Israel, then take any American action in the region and ask what else would explain it. If the answer is always Israel, then you’re the one who’s been captured by anti-American propagandists who want us out of the region.

The word for someone who leaves a religion is apostate. I use it intentionally, because what I’ve noticed is that leaving a political movement driven by conspiracy culture gets you the same punishment a religious apostate receives.

The reaction typically starts with mockery and defamation, followed by inventions about one’s motives. In the worst cases, it comes with doxxing, harassment, and violence. People in the movement will even blatantly lie about someone in the most extreme ways—accusations of serious crimes, invented out of nothing, posted by accounts with large followings who present themselves as the movement’s researchers and truth-tellers, and amplified by accounts already known to lie. There’s no correction. Nobody in the replies asks for a source. The lie isn’t there to be believed in detail; it’s there to make the apostate untouchable so that nothing he says afterward has to be read. All that matters is that he’s punished.

Who wants to deal with such attacks?

I’ve endured most of that list myself.

A movement will supply the explanations for a defection before anyone defects. Members are taught in advance what to think if someone leaves: he was paid, he was compromised, and he was threatened. Every option is on the list except the one that matters, which is that he learned something and didn’t have the full truth to begin with. This is to not only define the enemy but also keep everyone in the movement in line.

All the claims about an apostate are just claims about the apostate. None of them is an argument. Nobody says here’s why his new position is wrong. That isn’t stupidity; it’s what a self-sealing system does with a witness.

And that is how a movement survives the loss of anybody.

Every movement has enemies outside it, which are useful. When an outsider attacks, he confirms the frame: “Of course he’s attacking us; that’s what they do.” The attack reinforces the belief system. However, an apostate is a different problem entirely. He isn’t attacking from outside; he was inside it. He’s a big problem because he knows all the arguments.

He can’t be dismissed as ignorant, because he taught many of the people still in there. And his existence makes a claim that no outside critic can make: there’s a way out.

That’s the real threat. It’s not even what he says; it’s his existence itself.

What you’ll notice is that the responses are rarely rebuttals. A rebuttal would mean engaging his arguments, and that risks that they’re right. It’s much easier to create some conspiracy about him, so people dismiss what he’s saying entirely. Repeat the lies over and over, and that handles most people who don’t want to be punished in the same way they are attempting to punish him.

And those who do attempt a refutation simply recycle the same claims rather than making new ones. Such a response isn’t for the apostate; it’s aimed at their own audience, to reassure them that nothing has changed.

Plato’s cave gets quoted to death in conspiracy circles, but it actually describes this precisely. The prisoners know the shadows and built an entire understanding of the world from them. Inside this world, some of them are important figures; they’re the ones who read the shadows best, who explain them to the others, who are listened to and respected. Take them out of the cave, and they’re nobody. They have no standing in a world where the shadows aren’t the subject.

So when someone walks back in and says there’s an outside, he isn’t offering them knowledge. He’s offering them the loss of everything they are.

For the people at the top of it, the stakes are much higher. If the apostate is right, their entire paradigm goes with it—not one claim, the architecture under all of them. And many of them have built an income on that architecture. Conceding a single point would be conceding the business, because the admission doesn’t stay contained. Their followers may ask, “If he’s wrong about that, what else is he wrong about?” That’s why many of these people have to double down even when they’re completely wrong.

There’s one more reason the apostate is harder to handle than an enemy. He’s usually more precise than either side, because he isn’t defending a position anymore. He can concede the parts that were true and still show where the reasoning breaks.

For example, Jewish organizations in America are well-organized and influential, and Jews are indeed disproportionately represented in a number of fields relative to their numbers. Yes, there are wealthy Jewish people with political agendas, the same as wealthy people of every other description. But there is no “the Jews.”

There are Jews with agendas that contradict each other. In fact, Jews have spent most of recorded history in conflict among themselves. The same is true with Gentiles. And Gentiles who share similar agendas to Jews aren’t brainwashed cattle; they just have the same values and desires. The Christian Zionist who supports Israel will tell you exactly why. The committed leftist who admires a particular billionaire isn’t under a spell.

That kind of precision is exactly what a movement can’t manage and often what its opponents can’t manage either. One side needs every claim to hold, and the other needs every claim to fail. Only the apostate is free to say that one’s real, that one’s false, and here’s the step in between where it breaks.

Realizing the world is much more complex than a group with god-like powers running everything is actually very liberating. It gives the individual “Doomer” some actual hope that they can make a difference in some way. It takes away the idea that everything is rigged, that there is no hope for our future, and that we should root for the asteroid. It also makes the grifting conspiracy theorist jobless.

The grifting e-celebrities’ and alt-media’s model is to convince their subscribers that they are the answer. That they, by watching their streams, getting tickets to their events, and buying their merchandise, will somehow dismantle this omnipotent, shadowy cabal that runs the planet. They always say that the revolution won’t be televised, ironically while they are streaming and claiming they are the revolution.

How can anyone take this seriously?

I now see these movements for what they are: theater—which makes “e-celebrity” a truly appropriate term. It is why I deleted my entire Rumble channel midstream one night, realizing I was part of the problem.

The temptation for any apostate is to answer all the rumors and lies about him—to make response videos and posts to tackle every false accusation. But it doesn’t work. What you say doesn’t matter if a person doesn’t believe or care what you’re saying.

The apostate may also be tempted to strike back, mocking and calling his former allies names. But doing so is counterproductive: attacking anyone for holding their beliefs will only create defenses that further keep them in the matrix. The better approach is to detach and let nature take its course, leaving the only task that really matters: planting the seeds of truth and walking away. That doesn’t require responding to any attack or hating anyone who attacks you. You have to look at them like a sick patient; beating them up won’t cure them; it will just anger them.

But they see it otherwise. They see an apostate as a traitor who needs to be punished, and the things said to him reflect that. Such words can only come from a sick person—and I know that feeling well. I used to be very sick, infected with conspiracy theories and beliefs that poisoned my heart and clouded my judgment.

The price for apostasy is heavy if you care what people think. It costs friends, standing, and income. This is why most people are afraid to walk away. But once you free yourself from the opinions of others, the price for freedom is easy to pay.

I was talking to a Jewish friend who wanted to understand the mind of an antisemite, particularly someone like me, and how I snapped out of it. I sent him a PDF copy of my most antisemitic work, Our Struggle, which was my own version of Mein Kampf, but instead of just speaking to Germans, I was appealing to all humanity—to get everyone to turn on Jews.

As I pointed out some excerpts from my book to him, which argue the various methods I believed Jews deployed to control Gentiles, I said, “Read that, and look how I give Jews omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.”

And then it hit me: I had turned Jews into gods.

I told him, “I think we’ve all been looking at antisemitism the wrong way. It isn’t just some illogical hatred based on nothing; it’s a religious belief based on conspiracies, where the Jews are made gods.”

That’s the theory I want to put forward here, because the usual explanation doesn’t hold up. We’re told antisemitism is an irrational hatred, a jealousy of Jewish success, and a prejudice like any other that happens to be older. None of that explains what I experience as an antisemite. It also doesn’t explain why the belief survives every refutation, why it changes its justification every century while keeping its shape, or why no amount of evidence has ever killed it. A religion does all of that.

Here’s what I’ll argue. The antisemite has a god, and like any god, it’s omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The theology changes depending on who’s holding it, but the deity remains the same.

The jealousy explanation is where I’d start, because it’s the one most often used and the one that does the most damage. The antisemite knows it’s wrong about him, and nothing closes a mind faster than being told what you think by someone who has clearly never asked. For a former racial antisemite like me, it never felt like envy; it felt like dispossession. The sense I carried was that a people who had been received as guests had come to run the house, that my country was being steered by someone who wasn’t from it. That’s what it felt like.

What was actually underneath it took me far longer to see.

Today, there are three kinds of antisemitism that exist: racial, religious, and anti-Zionist.

The racial antisemite believes Jews are inherently inferior, that they are a combination of all the worst elements of mankind mixed into one group. Despite this, they somehow have conquered the world. This paradoxical belief is based on the idea that Jews engage in behaviors that allow them to beat the superior races of the West. In fact, the racial antisemite doesn’t require a global Jewish conspiracy because they believe all Jews will behave instinctually to undermine their host nations.

Think about what that means. If their behavior is genetic, then every Jew across the world acts in concert without anyone ever giving an order. It’s a conspiracy with no conspirators, which is far more powerful than a Bilderberg meeting, because there’s nothing to find and no evidence that could ever be missing. The god isn’t sitting in one place; it’s spread through an entire bloodline of a people, which is omnipresence by another name.

The religious antisemite—we’ll go with Christian antisemites—considers the Jews as lost souls in the best-case scenario or the devil incarnate, the Antichrist, in the worst. They are evil because they reject Jesus Christ. Not only that, they’re responsible for his death, making them god-killers.

But it goes further.

Christians hold that Satan is the ruler of the earth—the prince of this world, the god of this age. So if the Jews are the Synagogue of Satan, the children of the devil, then they aren’t merely his followers; they’re the ones administering his rule on Earth, exercising his power on his behalf.

While the racial antisemite says the Jew conspires by blood, the Christian antisemite says he conspires with Satan. Either way, you arrive at the same place: a people who move everything from behind the curtain, which no actual people has ever been able to do.

I should be clear that this is a reading most Christians have never encountered and would reject outright. The Catholic Church formally set the deicide charge aside in 1965, and the major Protestant bodies have done the same. Christian antisemites would be and are rejected by their own churches.

Although anti-Zionism is not technically Jew-hatred—since many Jews can be anti-Zionist, and there are far more Gentile Zionists than Jews on earth, some 30 million Christian Zionists in America alone—the anti-Zionist promotes a form of antisemitism that denies Jews the right to self-determination. Even though Zionists established Israel no differently from many other nations—by setting borders and declaring independence—they also fought for their right to exist, warding off several attempts at total annihilation by Arab coalitions.

Those survivals look improbable on paper but can be easily explained.

In 1948 the United States had an arms embargo on the region, and Israel armed itself largely through Czechoslovakia, with Soviet approval. In 1967 the planes that won the air war were French. Large-scale American military support came later, and the decisive moment was the 1973 airlift under Nixon.

Now watch what the conspiracy does with that last one.

The story in the JQ movement is that Golda Meir forced the airlift by threatening to use nuclear weapons. There’s something real underneath it: Seymour Hersh reported it; Moshe Dayan did raise nuclear preparations in a meeting, and American intelligence detected activity around Israel’s Jericho missiles. But the testimony of a man who was in the room is that Meir rejected the proposal outright, and Israel’s own nuclear chief publicly dismissed Hersh’s account. A proposal floated and killed becomes, in the retelling, a gun held to the head of the United States.

The conspiracy needs that, because the alternative—that America had its own reasons—would make Israel an ally rather than a handler.

From there it follows that Israel must control America, because otherwise why would America do it? The conspiracy then extends to total Zionist control of the West as the only thing maintaining Israel. This is where a political position turns into the same thing as the other two: Mossad is behind all false flags; Israel owns Congress; it runs Britain, France, Canada, and the whole West. One small country, somehow steering every other actor on the board.

