Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an author whose book The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is the most in-depth exploration of the QAnon movement and its utter insanity. In his next book, Jewish Space Lasers due out in September, he tackles the far-ranging historic antisemitic conspiracies that centered around the Rothschild family (no relation) from the middle of the 18th century and persist through today (to the point that sitting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene would even accuse the family of funding secret space lasers that were used to start the California wildfires in 2018). I called Mike and we chatted for an hour about the conspiracy plague infesting the United States and how completely enmeshed it is with antisemitism. Mike has written extensively on the topic of conspiracies in the United States for myriad publications, and has even testified before Congress on the matter.
David Flomberg: Let’s start with a little bit of your background on antisemitism, and how its growth in this nation over the last several years kind of became the focus of your work and how you got how you landed here.
Mike Rothschild: Sure. Well, I’ve been writing about conspiracy theories for a long time. Sort of. I started it about 2012, right at that time where some of this stuff was starting to filter into the mainstream because you start to have Donald Trump talking about Obama’s birth certificate. And suddenly there was this awakening of people who found somebody who said the things that they only thought. So you started to have the growth of this mainstreaming of this movement, and you started to have the growth of a lot of these medical conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. And we just got deeper and deeper and deeper into this. And as I started writing more and more about it, I really came to realize that almost all of the modern conspiracy theory industry is based on antisemitism, and most antisemitism is based on conspiracy theories. So it became natural for me to really dive into that in a deeper and more archival way. And of course, my last name, you know, is only just part of it. You know, growing up, nobody thought I was rich. Nobody thought we were part of that family. You know, we lived in a split-level tract house in the Chicago suburbs. We didn’t have a yacht in our backyard. But when I started to really write about this stuff, I started getting people who would respond to things with like, Oh, of course a Rothschild would say that, or, you know, you’re just defending your family. So it was all of these strands of different things I’d been working on for a long time. And I really saw that the rise in open and overt attacks on Jewish people in Jewish institutions had really ramped up with the rise of Trump. So it really felt like the right time to put all of this together.
David Flomberg: When you started peeling this stuff back — this is a question I get frequently, from friends who mean well, who don’t really understand why antisemitism has persisted so ubiquitously over the last 2000 years. I guess we could start by blaming Constantine and work forward from there. But how do you respond to that question when people are like, ‘I just don’t understand why antisemitism was so pervasive and why it’s existed in this way for so long. How do you respond when that question comes up? I’m sure it does.
Mike Rothschild: Oh, it does all the time. I talk about it in the book, too. So there’s always going to be a need in a society to scapegoat an outgroup. So you have a group of people who have different customs, who have a different language, you have a different style of dress. And particularly when that group finds a great deal of success, particularly financial success, and has a tendency to keep a lot of that success in their own community. You know, historically Jewish communities would lend to each other, they would borrow from each other, their philanthropy would be concentrated in their own community. So there really came to be a perception of Jewish communities, even in major American cities, as not really ‘part of us.’ They’re the outgroup. ‘They are ruthless’ is one of the terms that gets thrown around a lot. So when you have a group of outsiders who are like that, it’s very natural to blame them for things that go wrong. And as we’ve seen in history, antisemitism tends to cycle up and down. You know, sometimes there is a group that is more susceptible to blame. So in the 1950s, it’s communists. In the post-9/11 era, it’s Muslims. But even that is often tied in with Judaism. So when you would have some of the hysteria during the Red Scare, it would be tied to Judeo-Bolshevism or the “Jewish funders at the very top of the communist architecture who were funding the infiltrators being sent by Moscow.” So there’s always a way to tie it back to Jews. And after a certain point it just takes on a life of its own and you don’t even need to really know any of the history. You certainly don’t need to know any anything about, you know, Middle Ages money lending to blame. So you’ve always had this kind of cultural depiction of wealthy, powerful Jews as these kind of string pullers and power brokers. And after a while, that just becomes accepted fact that nobody really knows or wants to know where it came from or how they’re being manipulated by propagandists when they spread this stuff.
David Flomberg: And that’s that’s a great point. Did you read the ADL’s 2022 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents?
Mike Rothschild; Yes, I did.
David Flomberg: One of the things that really jumped out to me — and it’s a problem here in Colorado because the Goyim Defense League has a strong foothold here — was that propaganda has been their biggest weapon of choice and the increase in propaganda incidents, something like a thousandfold from 2021 to 2022. I think you’ve touched on this in your previous work about how it’s so easy to disseminate propaganda now and how, you know, social media has been a piece of that. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the propaganda side and why that has been so effective?