Now think about what that claim has to ignore in order to work.

There are tens of millions of American Christian Zionists who will tell you they unapologetically support Israel on theological grounds they’ve held their entire lives. In the framework I held, not one of them could be sincere: they’re all duped, or bought, or have no agency of their own. For one small country to move hundreds of millions of people across the West, those people can’t have minds of their own. The belief isn’t only a claim about Jews; it requires nearly everyone to be a puppet.

Three different theories—blood, theology, politics—converge on one belief: one hidden power that sees everything, knows everything, and controls everything.

For most of Western history the charge was religious. As Europe secularized through the 1800s, the same hostility came back in racial language, with scientific racism and eugenics supplying the new vocabulary. After 1945, racial language became verboten, but the hostility didn’t go anywhere; it shifted into politics, which is where it lives today.

History provides another angle. In England during the 1200s, coin clipping was everywhere, and Christians were doing it as much as anyone else—I didn’t learn this until I did research for this article. Yet in 1278 and 1279, only Jews were arrested by the hundreds and executed as a group. This collective punishment only makes sense if you believe Jews are one agent. You don’t punish an entire people for an act unless you think they all did it. That’s the monolith belief showing up again.

But the lazy counterargument to antisemitism is that it’s built on nothing at all, and that’s false. Plenty of it is built on things that actually happened.

The coin clipping was real. Some Jews in medieval England were debasing the currency. The Lavon Affair was real; Israeli military intelligence ran a false-flag bombing campaign in Egypt in 1954 and later admitted it. The USS Liberty was real. Israeli forces attacked an American ship in 1967 and killed 34 American servicemen, injuring 174. Whatever you conclude about intent, the attack happened, and the record is public.

None of the above is in dispute, and pretending otherwise is how you lose someone who knows that. The error isn’t in the facts; it’s in the leap taken from them: a crime some people committed becomes a crime the people commit, a state’s action becomes the whole diaspora’s action, or a documented case becomes evidence for a thousand undocumented ones.

This is why trying to debunk antisemitic conspiracy theories, claim by claim, rarely gets anywhere on its own. Some of the claims survive the fact-checks because they’re true, and the antisemite treats each survivor as proof of the conspiracy. What has to be shown is the unjustified leap from the fact to the people, the same move the English crown made in 1278. Expose that move, and the claims lose their footing all at once. That’s what happened to me.

Now let me show you how the antisemite’s god was assembled, one divine attribute at a time.

Charges from ancient times were real but limited. Tacitus and others accused Jews of being separate, clannish, and hostile to outsiders. That’s a monolith—one people with one disposition—but there’s no omnipotence in it and no hidden hand. Nobody in the ancient world thought Jews were secretly running the Roman Empire.

The hidden hand arrives in the medieval period. Jews were accused of poisoning wells across Europe during the Black Death and of ritual murder in towns that had never heard of each other. Those are charges of a people acting in concert, everywhere, unseen, with no account of how any of them could have coordinated it. That’s omnipresence.

Omnipotence comes in the 1800s with the Rothschilds, a banking family with branches in several capitals and genuine financial reach. From there it was a short step to claiming they owned the nations themselves. In 1873, a writer calling himself Osman Bey published The Conquest of the World by the Jews, which took the Rothschilds, made them the Kings of World Jewry, and turned their banking into a program for world domination. It went through seven editions in two years and was translated across Europe. Scholars treat it as a precursor to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which finished the job in 1903.

I know both books well, because I used to sell them.

So, the ancient world produced the Jewish monolith. Centuries of scattered, stateless vulnerability created Jewish omnipresence. Visibility in trade and finance created Jewish omnipotence.

Some people say antisemitism comes out of hard times, that Jews get scapegoated when things go bad, and sometimes that’s exactly right. The Black Death massacres are a clear case, as is the rise of Nazism amid Weimar’s collapse. But Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the same year it finished the Reconquista, at the height of its power. England in 1290 and France in 1306 were driven by crowns that wanted Jewish assets and debts canceled.

Antisemitism isn’t always crisis-driven; sometimes the ruling class just wants money, unity, or somebody to blame.

Which brings me back to the people trying to fight it, because the well-intentioned responses are where the most damage can be done. I’ve already said why the jealousy explanation fails; two others backfire just as badly.

The first is denial. When someone responds to a real event by denying it happened or by insisting the whole thing is baseless, the antisemite doesn’t hear a correction; he hears confirmation. “There it is! They’re covering it up!” The denial becomes another piece of evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. A framework that converts every denial into proof can’t be argued with from the outside, which is exactly what makes it a religion rather than a position.

The second is the both-sides objection, which gets turned around just as easily. Point out that Jews are on every side of every issue—capitalists and communists, hawks and doves, Zionists and anti-Zionists—and the answer comes back that they run both sides so they win either way. But nobody applies that reasoning to their own group. White men owned slaves, and White men died to end slavery. Nobody thinks that this means Whites ran a two-sided operation to trick Black people. A group appearing on both sides of a conflict is the ordinary signature of a group of individuals. It’s only read as coordination when you’ve already decided there’s one mind behind it.

Take conspiracy theory behind the Black Lives Matter movement, that a unified White power structure is deliberately holding Black people down and exterminating them via a racist police force. This anti-Whiteness is similar to antisemitism: 150 million Whites with no leadership, no meetings, and no common interest become a monolith with an agenda. The White man in a collapsing Appalachian town is still said to benefit from a system he has no access to, the way the Jewish shopkeeper in a Polish village was still part of the cabal. And if he objects, the objection is itself the proof—fragility, false consciousness, complicity.

That’s the identical architecture: real events, promoted to a unified agent, with denial converted into confirmation. I’m not saying the two are the same in history or in scale. I’m saying the logic is the same, and if it’s wrong when it’s aimed at Jews, it’s wrong when it’s aimed at anybody.

Whether times are good or bad, whether Jews have a homeland or not, or whether there’s anything to an accusation or nothing at all, antisemitism is a prejudice that molds itself to whatever the antisemite needs it to be. It functions as a cherry-picked explanation for what has gone wrong rather than a conclusion anyone reached from evidence, which is to say it’s held on faith. If it worked like a scientific hypothesis, evidence would change it. If it worked like a grievance, settling the grievance would end it. It does neither. It works like a religion, where a believer will drop a particular theology and keep the god.

I know, because that’s exactly what I did.

We need to bring back national pride in America. The problem is most people no longer agree on what there is to be proud of.

What I learned in the Marine Corps is that a group with every difference you can name—race, religion, region, class, education—can function as one unit if it shares a mission. My unit had men who would have had nothing in common on the outside and would probably have disliked each other on sight. But inside, none of it mattered, because we had the same objective, the same standards, and the same consequences for failing them. Although our differences weren’t erased, they were made irrelevant by something larger that unified us.

America doesn’t have that anymore. What Americans are told is that the objective is yourself. Maximize your income, optimize your life, and treat the country as the place where you happen to be doing it. When the mission is the self, your countrymen aren’t your unit; they’re your competition.

Individualism alone isn’t the problem; it’s a hyper-individualism stacked with hyper-materalism. This is already corrosive in a homogeneous country. In a diverse one, it’s extremely detrimental, because now you don’t have individuals competing against each other, which a healthy country can absorb and even benefit from. You have groups competing, each with its own history, grievances, and sense of who counts as “us.” Political disagreement is already hard enough to hold a nation together. Add religion, race, ethnicity, language, and culture on top of it, with no shared mission underneath, and the fractures run all the way down.

This isn’t unique to America. It’s true of any nation on earth. What’s unique is that Western countries were talked into treating the problem as imaginary and into treating anyone who noticed it as a racist.

So what’s the shared mission objective supposed to be?

We can’t unify around race. There are too many, and the moment one group takes pride in itself, especially White people, another hears a threat. We can’t unify around religion for the same reason. What’s left is culture, and when people try to name American culture, they usually come up with holidays, baseball, hamburgers, and freedom. That’s not nothing, but it won’t hold a country together, and plenty of new arrivals don’t identify with any of it. Many have been taught that the founders were colonists and racists, and our history was just hate and genocide, which means the one inheritance that could be shared has been poisoned before anyone gets to it.

A nation whose citizens take no pride in its history has no reason to preserve itself. Nothing gets maintained that nobody values. And that’s what the last few decades look like.

Here’s what I think the shared pride actually needs to be in order for us to survive.

America is a country where the basis of membership is a creed rather than a bloodline. Equality before the law. Free speech, including speech you hate. Due process. Self-government. The right to be left alone by those in power. These are demanding commitments; most of the world has never managed them, and we have managed them better and longer than anyone.

But the creed isn’t the thing to be proud of. The process of living up to it is.

I’ll use my experience going to boot camp to make my point.

Nobody is born a Marine. You arrive at boot camp with whatever you came with—your town, your race, your religion, your father’s name—and none of it matters. What follows is a process to break down your identity: the shaved head, the uniform, the micromanaging, the high standards nobody lowers for you, and the shared misery. All of it strips away your individuality to make you part of a unit.

After three months of brutal physical and mental torture, you’re handed the title of “US Marine,” and it means something precisely because everyone in that room earned it on identical terms.

That’s where American pride belongs. Not in the status, but in the process that produces it. In becoming an American rather than merely being one. In upholding the values despite the differences, which is work rather than an attribute. In defending the country and contributing to it.

Pride in your race or in the religion you were born into is pride in an accident. You accomplished nothing. You were handed a result and told to feel proud of it. But pride in a process is the opposite on both counts: you have to do something to get it, and anyone willing to do the same thing can have it. That’s a higher form of pride, and it’s the only kind that can hold a country this diverse together.

It also makes a demand the other kind doesn’t. If pride comes from the process, then being born here doesn’t finish the job. You can be a citizen by accident and an American by effort, and plenty of people born here have never done the second part.

But a process only works if it’s actually run like a machine.

My great-grandfather, Vincenzo Gagliardi, came here in the 1800s, served in the Marine Corps, and fought in the Spanish-American War. His last name was truncated to “Gage” to assimilate into American society. My grandfather, Angelo Gage, served in the Air Force during the Korean War. I served two tours in Iraq.

Let’s not forget that Italians were not considered the same as the people already here. In 1891, eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans, and respectable newspapers defended it. Government commissions sorted European immigrants into separate races and ranked them, with Italians near the bottom. The 1924 immigration law was written specifically to reduce arrivals from Italy and Eastern Europe on the argument that those people were incapable of self-government and would never become Americans.

They were wrong.

Not because people are interchangeable, but because the machine worked, and the machine was real: a long pause in mass immigration that gave the existing waves time to be absorbed, public schools that taught American history as something to inherit rather than apologize for, military service that threw men from everywhere into the same unit, economic mobility that made the next generation middle-class, intermarriage, and a culture confident enough to demand assimilation.

My family didn’t ask to be accommodated. Nobody changed anything for us. We changed, which is why I’m not writing this under the name Gagliardi.

Every part of that American-making machine has since been switched off.

The pause ended in 1965 and never came back, so the foreign-born share of the population has run at or near its historical peak for years. Immigration policy stopped selecting for assimilability and started selecting for almost nothing. Civics instruction collapsed, and what replaced it teaches the founding of our country as a tragedy. The expectation of English went with it: the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 shifted federal policy from teaching English to maintaining the student’s native language and culture. And the receiving culture lost its nerve, since asking anyone to adopt American norms became “racist.”

Nobody gets through boot camp without being changed. That’s the difference between a process and a door.

Now we have a door that’s been kicked off its hinges and left wide open. We removed the requirement to learn the language. We removed the shared history because the schools stopped teaching it as an inheritance. We removed the expectation itself, because asking anyone to adopt American norms became White supremacy.

What’s left is access to the benefits of a country without ever becoming a countryman.

America has become a nation that you extract from rather than join. Can we blame the migrants? Not really. Our government no longer upholds the standards needed to keep our country a country. That isn’t a statement about any nationality. Put the same arrangement in front of any population on earth and you’d get the same result.

Suppose a hundred million Italians arrived tomorrow—people from the same stock as my own family, all of them willing to assimilate. There would be nobody left to assimilate to. Little Italy becomes the whole country, and whatever you’d call the result—it isn’t America. The point isn’t the Italians; it’s that absorption has a rate, and a culture can only transmit itself to as many people at once as its institutions can reach.

So what I’d argue for isn’t bolting the door shut forever. I’m an immigrant’s descendant, and I wouldn’t be here to write this if that happened. It’s restoring the conditions under which the door works: numbers that institutions can actually absorb, selection for people who actually want to become Americans rather than extract from Americans, English required rather than optional, a history taught as an inheritance, and a culture where assimilation is a requirement, not an option.

Newcomers can add positively to America. Italian food and Italian names became American without anyone rewriting the Constitution, and that’s the correct relationship—you bring what you have into an existing structure, and the structure holds.

I don’t want George Washington reinterpreted to look like me. I don’t want the founders demoted to make anyone comfortable. I want what every assimilated immigrant family in this country once wanted, which was to belong to something that already existed and was worth belonging to.

If we can unite around that—a pride earned rather than inherited, strong enough to make our differences irrelevant the way my unit did—then the diversity here doesn’t have to be fatal. We are strong enough to absorb it if we do it correctly. But if we don’t, it won’t be a military invasion that ends this country. It will be the melting pot melting us away, which is what’s been happening for a while now.

America and Israel are allies, albeit with a rough past. Alliances between nation-states have always been complicated. Notice, though, that the people working hardest to split them are the same people who want both destroyed: Russia, Iran, China, Qatar, and other anti-Western allies they have, all driven by an anti-Western agenda.

I spent more than a decade inside a movement that taught me the opposite. I believed Israel was behind 9/11, that Jews were the hidden hand behind America’s decline, and that anyone who disagreed was a Jew shill. I arrived at those beliefs by consuming antisemitic narratives, absorbing them, one strand at a time, from a media environment that was feeding them to me on purpose. What drove me into activism was my desire for vengeance against those who sent me to Iraq: “Those neocons, those Jews, those traitors!”

What finally broke the web wasn’t a debate. It was dealing with antisemites long enough to see how hypocritical they were, especially myself. When I finally opened up dialogue with Jewish people, after 14 years of keeping that door sealed shut, I got to see them as individuals instead of a monolith.

The Jews I met weren’t anti-White or anti-American. They were understandably anti-Nazi, anti-Hitler, and against the race politics that had nearly wiped them out. The hostility toward White people and the West that I had assumed was built into every Jew simply wasn’t with the types I spoke to, whom I didn’t even think existed. Once I saw that, I started asking a different question: who benefits from Americans hating Jews and Jews fearing White Americans?

While war-gaming the new battlefield I saw before me, I came up with a very counterintuitive idea I call Pax Romana-Judaica.

The name is meant to sound paradoxical. Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD and crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt sixty years later. If any two civilizations have a historical grudge, it’s these two. For centuries, many Jews refused to walk under the Arch of Titus, which still shows Roman soldiers carrying the Temple menorah out of Jerusalem; some only walked through it after the State of Israel was founded. I’ve seen a few Jews today take a picture of it while flipping the bird.

Being Italian myself, I think I understand something about this relationship. Jews and Italians have lived alongside each other since the Roman Empire; the Jewish community of Rome is one of the oldest continuous communities in Europe.

Our past is messy, but we don’t owe our dead ancestors their feuds. The Romans who burned Jerusalem are gone, and so are the rebels who fought them. Nobody alive today is guilty of what they did, and nobody alive today is owed vengeance for it.

The same principle runs in every direction. Jews today aren’t guilty for what any Jew did in the past. White Americans today aren’t guilty for what any White American did in the past. Guilt belongs to individuals, not bloodlines. A civilization that forgets this ends up fighting wars its great-grandparents started, and a civilization that remembers it gets to choose its own future.

I say we choose to build a better future together rather than destroy ourselves over the past.

Having left the JQ movement, which has no strategy at all and appeals to inapplicable ideologies such as White nationalism, fascism, and Nazism to save America, I find myself back to defending the republic, freed from the fantasies that captured me for years, especially the antisemitism that conflicts with American history itself.

Jews have been part of this republic since its founding. It was only a few months ago that I learned about Haym Salomon, who helped finance the American Revolution at a moment when it was nearly broke. Yet White nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other LARPers believe Jews should be removed from America just for being Jews, when they helped found this country. They also call for the removal of other races to go back to a time that has long passed. Again, these people have no pragmatic solutions for our unique situation because they don’t live in the real world; they live in a fantasy. And the RGB alliance plays into those fantasies to convince these types of nationalists to divide Americans and promote inapplicable solutions.

What we face as Americans are three very different ideologies that agree on almost nothing except this: America and Israel are the enemy. The far left (red) sees both as colonial oppressors. Radical Islamists (green) see both as infidel powers. The far right (brown) sees both as tools of a Jewish conspiracy.

Russia, China, and Iran run documented influence operations online, and platforms and Western intelligence agencies have repeatedly exposed networks pushing divisive content into American feeds. Some of it targets the US-Israel relationship directly, because splitting the two weakens both.

However, much of the anti-Israel sentiment in America is homegrown. Foreign operations don’t create our divisions; they find the ones we already have and pour fuel on them. I know because I was one of the people they were pouring it on. The 9/11 claims I repeated for years had foreign amplifiers I never once checked. A lot of the anti-Zionism in America borrows the same oppressor-and-oppressed framing as the Black Lives Matter movement.

So what exactly is this Pax Romana-Judaica?

The Founders borrowed from Rome on purpose: the Senate, the eagle, and the republic itself. America inherited Rome’s role as the center of Western power, and in a real sense the Pax already exists. But Rome wasn’t the only influence. Although America was not founded as a Christian nation, it was founded mostly by Christians, whose moral tradition grew out of Judaism.

And I say this as a former Catholic who no longer subscribes to any religion and wouldn’t care if all religion vanished, but it would be ridiculous to pretend our culture doesn’t carry both a Roman and a Judeo-Christian inheritance. Here is some of what America, Europe, and Israel share:

• From Rome: the republic itself, a senate, citizenship as a legal status, written law that applies to everyone, and natural law, the idea that some rights exist before any government grants them.

• From the Hebrew Bible: the dignity of every individual, made in the image of God; the idea that even kings are bound by law, as when the prophet Nathan confronted King David; and the moral core of the Ten Commandments against murder, theft, and false witness, which every Western legal system enforces.

• From Christianity: the line between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, an early root of separating church and state; and care for the poor, the stranger, and the weak as a public duty.

• From the Enlightenment that grew out of all three: freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and government by consent.

Our law descends mostly from English common law, which absorbed Roman legal ideas and Christian morality over centuries. I’m not referring to these as religious values. I mean the values themselves, shared across the Abrahamic faiths and carried by Christian Europe for centuries. The Christian antisemite rejects this because he blames the Jews for Christ’s execution, but that’s just one more inherited grudge. Even the Catholic Church I once belonged to formally rejected it in 1965, declaring in Nostra Aetate that Christ’s death cannot be charged against all the Jews then living, nor against the Jews of today. If the Church itself let go of that grudge, the antisemite has no excuse to keep it.

Rome itself is the precedent. The empire was never an ethnostate. It held Latins, Greeks, Gauls, Syrians, Egyptians, Jews, and dozens of other peoples, and in 212 AD Emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to nearly every free person in it. Emperors came from Spain, North Africa, and Arabia. What held it together wasn’t blood but law: you could keep your gods, your language, and your customs so long as you submitted to Roman law.

That’s why an American ethnostate won’t work. America was never built on a single bloodline, and trying to make it one would mean tearing apart the very people who built it, Italians and Irish included. That doesn’t mean ancestry means nothing. Shared descent, memory, and kinship are part of what makes a people a people. But blood alone has never held a nation together. Rome’s real danger came when it admitted whole Gothic peoples in 376 faster than it could make them Roman, and two years later the Goths destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople. A nation can absorb many peoples, but only as fast as it can turn them into citizens in more than name.

Fast-forwarding to today, Washington and Jerusalem share intelligence, fight the same terror networks, and see Iran as the same threat. Of course, all this is theater to the psyop’d antisemite. But once they learn it isn’t, they'll understand why I’m pushing this idea: this is one of the ways to actually save the West. And yes, America has its own interests in the Middle East: oil and the shipping lanes it moves through, keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon, fighting terror networks that have attacked us directly, and keeping Gulf partners out of China’s orbit. It’s not all for “the Jews” and “Israel.” That’s a narrative foreign propagandists love to amplify.

The Abraham Accords have even brought several Arab states into the alignment, which creates a more stabilized Middle East, benefiting the world. It also proves this was never about the West against Islam, but only radical factions of it. This is where I’m being careful not to make the same mistake twice, leaving Jew-hatred only to start hating Muslims as a whole. I will never make that mistake in my life again toward any group.

But the American-Israel alliance that exists today rests on two weak foundations. One is personal: it depends heavily on whoever sits in the White House and the Knesset. The other is theological: much of America’s support for Israel comes from Christian Zionists acting on faith, and faith doesn’t persuade a secular voter or a skeptical young man on the nationalist right.

Pax Romana-Judaica is a partnership of values: free speech, the rule of law, representative government, and the freedom of individuals to live by their own conscience. Israel is a democracy in a region with very few. That shared foundation, not blood or prophecy, is what makes it an ally.

Because it’s built on values, it’s conditional in the healthy sense. Allies who share principles can argue about policy without the partnership collapsing. Unconditional support invites the charge that America serves someone else’s interests. A values-based alliance answers that charge, because it’s an argument an American can check.