Mike Rothschild: Sure. A lot of this is spread through social media and takes advantage of the ease and the lack of barriers to entry that something like social media has. And conspiracy theorists have always excelled at adapting to new technology. I write about it in Jewish Space Lasers, how in the various early days of the internet as we know it, in 1994 and 1995, when most people didn’t even have an email address yet, there was already a vibrant conspiracy community in places like Usenet and, on message boards. And of course, there’s already a huge amount of antisemitism there. But what they are able to do is they’re able to latch onto these societal perceptions that Jews are overrepresented in banking or finance or politics or entertainment and play on the very baseline American fears that someone is getting something over on us, someone is exploiting us, somebody is too powerful, somebody is too rich. And that somebody is very easy to blame on Jewish people. You know, this is a very old hatred, but it’s repurposed in ways that seem very new, very cutting edge, and plays on these fears that people have had for a long time.
David Flomberg: Yeah. That jumped out at me early on with QAnon and how much it mirrored the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was like a word-for-word recasting. A reboot that wasn’t really veiled at all, but written for someone who has no sense of history or has never heard of the book.
Mike Rothschild: Right.
David Flomberg: I could see how that could how that could start to ring a bell for them.
Mike Rothschild: Yeah. And the Protocols functions in much the same way that the Q-drops [Ed: QAnon originated as a series of anonymous posts on the message board 4chan, before moving to another board, 8chan] later would. They are extremely vague and also extremely specific, so they can kind of be about whatever you want them to be about. And they’re very difficult to falsify because they’re not really about anything concrete, you know? Q really took off when the Q-drops stopped being very concrete, specific claims that Hillary Clinton will be arrested at 10:45 A.M. on October 31st, because obviously that’s either going to happen or it’s not going to happen and it’s probably not going to happen. But when your gospel is these sort of vague and cryptic claims and these riddles and codes, then you could keep people spinning on that forever. And I think that’s one of the things that’s contributed to the success of the Protocols is that they are malleable enough to be translated and recontextualized for dozens of different cultures.
David Flomberg: And it’s really interesting when you think about the people who adapted. I mean, the Dearborn Independent and Henry Ford just plunged in and then his reach was able to really propagate that stuff in such a prolific way across the nation.
Mike Rothschild: They gave away hundreds of thousands of copies of it, and they sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. These books are enormously popular. And we we think of them as sort of fringe nutcases, you know, printing pamphlets and handing them out on street corners. But some of these books sold millions of copies There’s an enormous appetite for this material. The people who create the next generation of these materials, they understand how this stuff works and they’re excellent at monetizing it.
David Flomberg: That’s the thing that jumped out to me, too. One of the things that’s driven me a little nuts around the way the journalism industry has shifted here is, you know, credible organizations like The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal throwing up paywalls to offset their revenue needs and and be viable, compared to OANN and Infowars and Breitbart and Newsmax, who are giving it away, completely free — because why would I pay for one thing when I’m getting my news from somewhere else giving it to me for free? What’s your take on how that has proliferated and how that’s contributed to the problem?
Mike Rothschild: Oh, it’s a huge part of it. The conspiracy theorist materials will always be extremely accessible, almost always free, very easy to share, have very little barrier to entry. Whereas, you know, legitimate news needs to have advertising and things to pay writers. It needs to pay editors. When you have a substack and you’re just putting up, you know, blog posts about conspiracy theories, it doesn’t really cost you anything. But you have people who will pay you for it anyway. So many of these sites…They would give this stuff away all the time. They would give away the pamphlets, they’d give away the books and sell them extremely cheaply, and they would make a huge amount of money in other ways. So there are always going to be people who really excel at monetizing lies that other people want to believe. Unfortunately, the legitimate news industry just can’t move that quickly and doesn’t have that kind of lack of shame.
David Flomberg: For sure. That was compounded for me as an armchair historian, knowing the Weimar Republic’s embracing of “lugenpresse” and then Trump recasting it as “fake news.” I’ve watched with great dismay how he’s been so successful in that drumbeat that it doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you are now. I’ve seen people on the right and the left who are now convinced that all press is just lying to them all the time, no matter who it is, where it’s coming from. They lump them all together. Then you start to see it fall under some of those conspiracy theories where, oh, well, you know, sure, the Koch brothers are on one side doing their thing. But, you know, George Soros is on the other side. He’s doing his thing. Clearly, they’re the same. And then it’s a Venn diagram of antisemitism that becomes one circle pretty quick.