It also means no inherited guilt in any direction. Jews shouldn’t fear every White American as a future Nazi waiting to happen, and White Americans shouldn’t carry guilt for crimes they never committed. Both come from the same broken idea: that your group decides who you are. The same holds when someone betrays the alliance. When Jonathan Pollard spied on America for Israel, the guilt was his, not every Jew’s, and the same would be true of any American who betrayed Israel.

In my political theory, Neofederal Unifism, I describe my idea of “ethostates” rather than ethnostates: communities organized around shared values. Some communities may also share ancestry, the way an Amish town or a Hasidic neighborhood does, but what holds them together is consent and shared values, not just blood, which clearly has never been enough for any people.

The Pax is the same idea at the scale of civilizations.

What are some objections to my idea?

“America First means not entangling ourselves with Israel.”

I agree with this. But those who want to cut Israel off completely are not looking at the grand chessboard. If we cut off Israel, she will be vulnerable to Iran, which wants to dominate the region and certainly would if it obtained a nuclear weapon. Israel would then be destroyed or forced to join the anti-American forces, thus leaving us with less leverage in the Middle East. Also, think about what would happen to the petrodollar if an Islamist Iran ran the region. Would the world be better if an Iran-led bloc, backed by Russia and China, set the terms instead of America? That doesn’t benefit America, Israel, or Europe. Meanwhile, the antisemitic narrative is that Israel controls America, forgetting that roughly 40 percent of the world’s Jews live in America and that millions of Christian Zionists support Israel on their own convictions.

Many Americans support Israel because they see what I now see. But a growing number of younger Americans want to sever the alliance. Their reasons vary, and antisemitic conspiracies amplified by the RGB alliance are part of it; I know, because I helped spread them. My answer is that the forces targeting Israel are the same ones targeting America, and a partner that fights them at its own expense makes America safer. But a values-based alliance can debate specific commitments. It doesn’t require blank checks.

“Israel’s conduct in Gaza contradicts shared values.”

I don’t like what’s happening in Gaza. However, after learning the history of the choices many Palestinian leaders have made throughout the decades, I understand the conflict in ways I didn’t before. Moreover, allies can and should criticize each other. A partnership built on shared values gives Americans standing to hold Israel to those values, which a purely transactional or theological alliance never does. At the same time, we can’t expect Israel to let itself be terrorized by the enemies that surround her.

Another angle I want to add is the ethnic one, for readers still in the movement who think of Jews as a completely alien race. Genetics doesn’t support that. Studies of Ashkenazi Jews, the majority of the world’s Jews, find substantial European ancestry, much of it Southern European, alongside their Middle Eastern roots.

I’m not saying this so you’ll accept Jews as honorary Whites. The alliance doesn’t rest on blood, and it shouldn’t. I’m saying it because the “alien race” idea you were taught is false. After centuries of intermarriage, plenty of Jews are indistinguishable from their European neighbors, and some of the White nationalists I knew, myself included, would fail their Nordic racial purity tests. If that part of what you were taught was false, it’s worth asking what else was.

I also ask Jewish readers to consider this with an open mind. Just as I’m asking my old movement to drop the “alien race” myth, I ask the few Jews who see White people as the enemy to drop that belief too. The far left already describes Israel as a White settler state and Ashkenazi Jews as White oppressors. If that ideology wins, Jews won’t be spared as a minority. They’ll be cast as the next oppressor. Some of you have already seen this happen.

Rome and Jerusalem spent centuries as enemies. But we, their descendants, don’t have to be. The people who want America and Israel at each other’s throats are counting on us to keep fighting old wars, keep inheriting old grudges, and keep sorting each other by blood.

I did that for years, and I know how hard it is to see from the inside. The way out was the same for me as it is for a civilization: stop asking who your ancestors were, and start asking what you want to build.

We can promise our Jewish neighbors that Hitler is never coming back, because we don’t want him nor need him here in America. Our forefathers left Europe to escape oppression and monarchism. And we can ask them to stand with us against the forces that would destroy us both.

That’s the Pax. It’s not a slogan about the past; it’s a choice about the future.

Name one time in your life when you insulted someone for hours and they said, “You know what, you’re right.” Maybe if the person has thick skin and doesn’t mind getting some tough love, you can name a few experiences. But I wager that for the most part, such an outcome was rare.

I’m 42. I’ve argued hundreds of times with people that held opposing beliefs, and I can count on one hand when someone told me, on the spot, that I was right about something. And those were times I was being very kind and patient.

Nobody decides to believe something; they’re convinced, or they aren’t, and what convinced them usually isn’t one fact. It’s layers: experiences, disappointments, things they got wrong, hopes about the future, and very often a person they trust who told them.

When you go after someone’s belief, you’re not removing a brick; you’re dealing with a wall of bricks, and that takes time. Insult them, and now they’re not just defending the belief; they’re defending themselves against you, and you have to get through another wall about them before you reach the wall that matters.

People do this on instinct because they want to fight like their favorite e-celebrities in blood sport debates. They think “owning” someone is how it’s done, failing to realize these people are merely entertainers, not serious thinkers or figures who want to truly effect change.

Imagine you’re a doctor, and someone walks into your practice with a disease, and you’re the one with the cure. And you treat them like this:

“You’re an idiot. Who were you around? How did you let this happen?”

They’re leaving. And they’re not coming back, and they’re definitely not taking your medicine, even though your medicine works.

Now do it the other way:

“Here’s what’s going on. Here’s the cure. Take it whenever you’re ready.”

You can’t force anyone to swallow anything. They might not even believe they’re sick. Your job is to lay it out and leave it with them.

That’s the whole difference. You’re not attacking the person for being sick; you’re attacking the sickness so the person can stop being sick.

This is how you should see people who are infected with mind viruses, infected and insulated by a cult. You should not treat them like e-celebrites treat each other; they get paid to put on a show.

The same thing applies to people who are on the fence about a topic, coming to you and asking for an explanation.

Picture a Mercedes salesman.

A man walks in looking for a car. “What kind of car, idiot?”

He hesitates at the price. “What, are you broke?”

Nobody sells anything that way. And everything in life is sales—even asking someone to pass you the salt that’s in arm’s reach. You’re always making a case to someone who has the option to say no.

The people selling conspiracy theories understand this perfectly. They’re excellent salesmen, except that what they’re running is a con. They package a lie so well it looks like the truth, and they deliver it with warmth to people who feel talked down to everywhere else.

Then the people trying to correct them show up with contempt and then wonder why they fail to wake people up from their delusions.

You must learn to deal with people with patience and respect. Our greatest minds don’t engage in such egotistic behavior.

No serious philosophers or scholars engage in blood sports debates. The most intelligent people on earth engage in arguments via peer-reviewed papers and debunk claims with scientific research and experiments. If they do engage in a debate, it’s at a university with a moderator, using serious arguments against the belief system, not personal attacks against their interlocutor. In other words, they don’t sit on the Internet for hours, hurling insults around and clip farming for “content” to make money, which is what all this debate bro space is really about.

That’s the part most people miss.

When you challenge someone like Candace Owens over claims you can show are false, her audience comes for you, and it looks like loyalty to her. It isn’t. They’ve invested in her, both financially and emotionally. They’ve adopted her beliefs and argued for those beliefs and told their families about them. Attacking her is taken as an attack on her followers because it implies their judgment of her was bad, and that lands as a personal attack whether you meant it that way or not.

Why do they trust her in the first place? This is where it gets very strange. Someone catches the government lying once and concludes the government can never be trusted about anything again. But when a commentator they follow is caught in a falsehood, that’s taken as evidence that powerful people are trying to silence her.

Same evidence, opposite conclusions. The difference is which one they are heavily invested in.

You can go after the seller, and it does something. Slay the shepherd, and the flock scatters. But the flock will usually defend the shepherd first, because the shepherd is the one who told them they’re smart enough not to be fooled.

What actually works with the people following them is to only attack their beliefs.

State the facts. Show them where to check it themselves. Don’t mock, and don’t try to make anyone look stupid; deliver the same thing the same way as many times as it takes. Most people put up a wall the moment they feel disrespected, and once that wall is up, you’re not reaching anything behind it.

That said, patience isn’t endurance. Plenty of people aren’t arguing in good faith, and you’ll know them by what they do with an answer: they don’t engage it; they move to the next thing. In that case, drop the facts, leave the link, and move on. You’re not there to win the exchange, and you’re not obligated to absorb disrespect to prove you’re the patient one. The people worth reaching are often watching the thread rather than posting in it, and they see how you conducted yourself either way.

What happens over time is quieter than winning. Eventually somebody notices that you never insulted or mocked them and that they’ve been disrespectful toward someone who was patient with them. That feels like something, and it opens a door that no amount of humiliation ever will.

This is why I don’t respond to people who attack me anymore. It won’t change anything, it wastes my time, and it reinforces the very behavior I want that person to drop. If I insult them back, I become one more thing they have to defend themselves against, and the beliefs I’m actually trying to reach get one more layer of protection.

People abandon a belief when its support breaks; your job is not to be one of the reasons it stays up.

In the last several days, I’ve seen many Charlie Kirk conspiracy theorists post pictures of a menorah next to the courtyard at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was killed. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it does resemble one. To them, this is just more evidence that Jews conspired to have him murdered because he was going to turn on Israel. The location proves the intent: a traitor sacrificed ritually, in a spot shaped like their own symbol.

But flip the image 180 degrees—it looks like an Amish barn.

Nobody thinks the Amish did it, because nothing connects them at all. But nothing connects a courtyard’s shape to anyone’s guilt either. Yet that’s the whole mechanism in one picture. The Jews are already guilty in the viewer’s mind, on the strength of facts that have nothing to do with the shooting but are read as motive: Charlie’s disagreements with some of his Jewish donors, his comments on Oct. 7, and his position against war with Iran.

So the barn is a coincidence and the menorah is a sign. Same image. The only thing that changed is the story someone brought to it.

Picture the absurdity of trying to use this as evidence in the court of law.

“Your Honor, Exhibit B. The UVU Courtyard is shaped like a menorah; therefore, the Jews did it.”

The court asks the obvious things: Who chose the location? What are their names? When did they decide? What did they do, and how do you know?

And the answer comes back: “Just look at it!”

Most conspiracy theories would never survive ten minutes in court, because they’re coincidences stacked on coincidences, and the stacking is what makes them feel strong. It’s a house of cards.

Some people in the JQ movement call themselves noticers. They do land on some real patterns in reality, but these noticers will fix on certain patterns while passing over everything that cuts against the narrative.

To understand how this works: If I told you to look around the room you’re in that’s filled with a certain color you didn’t notice that much of—let’s say red—and find everything that’s red, you’d see red everywhere, more than you’d have before. But what would you miss? The blue, the black, the white, all of the other colors that you weren’t focused on. If I asked you to look for blue, you would have missed the red instead. Your eyes found what you went looking for, and the room obliged.

That’s what noticing really is. It feels like discovery, because you never counted the misses.

Watch what happens when the misses get pointed out.

It’s true that Karl Marx was Jewish. But what about Friedrich Engels, who funded him and co-wrote the work and wasn’t a Jew?

“Oh, he was a Jew puppet.”

So, Engels loses his agency, and the pattern survives.

There are Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists on both sides of the same fight, the way White people and Black people and everyone else are on both sides of everything.

“Yeah, but they don’t control the banks.”

Show them the non-Jewish bankers, who are most of them.

“The Jewish ones are the important ones.”

There’s always an explanation, and it never costs the noticer anything, because the conclusion arrived first and the evidence is being sorted to match.

Larry Silverstein didn’t go to work on the morning of 9/11. Neither did ~33,000 other people who worked in those buildings. Are they all in on it? Of course, Larry isn’t just some random person who didn’t go; he owned the Towers and insured both for acts of terrorism. That isn’t suspicious either—the buildings had already been bombed in 1993.

Some noticers bring up Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. He wasn’t in the building either, because he was dropping his son off at school. However, his brother Gary was, and died there along with 658 of the company’s employees. Why wouldn’t he warn his own brother?

People have an answer for that, too.

“He sacrificed him to Moloch.”

At that point you’re being asked to prove a demon exists before you’re allowed to doubt the theory. And that’s another answer that costs the noticer nothing. It’s a claim made to protect a claim.

Now the case I know best: myself.

In late 2023 and early 2024, at the peak of my time in that movement, I told my audience on stream that if I ever changed my position, if I ever flipped or spoke favorably about Israel, they should assume I’d been bought off, threatened, or compromised.

Think about what that did. I wrote the explanation for my own future change of mind in advance, and I wrote it so that the one explanation that mattered was ruled out ahead of time: that I might have learned new things and had new experiences that changed my mind. My explanation acted like a deadman’s switch, ensuring that even if I left the movement, the movement was left intact.

Since I left, I’ve seen and heard every conspiracy imaginable: paid off, blackmailed, threatened, an agent all along, mentally ill, even a clone. Yes, you read that right—people think I’ve been cloned. Every explanation except the simplest one. Maybe after fourteen years he checked the stories that never added up.

Notice what’s missing from all of it. Almost nobody says here’s why his new position is wrong. They don’t argue with what I believe now. They explain away the fact that I believe it.

Let’s be honest: even without my own words from that time, the explanations would be the same. The mechanism doesn’t need my help; it was already built to account for anyone who walks out.

So the question isn’t whether you’d fall for a menorah in a courtyard. It’s more uncomfortable than that: are you taking everything into account, or are you only counting what keeps the story alive?

If you can’t name the last piece of evidence that cost you something, you already know the answer.

The political internet runs on memes, and I don’t just mean funny pictures. A meme is a packet: an idea compressed small enough to travel. It can be an image, a short clip, a catchy song, a screenshot of a quote, or a phrase. What makes it a meme is the compression. It carries a claim in a form small enough to cross a timeline in two seconds and implant itself in someone’s head.

Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976, borrowing from genes deliberately, and the analogy holds very well. Like genes, memes evolve via mutation as they carry on and interact with their environments. While they pass through different echo chambers, each person adds something, strips something, or bends the framing to fit their own view. The ones that survive are the ones that spread best in that environment, which is not the same as the ones that are true.

Slogans are the purest case. “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” is a four-word compression of a claim that would take an hour to argue properly. “Free Palestine” compresses an entire political position into two. Neither is an argument. Both are payloads, and both are repeated by people who could not defend them for sixty seconds, which is not a flaw in the design—it is the design.

Attention on social media is measured in seconds, so anything intended to capture attention has to be small enough to do so. An argument can’t do that, but a meme can.

I know how this works because I did it for years.

My most viral meme was a song I made called “Boom Boom Tel Aviv.” It reached hundreds of millions of people around the world because of its catchy lyrics, timed with events that had just occurred. I made it as a joke, but it spread much further than I could have imagined. Another was a Hitler edit set to an already viral Mr. Kitty track. That one is still circulating today, years after I made it, passed around by people who have no idea where it came from.

A viral working meme leaves its author behind. Mine didn’t go away after I abandoned antisemitism. Those pieces reached more people and did more work than any argument I ever wrote, and they did it by being short, catchy, and impossible to counter at the same speed.

My longer “drill instructor” rants traveled for the same reason. The rant wasn’t the meme; it was a delivery vehicle for four or five phrases that were the payload. Everything around them was packaging. The same was true with all of my over-the-top theatrics.

A meme full of disinformation spreads as fast as any other, and usually faster, because it was engineered for spread rather than accuracy: fabricated quotes attributed to famous people; passages from religious texts, invented or stripped of context; and historical claims that were never true.

Memes inside an echo chamber go unchecked because people in it already trust it. They assume that someone upstream verified the information. Usually nobody did. Yet the meme arrives already vouched for by the community it’s traveling through, and that borrowed credibility is what carries it.

A meme is almost always smaller than its refutation. The claim fits in a sentence, whereas the correction needs a paragraph, a source, and context. The first mover sets the frame, and everyone answering it arrives late, carrying more weight. Therefore, a counter-meme has to be as compressed as the thing it’s refuting. If it takes longer to read than the original, it loses, no matter how right it is.

The technique that works is putting the fake next to the real, in one image: the fabricated quote beside the actual text, the cropped photo beside the original, and the out-of-context passage beside the full passage. You don’t have the time and space to argue. You only have the time and space to show the comparison, which the viewer completes on their own.

The same works for footage. 9/11 Truthers always show an edited clip of World Trade Center 7 collapsing that begins at the moment the visible facade drops, which makes it look like a clean demolition. However, the full video shows the east penthouse sinking into the building several seconds earlier: the interior was already failing while the exterior still stood. By the time the outer shell went, there was nothing left inside holding it up, which is why that portion of the fall reaches free-fall acceleration. NIST says so in its own report, and truthers quote that line constantly while cutting the seconds that explain it. The clip supports the demolition theory by starting late. Show the earlier seconds, and you’ve answered it without saying anything.

But no meme stands alone. Each one connects to others, and together they form an ecosystem where every claim supports the neighboring one. Someone in that environment isn’t holding one false belief; they’re holding a web, and each strand carries a foundational assumption that makes the next strand plausible.

Kill one meme and the web holds. The strand regrows because the structure that generated it is untouched. To actually get somewhere, you need a folder of counter-memes, each engineered to cut a specific strand, deployed against the same belief.

Memes behave like viruses. They reach a host, take over how that host sees the world, influence how they act, and then use them to infect the next host. An ecosystem with millions of hosts generates new claims faster than anyone can answer them.

Some people will be infected and stay infected. Others can be cured. The difference isn’t intelligence, and it often isn’t evidence either. The side that reaches more people is the side with better memetics, not the side with better evidence.

Anyone engaged in debunking has to be realistic about that. You’re not going to reach everyone, and treating every failure as your own is how people burn out and quit. All you can do is help counter-memes travel and reach the ones who are able to wake up.

Like medication that needs to be improved to deal with an evolving virus, counter-memes need to evolve too. Whatever works eventually stops working as the other side adapts around it. Engineering one good rebuttal is not enough; you must stay in the loop and keep up with enemy memetics, because the thing you’re fighting is already evolving.

For years I believed 9/11 was an inside job and that Israel was behind it. The pieces broke away slowly, one claim at a time, until a single collapse took down everything that was left.

Doxastic involuntarism—the view that humans do not choose their beliefs—is widely held among epistemologists, including myself. This is why I keep telling people who don’t believe my change is sincere that I had no choice in the matter. Once I was exposed to new information that explained things better than my previous beliefs, especially where those beliefs weren’t factual to begin with, the old ones couldn’t stand.

But how did I get sucked into these beliefs in the first place? Most people don’t fall into conspiracy theories through stupidity; they start with a true observation and then carry it too far.

My journey into the conspiracy theory world started with Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. WMDs were the case for the war, but we didn’t find any. I had served my country, only to find out I’d been lied to. I spent the next twenty years ashamed of that service.

Although I was right that my government had lied to me, the big error came next: the distrust that was earned for one narrative spread to all narratives. If they lied to me about Iraq, why believe them about 9/11, or anything else for that matter? Then, why believe any institution that sits near the government at all?

When the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11, I didn’t study the footage over and over; I saw it once on live television and assumed that was simply how buildings fail. The official explanation was in engineering reports almost nobody read or could read, and I had no reason to go looking. Then in 2006 I watched Loose Change. The narrators told me to notice how fast the towers fell and to look at the “squibs” that seemed like explosives. Suddenly there was a gap between what I’d seen and what I could explain, and I was convinced something was off. The story fit perfectly into a false-flag narrative, carried out by a government that had just lied to me about Iraq.

Two claims carried it over these twenty years. The first was that explosives brought the towers down; I didn’t let that go until 2015, when I went back and was able to debunk each claim, showing that the collapse doesn’t require explosives, and the evidence for them isn’t there. The second was Israeli foreknowledge: the “dancing Israelis,” supposedly positioned in advance to record the attacks, and the Israeli “art students” who supposedly gained access to the buildings to prepare for the operation beforehand. I held on to that until just a few months ago, when I realized the conspiracy theorists who pushed it had misrepresented what the FBI reports actually said and that the Israelis actually warned us about some of the hijackers in August of 2001.

When that second claim fell, something larger fell with it. I realized my antisemitism had exactly the same structure as my 9/11 belief. Coincidences were stacked until they looked like intent, making Jews part of a monolithic conspiracy. Since Jews could not be trusted, just like the US government, no Jewish sources or voices could be taken into account. Every claim against Jews stacked up without any refutation allowed by counter-evidence.

The most recent conspiracy theory we have all seen get created in real time is the “Israel killed Kirk” conspiracy, which takes the same shape as the “Israel did 9/11.” In both cases, Jewish people are named, there’s an appeal to “Cui bono?” and people start making all kinds of claims. Despite knocking down each claim, the conspiracy keeps going. Why? Because refuting a hundred surface claims one at a time is endless; the structure underneath generates new ones faster than they can be answered. But if you show someone the structure, the claims built on it lose their footing all at once.

What is the structure?

Earlier this week, I came up with the idea of mapping out that exact structure using my own experience. By analyzing what happened to me, I identified seven preconditions that had to be in place for me to fall into the conspiracy narrative to begin with.

1. Distrust: A source lies or fails badly on something that matters, and the person loses trust.

2. Overgeneralization: The distrust spreads from the claim that earned it to everything the source says and then to anything or anyone associated with that source.

3. Pattern bias: Other instances of the source lying are noticed, gathered, and read as a rule rather than as a record. The source doesn’t lie sometimes; lying and cover-up become what it does.

4. Explanatory gap: The event in question has an explanation the person cannot verify for themselves, which leaves them dependent on some other source.

5. Rival narrative: A competing story fills the gap before the official explanation does. Because it confirms the pattern and seems to explain the event better, it is trusted from the start.

6. Self-sealing: Credibility is assigned by conclusion rather than by source. Every correction is discounted, and every claim that supports the rival narrative is accepted, even from inside the distrusted institution.