Mike Rothschild: Yeah. And that feeling of “everybody is lying to you except me” is extremely powerful. One of the big conspiracy gurus I write about in this book is Bill Cooper, who wrote the early 1990s paranoia classic Behold a Pale Horse. And he also had a radio show. And what he would often say on his show is, “don’t trust the media, don’t trust the politicians, don’t trust anybody, don’t even trust me. Just think for yourself and come up with your own ideas and come up with your own answers.” There is something really powerful about being told the only person you can really trust is you and there are maybe a few sources along the way that you can rely on to help push you in the right direction. Ultimately, everybody creates their own reality. We’re seeing that now enormously writ large, where you now have people who just live in these alternate universes where what they want to be real is real and everything else is fake. If I don’t want it to be true, it’s not true. There’s an enormous amount of denial in so many of these communities. It’s based on this idea that “I am the arbiter of what is true for myself.” A lot of conspiracy theory press seizes on that very efficiently.
David Flomberg: You raise a good point there because it reminds me of — I forget where I read it, maybe The Atlantic or maybe Vanity Fair — they did a piece on Rugged American Individualism and its contribution to this problem. You know, they talk about the fact that in this country, culturally, there’s this kind of John Ford-movie take on the Old West mentality of, “we did it on our own without any help and we can create our own world and create our own reality.” It has led us to a place in this society where you can literally have a subgroup of people who embrace the idea that the world is flat, this narrative that they can just create anything they want to in their own reality.
Mike Rothschild: Yeah. And we’ve become a society — almost entirely in the West — based on this idea that “you can’t tell me what to do. You can’t tell me what’s real, you can’t protect me from myself.” So we all sort of carve out our individual worlds and in those worlds, whatever we want to be true is true. What we come back to so often is that there’s a powerful force that is working against us. I think so much in conspiracy theory belief is wanting to believe that there is somebody in charge, somebody is running things. And even if that somebody is pure evil — and they usually are — there is at least some kind of plan afoot. If we speak up too much, if we start pushing back against that plan, then those powerful people will come after us. And the things that have gone wrong in our lives are not because of our bad decisions or just bad luck. It’s because there is somebody at the top who is afraid of us and they have to get rid of us. It almost becomes like a security blanket of “I’m important enough to matter to this very powerful cabal at the very top.” And that’s a lot of what powers things like QAnon is this a need to have powerful enemies and be important enough to matter to these people.
David Flomberg: Yeah, that’s a great point. On Jewish Space Lasers — obviously, the title comes from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s insane mutterings. But can you talk a little bit about what planted the seed for where you’re going with this book?
Mike Rothschild: Sure. There wasn’t one kind of incident or, you know, message I received that sparked this. But I was definitely curious as to what is it about the Rothschilds that has so fired the imaginations of conspiracy theorists and also legitimate writers? You know, you see all kinds of Rothschild references in very straightforward books. You know, they’re referenced in economics books, history books. There’s this sense that the Rothschilds have had this enormous power in our society. And I really wanted to know, is that actually true? Because everything you see about the family today is that they’re very diffused. Rothschild companies are not run by Rothschilds anymore. The family has long been surpassed in terms of wealth and power by certainly the American oligarchs of the early 20th century, you know, JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. But, you know, certainly now, there’s much more money in tech billionaires and Bitcoin than in any Rothschild. There are no Rothschilds on the Forbes richest list anymore. I really wanted to kind of separate how the myths have driven the perception of this family as opposed to what this family actually is, and then tie that into the conspiracy theory portrayal of them. One of the things I discovered really early on is that the Rothschilds never really had any kind of footprint in the United States. They found the U.S. to be sort of incomprehensible. The heirs of the family really didn’t want anything to do with it. So I really wanted to know why do we spend so much time talking about a family that has such a fairly small footprint in the United States? And why do we see their tropes recycled over and over again in people like George Soros? So I really wanted to figure out how we got to where we are by going back to the beginning of this family and trying to trace how the legends about them started in the first place and what we can learn about that.
David Flomberg: Were you able to trace that storyline into today and how things have kind of changed especially in the last, I don’t know, six, eight months? Or was the book probably already at press by the time the whole Kanye “Ye” West thing broke?
Mike Rothschild: Oh, no, I was able to get that in the book. You know, one of the actually one of the great things about Melville House is that they are able to work really fast. So I’m actually just finishing copy edits on the book. You know, just making some final tweaks on it. So I was able to put in things like Kanye’s Infowars interview and I was able to make references to some of the more recent antisemitic events. And what I’ve been noticing is that as Islamophobia has really receded — we’re now more than 20 years past 9/11 — we’ve turned back to the Jews as the subject of our scapegoating. And what I’m seeing now that’s really different from a lot of the anti-Jewish sentiments, even of the 1990s, is there was a sense in a lot of that material that “we don’t hate all the Jews. The Jews are a wonderful people. We just distrust these certain Jews. It’s just these really rich and powerful ones. And the Jewish community should hate them too, because they’ve brought all this misery down upon all Jews.” … What’s different now is that you don’t have that kind of equivocation anymore. It really is now, “Yeah, well, we got to get rid of all them. All the Jews are a problem. They all need to be dealt with. So you see that in this latest generation of kind of young, clean cut fascists where they’re not couching this at all in any kind of “not all Jews” language. It really is all Jews. And that’s a difference that I’ve noticed that I really was able to hit really hard in the book.