7. Echo chamber: The community around the belief discredits outside voices in advance and treats doubt from within as betrayal. Questions carry a social cost, so they stop being asked, and the belief is reinforced by the people who share it rather than by the evidence.

Number six is why a conspiracy movement always demands "an independent investigation" and rallies behind every so-called whistleblower. Its members have cut off every channel that could correct them and ask for a new one they'd accept—one that doesn't exist and, by construction, never will. The seventh is why that demand is rarely questioned from inside: the people who might question it have learned what it costs.

Since we can’t choose our beliefs, peer pressure alone doesn’t work. You can’t force someone into letting go of something any more than you can force them to accept something. The only thing that works is changing what the person can see.

The most useful question I know to ask someone is this: What would it take to change your mind? Most of the time they will give you exactly what it takes. But if their answer is “nothing,” or a condition that could never be met, that means the belief has been walled off from anything that could defeat it.

Often the wall is the cost of leaving the tribe. Picture a religious leader, whether a rabbi, a priest, or an imam, thirty years into his ministry, who hears an argument he can’t answer. Conceding it would cost him more than a belief; it would cost him his congregation, his standing, his livelihood, and the self he has spent three decades becoming. The same holds for anyone who has built an identity, an audience, or an income on a conspiracy. That is why an argument can land and still change nothing.

Epistemologists have long recognized two basic ways to check a belief. You can check whether it coheres, meaning it’s consistent, follows its own rules, and doesn’t contradict itself. Or you can check it against the world through tests, predictions, and results that other people can repeat and arrive at independently—science. The first settles matters that live inside a system, like mathematics or the rules of a game. But any claim about what actually happened in the world needs the second, and no amount of the first can stand in for it.

A conspiracy theory passes the first check. Ironically, it’s often more coherent than reality, which is why it seems to explain things better and feeds the pattern bias so well. Reality is messy, full of accidents and failures that don’t add up to anyone’s plan. However, a conspiracy theory fails the second check, and the distrust has already severed the channel through which the second check works, namely other people converging on the same answer. What remains is a claim about the world held up entirely by internal consistency. But internal consistency does not mean matching to the real world.

Real conspiracies exist, but there’s a line between real and imagined ones. COINTELPRO was real. MKUltra was real. The Tuskegee study was real. The Bush administration made the case for war in Iraq based on claims its own intelligence didn’t support. We know about these because documents surfaced, independent investigators converged, and the evidence held up when other people checked it, not because each narrative was coherent.

There’s nothing wrong with being skeptical or distrusting one’s government or anyone else for that matter. But trust isn’t all or nothing. A source that lied about one thing can be right about another, and the only way to ever know is to check, claim by claim.

Beliefs that ask you to stop checking are the ones to watch.

Although I was using anti-Zionist talking points 11 years ago, my intense pro-Palestine activism began immediately after Oct. 7. I learned a very simple and one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Red-Green Alliance, which goes: Palestinians lived peacefully until 1948, the Nakba happened, then the occupation, and Oct. 7 was the first time they struck back in a way the world noticed.

I recently saw several clips from Motaz Azaiza giving an interview about his experience with Hamas. Azaiza is the Gaza photographer whose images of the war’s first months made him one of its most recognized witnesses in the West. In the interview, he described a WhatsApp group managed by a Hamas media official at the Rafah crossing, used to organize online campaigns against journalists who challenged the group’s narrative. He said photographers in Gaza learned to lower their cameras when someone criticized Hamas. He said he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten by a crowd on Oct. 7 and chose not to publish it because he feared Israel would identify and target the people in it. And he criticized Hamas’s leadership directly, asking for anyone to name a single Palestinian in Gaza whom Hamas’ weapons had protected since the war began.

Azaiza still describes himself as a supporter of armed resistance, so he hasn’t changed sides. This makes his testimony worth taking seriously, since it comes from someone with every reason not to give it. Ironically, some pro-Palestinian activists are claiming he was made to say these things or that he decided to betray the cause. I see such claims constantly when uncomfortable truths come out or when someone from that side takes accountability.

But I digress.

The last few months for me have been truly tranformative, full of a lot of fact-checking and dismantling long-held beliefs. Although I never supported Hamas, this story led me down another rabbit hole, which was the opposite of what I was told regarding the Palestinians and their history.

As I was always told, “Everything was just fine before Israel showed up.” Except it wasn’t.

In August 1929, Arab rioters killed 67 Jews in Hebron, and the British evacuated the city’s surviving Jewish community. Across the Mandate that week, 133 Jews were killed; 116 Arabs were also killed, most of them by British police putting down the riots. The Arab revolt of 1936–39 followed, with thousands dead on all sides, most of them Arabs killed by British forces.

Israel didn’t exist at this time, so what’s this killing Jews about?

In 1970, the PLO had essentially built a state within a state in Jordan. That September, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked several airliners and blew three of them up on an airstrip in the Jordanian desert after an earlier attempt on King Hussein’s life. The Jordanian army moved against the Palestinian militias in what became known as Black September, and thousands were killed. Palestinians remember it as a massacre; Jordanians remember it as the defense of their kingdom.

Learning this was another shock to me. I was always told that “the Jews” were the only terrorists in the region, that they in fact invented terrorism.

But it gets even worse.

After Jordan expelled the PLO, it relocated to Lebanon, where it became one of many armed factions in a fifteen-year civil war that killed somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 people—Lebanese Christians and Muslims, Palestinians, Syrians, and Israelis among them. Israel invaded in 1982; that summer, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila. An Israeli inquiry found its defense minister personally responsible for failing to prevent it.

Clearly, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is much more complicated than I previously knew, and yet, I was parroting the narrative from one side without knowing the whole story. Its complicated history also answered the question that I never got a real answer to: “Why isn’t the entire Muslim world helping these people?” The answer I usually got from the pro-Palestinians is that they were “Muslim, Zionist traitors.” But I now see why these Arab governments have kept their distance from them.

When Hamas smashed through Israel’s defenses on Oct. 7, I wondered what the attack was meant to achieve. It could not defeat Israel militarily, and an overwhelming Israeli response was predictable. I had a terrible feeling that Gaza was going to be leveled.

Weeks after the attack, senior official Ghazi Hamad said on Lebanese television that Hamas would repeat Oct. 7 again and again. Another senior figure, Khalil al-Hayya, told the New York Times the aim was to change the whole equation rather than to govern Gaza quietly. Mousa Abu Marzouk said on Russian Arabic television that Gaza’s tunnels were built to protect fighters and that protecting civilians was the responsibility of the United Nations and Israel.

Those are their words, indicating they don’t care at all about the civilians that they’re supposedly fighting for. Their words also suggest the leadership anticipated the war and accepted its cost to Gaza’s civilians.

I used to think the things Israel told us about Hamas were just lies. But hearing similar things echoed by Azaiza tells me that the Israelis weren’t lying about everything.

As I continue to do my due diligence and learn more about the region, I don’t blame Israel for wanting to wipe Hamas off the map. This war ends when Hamas gives up power or is eliminated. I can’t expect the Israelis not to do anything about Hamas after they have threatened to repeat Oct. 7 over and over again, especially hearing how they treat their own people. We wouldn’t tolerate any group that said they would repeat 9/11 again and again, so how can we expect the Israelis to?

I hope this conflict ends soon. Civilian casualties will only continue to rise so long as Hamas continues to convince Gazans to engage in this futile jihad. I wish the Gazans would rebel against their oppressors and make a deal, rebuilding under different leadership. But is Hamas oppressing them? In the interview Azaiza said that many Gazans wanted the war to bring about change. In fact, some of them have been interviewed recently and said they have no regrets about Oct. 7.

How can you reason with a population that has faced such destruction but has not faced reality? How do you reason with a culture that embraces matrydom as a form of victory? These Gazans remind me of the Japanese in World War II, who refused to surrender until two atomic bombs were dropped on them. It’s been said that the amount of explosives used on Gaza is equivalent to six Hiroshima bombs, yet there seems to be no sign of surrender to this day.

So long as the Palestinians are seen as cannon fodder by their Iranian puppet masters, and so long as the flow of arms and money doesn’t stop, it seems Hamas is willing to sacrifice every person they are supposedly fighting for to achieve their aims. And those who will continue to suffer most will be the innocent men, women, and children, who deserve a better life that Hamas refuses to give them.

In 2006, after my two tours in Iraq and learning there were no WMDs, I became ashamed of my service. From there I went into various conspiracy theories until snapping out of them all just a few months ago, the final one being “Israel did 9/11.”

There’s no question that Israel and various Jewish organizations and individuals have tremendous influence in American politics. But why? Is it because they are an omnipotent, monolithic force, and every Gentile has no agency? Is it because their power is so hidden that no one sees the strings? The conspiracy about Jewish power is just that.

Jews, as organized and influential as they are, are not omnipotent, are not a monolith, nor are they out of sight. If the people in a “secret cabal” are telling you who they are, what they want, and how much they’re spending to get it, then you don’t have a conspiracy.

So the question is simple: where’s the concealment?

Start with AIPAC. AIPAC operates under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Its lobbying expenditures, the issues it lobbies on, the officials it contacts, the identities of its lobbyists, and its political contributions are all public filings. The affiliated super PAC’s spending shows up in FEC reports, which is how anyone can look up that it put roughly $2.6 million into a single congressional primary against Thomas Massie this year, while the Republican Jewish Coalition put in around $4 million. I know that number because it was reported, not because I found it. In addition, TrackAIPAC names and shames politicians that take money from the organization all over social media.

So where’s the secret?

In fact, Massie introduced a bill this year to force exactly that. But notice what it is: a public fight in Congress over which disclosure regime applies to an organization that already discloses. It’s the opposite of a hidden hand.

AIPAC isn’t even the largest pro-Israel organization. The largest pro-Israel organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which claims over ten million members, making it the largest Zionist organization in the country. It holds an annual summit in Washington, sends its members to lobby Congress, runs chapters on hundreds of campuses, and states its theological reasons in plain language from the pulpit. Tens of millions of American evangelicals support Israel because they believe God requires it of them, and they will tell you so at length, for free, without being asked.

Do these Gentiles have zero agency because the omnipotent Jew has brainwashed them?

In September 2024 the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state broadcaster RT for funneling nearly ten million dollars into Tenet Media, which used it to pay American political commentators. Roughly $8.7 million went to three of those commentators’ production companies; one contract ran to $400,000 a month. The commentators, by the government’s account, didn’t know where the money came from. They kept their editorial independence, in the sense that nobody had to tell them what to say.

That’s what concealment looks like.

What this case showed me is this: the influence I was pointing at files paperwork and the influence I ignored only surfaced through a federal indictment.

Foreign anti-American operations work clandestinely and, frankly, more efficiently. They don’t need to buy expensive politicians but rather buy streamers, gamers, e-celebrities, and alt-media figures who are looking for fame and money—many of whom, by the way, have been doing better numbers than the mainstream media.

But here’s what I just learned a month ago.

After 1967, the Soviet Union ran a sustained campaign to recode hostility to Israel as anti-imperialism so that it could travel into the Western left without sounding like the old Jew-hatred. The high point was UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared Zionism a form of racism. Although the resolution was repealed in 1991, the vocabulary outlived it by decades and is still in daily use by people who have never heard of it.

You’ll also see a claim that the KGB ran a dedicated operation to export that framing into the Muslim world, under the cryptonym “Operation SIG.” That account comes from a single Romanian intelligence defector, published decades after the fact, and it hasn’t been corroborated the way other Soviet operations have. Regardless, such operations are documented: the USSR spent decades professionalizing a narrative about Israel and America, and that narrative is stronger than ever, especially after Oct. 7. In fact, in my 14 years of antisemitic activism, I’ve seen more antisemitism in the last three years than all 11 years prior combined.

The Red-Green alliance is nothing new. Communists and Islamists worked together to overthrow the Iranian Shah in 1979. However, the idealistic leftists were then disposed of by the Islamists after they served their purpose. Similarly, the Green-Brown alliance isn’t so new either, since Hitler did align himself with Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini to fight against the British and the Jews during World War II.

What’s new is this colorful convergence of all three colors, making it the Red-Green-Brown Alliance, which adds Christian, nationalist, race realist, and antisemitic activists, which I was among. In fact, I helped put together the Christian-Muslim alliance, although I was neither.

What drove this unity? Anti-Israel and antisemitic messaging—that was the whole of it. The left and Islamist networks we teamed up with despised everything else about us. They amplified our voices to attack Israel on one hand while running open-society and Soros lines on the other, calling nationalists Islamophobes and racists while describing Israel as a White-supremacist project—a framing that put my camp in the crosshairs. We noticed. In fact, we would joke about it in our chat that once we defeated ZOG and Israel, if we had to go to war with each other, at least it would be on our terms.

Nobody in that arrangement was truly anyone’s ally. Everyone believed they were the ones doing the using. Eventually, like any other incompatible friendship, it collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.

The reason some of the far right associated itself at all with this alliance is because these types want things to get worse on purpose. The slogan “Weimar conditions need Weimar solutions” was said out loud, meaning that if the West degraded far enough, a figure like Hitler would rise again. They want to replace our democratic republic with a totalitarian state, whether fascist or monarchist. That belief is what makes the wing valuable to anybody selling collapse. You don’t have to recruit someone who already wants the building to burn. You just have to hand him a match, which is why the RGB Alliance doesn’t need a signed contract or membership list.

Take me, for example. Nobody was controlling me; nobody handed me a script. I already was ashamed of my service for two decades. I was convinced 9/11 was an inside job done by America, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. I believed all our wars were bankers’ wars and that we had no legitimate interests in any region of the world. I believed my government was pure evil, that if anyone needed a regime change, it was us.

The script was on the feed, boosted by the algorithm and promoted by e-celebrities, influencers, and alt-media figures. Without even knowing it, I became one of these figures myself, thinking I was doing the right thing. Even worse, I became audience-captured, so my theatrics became more unhinged and extreme to keep pushing the narrative for the so-called greater good.

Everyone in the RGB Alliance has a similar enough goal that they find each other useful. But whoever comes out on top will turn on the others in the end.

America can survive Zionism and any bad policies that may come with supporting Israel, but it cannot survive an immigration policy that allows massive, uncontrolled 3rd-world immigration that screens for neither assimilation nor hostility and then treats asking about either as bigotry. It cannot survive the suicidal, egalitarian, utopian fantasy promoted by the left. It cannot survive Islamofascism nor the delusions of the far right pushing White nationalism, Italian fascism, or German National Socialism, all of which are inapplicable to the United States.

Our forefathers fled European monarchies to establish a republic, not a replica of the former. However, the current state of this republic has fallen far from the path our forefathers envisioned; its self-destruction is inevitable, unless we find a way to get back on the path. And that is not achieved by listening to anti-American voices telling us to become isolationists, pacifists, or ashamed of our greatness, so we allow our adversaries to gain the advantage.

I invite you to look into a political theory I developed that is completely compatible with their vision but takes into account the irreversibility of the changes that have transpired in the last century, laid out in my book, “The Factured State.”

I was one of the most prominent and viral antisemites in the world. Swattings and attacks on my family didn’t pull me out of it. They pushed me deeper. What helped pull me out was a two-hour conversation over coffee with a religious Jew who was never once offended by anything I said, and I think the people fighting antisemitism need to hear why that worked.

For a long time, the standard approach to people like me was to label and shame but not to engage. For example, many Jewish organizations and scholars hold a firm policy of refusing to debate Holocaust deniers. I understand the reasoning: a debate can make the other side seem legitimate. But in practice, what replaces the debate is the label, the boycott, the censorship, and the public example. Seek and destroy.

My argument, from my own experience, is that this gets the order backwards. The first response to an antisemite should be to de-escalate, debunk, and deradicalize. Destroying someone’s life should be the last resort to prevent violence, not the first. I’m not writing this from a position of arrogance. I’m writing it as someone the first strategy created but was deradicalized by the second.

We always hear that antisemitism is a unique form of hatred. I agree, because Jewishness itself is an unusual identity: ethnic, religious, and national at once, and Jews don’t even agree among themselves on how those strands fit together. A Jew can be secular and a Zionist or religious and an anti-Zionist. That matters, because the entire antisemitic worldview depends on Jews being a malevolent monolith, wearing different masks to fool the goyim.

Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews in the West, have excelled in fields like mathematics, science, finance, and media, so they are disproportionately visible wherever they live, in good things and, unfortunately, in bad things. What antisemites, my former self included, fail to notice is that this isn’t unique to Jews. Europeans are majorities in the West but a global minority, disproportionately represented in both great achievements and great crimes, and you can see the same logic in BLM-era rhetoric against White people. The pattern forms whenever a minority is disproportionately successful and still looks like an “other.” I expect Indian-Americans, who have risen quickly to lead major corporations, to face the same kind of resentment, and online you can already see the early shape of it.

For most of history, antisemitism was religious. Christians condemned Jews for killing Christ. In theory, a Jew could escape that by converting, but even that door kept closing: Spain’s conversos converted and were hunted by the Inquisition anyway. Racial antisemitism, which emerged in the late 1800s and peaked with the Nazis, offers no door at all. That’s the kind I subscribed to. I believed Jews had a proclivity for certain behaviors and that whether an individual Jew was good or bad, Jews as a whole were bad for my people.

Once you accept that premise, the “solution” to the so-called Jewish problem can only be expulsion or extermination. I was never an exterminationist. Even at my worst, I told myself the peaceful answer was for us to live apart. I’ve since had to face that it was the same premise with a gentler ending. I do think we can all get along, but we must share the same values and be honest with each other.

People fighting antisemitism often explain it as jealousy. But from someone who was on the inside, it never was about any sort of jealousy. When a race realist looks at Jews in positions of power, he feels he’s lost sovereignty over a country his ancestors founded. If these Jews in positions of power are able to effect massive changes to his society that he deems negative, he’s naturally going to blame them.

Imagine if Arabs, who are a minority in Israel, dominated its media, academia, and financial system. Imagine if these Muslims promoted laws against Islamophobia and pursued special interests that harmed the majority of the Israelis. Even if those Arabs were benevolent, Israeli Jews would feel they no longer had sovereignty over their own land. That’s what I felt.

But that feeling rested on a premise I never examined: racial antisemites see all those Jewish names as a group with one will. The secular Zionist and the religious anti-Zionist, the senator and the donor funding his opponent.

So, it was never about jealousy but about sovereignty; not seeing the average American Jew as a fellow American made them an other, even when they suffered under the same rule of the political elite. The average Jew doesn’t get special benefits just because some of the elites are Jewish billionaires. That’s like thinking the average White person benefits just because there are White billionaires.

I was the kind of racial antisemite who was all-in. The frame I lived in predicted I’d be attacked, so every attack confirmed it. The boycott, the censorship, the label, the public example: every one of those confirmed exactly what I already believed about a powerful, coordinated group.

Shame only works on people who share your values. It works inside a community, on someone who cares what the people shaming him think. But an antisemite already sees Jews and Jewish organizations as the enemy, so their condemnation doesn’t register as shame. It registers as a badge of honor. The louder they condemned me, the more the people around me took it as proof I was over the target, and the more I believed it too. You can’t shame someone out of a movement whose values are defined against you.

When Kanye West’s antisemitic rants cost him Adidas and his other major deals, those were companies deciding they didn’t want their names next to his. Inside the movement, nobody saw it that way. They saw a billionaire silenced overnight, and they filed it as proof. When Elon Musk, after his fight with the ADL over advertisers, apologized publicly and then visited Israel and Auschwitz, antisemites said, “Look, even the richest man in the world has to bow to them.”

The label “anistemite” itself is being worn down, too. When Greta Thunberg, known for her anti-Israel activism, lands on the same top-ten antisemites list as Dan Bilzerian, the word stops meaning anything specific. She may be an anti-Zionist. Whether that makes her an antisemite is exactly the distinction a list like that waters down.

Anti-Zionism deserves to be confronted on its own terms. Once a state exists, with millions of people born there, calling for its dismantlement isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s a demand that those people lose their country. But when every anti-Zionist and every antisemite gets the same label, people inside the movement conclude the word just means “anyone Jews don’t like.” Then they stop listening when it’s used on someone who has actually earned it. I was someone who earned it. Diminishing the word doesn’t reduce antisemitism—it makes more antisemites.

What pulled me out wasn’t Holocaust lectures or shame. It was a conversation based on facts after all the attacks stopped and the dust settled.

When I told everyone I decided to abandon antisemitism in February of this year, Jake Turx left a comment on my post and asked to meet up. My initial plan was just to make peace with Jews and vanish, to go on and focus on philosophy and self-improvement. When he reached out, I was hesitant at first, but I decided a meet up couldn’t hurt, and I wanted to actually build bridges like I said I would.

We met up for coffee. He started by asking how I was feeling and how I was doing. Then we went through everything: Israel, 9/11, Gaza, and the conspiracy theories I still held. For about two hours, every topic we could think of about antisemitism was on the table. It was cordial the whole way through. He was never offended. He didn’t accept my claims, and he didn’t just deny them either. He asked, “Why do you think that? What makes you think that?”

This approach was the key. Think about it: how would the conversation have gone if Jake used shaming tactics and brought up the Holocaust? The old playbook would have driven me away. More importantly, he didn’t deny history as it’s actually recorded, including the uncomfortable parts, like Jewish overrepresentation among early communist leaders. He just dealt with the points. But he also taught me how those things also led to Jewish persecution in Russia, how religious Jews were treated, and other things I didn’t know.

I brought experience as an antisemite to the table. I told him about the hypocrisies and contradictions I’d caught in the JQ movement. The movement demanded that every Jew answer for the worst Jew and never held itself to that standard. Once I saw that the rule only ran in one direction, I couldn’t help but snap out of it.

That coffee led to my first podcast interview, on Living Lchaim with Yaakov Langer, with Jacob there on camera as the friend who introduced us. The episode reached a lot of people, and it led to more private conversations with both of them afterward. That’s when I really got to see these two religious Jews up close and how kind, forgiving, and honest they were. They weren’t arrogant. They weren’t supremacists. They were nothing like what I’d been taught they would be. In fact, we shared the same issues with the same people because we actually shared, for the most part, the same values.

This meeting didn’t have to take place, but it did. Part of it came from Jews who had a curiosity about me; the other part came from me wanting peace after 14 years of fighting with Jews. The conservation cost us nothing, and a bridge was built between peoples.

This meeting led to more conversations with more Jews, both in private and on other podcasts, with rabbis, and even making peace with former enemies, such as David Lange. Speaking to both American and Israeli Jews led me to learn more history about Israel/Palestine, bringing more nuance to the conflict, rather than the one-sided story I got after Oct 7.

So, peaceful and cordial conversations. That’s the approach I’m asking Jewish people and organizations to adopt.

Conversation only works if you can answer what you hear. When I was inside, most of what I believed about Jews came from a handful of claims passed around the Internet, antisemitic books I read, and figures in the movement I trusted. Almost nobody I knew had fact-checked any of them. Neither had I. I believed Jews were behind 9/11 for years without once opening the 9/11 Commission report. When I finally read it, after I had already left, what I found was al-Qaeda’s plot, documented in detail.

Take, for example, the various Talmud quotes that circulate online. Some are outright fabrications or misunderstandings, such as the claim that the Talmud allows marriage to a three-year-old. This is absolutely false and is easily debunked. But be honest about the hard parts, too. If you tell someone there’s nothing difficult in the Talmud and he finds one real passage, you’ve lost him, and you’ve confirmed his suspicion that you were hiding something. It’s far more convincing to say, “Yes, that line is real, here’s what it’s actually discussing, here’s how Jewish commentators have read it, and here’s why it doesn’t mean what you were told.”

Answer the claim; attack the belief, not the man holding it, and do it with compassion. That takes a particular kind of patience: knowing who you’re talking to and answering false claims without hostility. It can be learned, and I think it’s worth cultivating. Someone who has been told for years that Jews will try to destroy him has nowhere to put a Jew who simply answers his question. If Jews run away from debates and refuse to engage with antisemites, it seems like they have something to hide, which fits the “subversive, lying Jew” trope.

I’m not saying conversation works on everyone. Against those who truly want to harm Jewish people, defend yourselves with everything you lawfully can. When people treated my rhetoric as a threat, they were right to. Although I knew I would never harm a Jew, my rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of someone who meant it. But not everyone who says those things is that person.

I’ve tried to live by what I’m asking of you. When you leave a movement, like I did with the JQ, the people you left have a lot to say about you, and a lot of it is ugly. I haven’t answered any of it, and I don’t intend to. I know how that frame works from the inside, and contempt can’t break it. If I answered them the way they expected, they would hate me more, and it would only reinforce their beliefs. That is why the only thing I’ve been doing is posting the facts I’ve discovered and ignoring all the personal attacks and lies being spread about me.

There are many people I’ve turned into antisemites who I still want to reach. If they’re ever going to leave it, it will be through the same kind of conversation that reached me: honest, calm, with no covering up uncomfortable history and no excuses for anyone’s bad behavior. The order matters. De-escalate first, debunk the claims, and give the person room to deradicalize, because destroying the ones who could still be reached turns them into the ones who can’t.

I changed when the dust settled and the people across from me were willing to talk. If the censorship and the attacks had never stopped, when would I have been calm enough to even consider that I was wrong?

It’s been several months since I’ve written on here because I deleted my previous Substack. I wanted to get away from the old crowd completely, even though deleting it cost me thousands. I grew tired of feeling obligated to hold on to something I had to let go, even if I was getting paid for it. The same was the case with my Rumble channel and my Shopify store. No amount of money was worth being connected to anyone from that world. It all had to go.

So why come back on here?

In the last three months, I have been sitting in silence, observing everything being said about me by former allies, former friends, and even former enemies. This period of silence was necessary for my personal growth, to learn how to endure nonstop attacks, to not care about being misunderstood or or even hated for the wrong reasons, and to endure the loss of having to accept that I had been in the wrong place for decades. Watching everyone come up with all sorts of narratives about me on their own was very interesting to see, because I refused to explain myself to anyone, so their imaginations ran wild.

Those who did their due diligence would have learned the logical progression that led me out of the JQ movement from the six interviews I did. But most people, feeling betrayed or having personal grievances toward me, especially the grifters I exposed, took the opportunity to spread lies and false narratives without pushback. The old me would have tried to refute every single attack, but I didn’t care anymore. I let these lies and false narratives spread as far as possible, acting as filters to remove everyone who fell for them from my life.

Learning to be silent was one half of the healing process.

The other half began during my appearance on the Jeremy Boreing Show. Jeremy suggested that I go back in time and reevaluate my beliefs, which he believed all stemmed from the combined trauma of 9/11 and the Iraq War. I left the show with that idea in mind, which led me to go back and reexamine everything.

After five more interviews with different people, I saw different perspectives I refused to look at for 14 years. This new information opened new doors—doors that I didn’t bother to open because I thought the only things behind them were lies. It was only after I opened those doors that I realized the room I was living in was also a lie.

For 20 years I have been ashamed of my service. The shame began with learning that the Iraq War was based on lies, that we were the bad guys. When I learned 9/11 was an inside job, this only made everything worse.

From 2006 to 2026, I was so anti-war that I basically became anti-American. I believed Al Qaeda was a CIA creation that did 9/11 on behest of Israel, the Jews, and special interests. When Bin Laden was killed in 2011, I thought it was just another lie to justify our fake war on terror. I thought the same when Trump claimed al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019, because I thought ISIS was another creation of the CIA/Mossad. Essentially, I believed all terrorists were just our puppets that we used as proxies to dominate the poor and innocent Arabs in the Middle East.

My trauma and guilt made me the perfect propagandist, not only for the JQ movement, but also what I later came to learn as the Red-Green Alliance.

A few weeks ago, I realized that every time I went viral over the last four years—whether it was Boom Boom Tel Aviv, my video on Aaron Bushnell, or my viral video on Russia/Ukraine—it was always because of influencers from the Red-Green Alliance.

I also noticed figures from the Red-Green Alliance were lying about all kinds of things—Bibi being dead; airstrikes that never happened; and knowingly promoting that Israel killed Charlie Kirk when I knew several of these figures who told me they didn’t believe it, but they pushed it to hurt Israel. Just like figures in the JQ movement, these supposed pious and honest Muslims, who pride themselves in never lying, were lying just as much as everyone else. When I started calling them out, they started lying about me. When I disagreed on Gaza being a genocide by definition, this was the final straw. I noticed what these people really were, and I saw they were never allies of the West, America, or even Whites; they were just using us for their anti-Zionist and anti-Western agenda.

Further research led me to learn about the anti-Zionist psyops the Soviet Union ran against Israel after the Six-Day War, from 1967 to 1988. The goal was to turn the Arab nations into antisemitic and anti-Zionist fronts against Israel. I started to see a connection between these pro-Iran, pro-Palestine, and pro-Russia accounts. I even started to see a connection between neo-Nazis, White nationalists, and pro-Russia accounts. I realized the Red-Green Alliance had shaped itself into the Red-Green-Brown (Nazis) Alliance, and I was unknowingly part of it since Oct 7th.

Once I began to call out this alliance, suddenly all masks fell off from my so-called Muslim friends and allies. Finally, they realized the stupid American is of no use to them.

The suicidal guilt that drove me to be anti-Zionist, anti-America, and anti-West had died off because I realized Americans like me, especially war veterans, were being weaponized against our own country with shame and guilt from our service, while these other countries, running proxy wars and invasions, were not checked by these figures, nor did they promote any guilt or shame.

Just a few days ago, I read, for the first time in 20 years, the 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary, the 28 declassified pages of the 2002 Joint Inquiry Commission on 9/11, and even reviewed the internal dialogue of the Bush administration’s reasons for invading Iraq. Once I realized 9/11 wasn’t an inside job, my heart broke. This time it wasn’t just a sense of betrayal but also guilt—how many other Americans did I make anti-American? Did any of my rhetoric drive any of my fellow servicemen to suicide?

At the same time my heart broke, the 20 years of extreme shame and guilt were released from my body. Although extremely anxious, I froze for a few moments. I stood there in silence. A feeling washed over me. This was the near instant death of the shame and guilt. I've grown so accustomed to betrayal over the years—from friends, from allies, and from people in life in general—that this was just another betrayal like the rest.

But a new feeling began to emerge. Something I haven’t felt in decades: a form of pride.

I realized my signing up for the Marine Corps was not based on a lie at all. My desire to go fight for my country was not in vain at all. Although the Iraq War was certainly propagandized and had special interests behind it, we should still ensure all terrorists and enemy regimes get the memo: anyone who attacks America will be crushed, and this chaotic region will be brought to heel. That was probably part of the Bush administration’s plan, and it didn’t go as well as they thought. Regardless, this pride in me was also accompanied by a new passion: I see another enemy, similar to the ones who attacked us on 9/11. All anti-Western ideologies and forces, even if they didn’t attack us, absolutely want to attack us and would do so if they could.

Since making peace with Jews months prior, escaping antisemitic extremism, getting to know them, and putting that chapter behind me, I had already felt much better. But this reconnection to a part of myself I had suppressed due to enemy guilt propaganda reignited in me a patriotism for my country. I now clearly saw all the propaganda, all the moving parts working against us, even from the so-called pro-White types who call our troops ZOGbots, who paradoxically always brag about how great our race was at imperialism and colonialism, but for some reason, we shouldn’t be in the Middle East, because that’s immoral.

Even these Nietzschean-minded types have been softened by the Red-Green Alliance propaganda, thinking Americans have no interests at all in the Middle East because they have been so consumed by antisemitism; anything to do with Jews is always bad. I guess they believe it’s much better that Iran get nukes and run the region, that Putin takes all of Ukraine, and that China absorbs Taiwan, just to hurt the Jews and Israel. They have lost complete sight of the Grand Chessboard that is geopolitics and have merged with these voices, becoming part of the RGB Alliance.

But I have awakened from this trance and reject all of these voices.

I say, no! America must never stop being the great superpower that it is. We must not allow ourselves to be demoralized, to call ourselves “stupid Americans” or “ZOGbots” or anything else our enemies have guilted us into calling ourselves. We must maintain our military power in every region we possibly can, because the people telling us not to are our enemies. These jihadists and authoritarian governments are not better for the world. They cannot police themselves, let alone their neighbors. They lack the might and the minds that we have. That’s why the only way to destroy America is to convince Americans to destroy themselves.

I used to be one of these types of anti-America Americans, falling for this suicidal, guilt propaganda, but no more! America may not be perfect, but she is still the best country in the world, and I'm done being ashamed of being an American.