David Flomberg: Did you have a chance to explore Zionism and how that has become kind of a replacement word for “Jew” on the left over the last few years?
Mike Rothschild: I really didn’t want to get too much into the issue of Zionism because it’s such an enormous topic that it, you know, you can write entire volumes about individual time periods. You know, the Rothschilds had a very split opinion on Zionism. Some of them were very supportive of it and others were not supportive of it at all. There were Rothschilds who did not want a Jewish homeland. When you’re talking about the Rothschilds and Zionism, it’s very complicated and there’s a lot of back story there. I was really trying to focus on the myth of the Rothschilds rather than the actual reality of the Rothschilds. But I definitely talk about how we both on the left and the right substitute in various euphemisms when we mean “Jew.” So when certain people talk about Israel or Zionism, they just mean “Jewish people.” When certain people use terms like “globalist” or “European bank” or “international finance,” what they almost always mean is “Jews.” And of course when you hear “Soros,” what you’re hearing is “Jewish money.” You know, when you talk about Soros-backed prosecutors, what they mean is “Jews are pulling the strings on things.”
David Flomberg: And interestingly, Soros didn’t even contribute to Bragg’s campaign.
Mike Rothschild: Yeah. And it doesn’t matter. That’s the thing- the Rothschilds are linked to so many things that they had absolutely nothing to do with. You know, you talk about something like the Federal Reserve. There are countless memes and authors who talk about the Rothschilds founding the Federal Reserve to take control of American money. The Rothschilds had nothing to do with the Federal Reserve founding. They had virtually no role in American banking at that point. You know, there was very little Jewish presence at all in the early incarnation of the Federal Reserve. But it’s a much better story if you just take these wealthy string-pullers who we’ve already blamed for a century of shenanigans and just lump them in with this. “Well, if they did these other things, why wouldn’t they do this, too?”
David Flomberg: Get out your crystal ball here. What do you see happening in the next 5-10 years in the United States when it comes to antisemitism, when it comes to conspiracy theories and how things are going to develop.
Mike Rothschild: Well, I think a lot of it is going to depend on the 2024 election. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it is going to depend on the future of social media. You know, we’ve seen the monopolistic way that the social media companies are run has been enormously fruitful for cranks and conspiracy theorists and antisemites. You know, we saw this in the run-up to the 2020 election. You know, places like Twitter absolutely allowed movements like QAnon to flourish with virtually no oversight. And, you know, we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg openly admit that Facebook did not pull down Alex Jones videos because they didn’t want to be seen as too censorious of conservatives. So a lot of this is going to depend on whether or not there are some actual rules and some actual guardrails put into social media. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. So I think as long as we don’t have those things, these movements are always going to flourish in the mainstream. I mean, they’re always going to flourish on the fringes. There’s always going to be people creating their own platforms, their own methods of distribution, but they’re not going to be quite as mainstream as things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have been. So I think a lot of that is going to depend on what the social media companies do, how things continue to progress in the election, and whether or not there is some kind of other unpredictable event. You know, we saw with COVID for a moment that anti-Asian sentiment really spiked and then that really started to die down. And we got back to antisemitism as usual. And of course the Jews were also linked to COVID. There are all kinds of theories about the Rothschilds and Soros starting COVID-19 or funding the vaccine. But you saw in those very early days, a real spike in anti-Asian hatred and that wasn’t really foreseeable. But then it started to die down in its intensity as this new wave of antisemitism cropped up. So I think it’s going to get worse and it’s going to get more mainstream unless something comes along to temporarily replace Jews as the most prolific scapegoats. Then we’ll probably get back to business as usual once that dies down. So unfortunately, I think what’s most likely to happen is more of this cycling up and down. We’ll go after Jews for a while and then there will be some other group that we’ll go after. But then eventually we’ll find our way back to the Jews again.
David Flomberg: The 2024 election is definitely going to be emblematic of where the country’s overall sentiment is. But one of the things that’s been really concerning to me is the really ubiquitous infiltration of the fringe mindset in local politics — from school boards to state houses and state legislatures. And that shows no sign of that letting up from, you know, from Congress and the Matt Gaetzes and Lauren Boeberts and Marjorie Taylor Greenes to people like Wendy Rogers in Arizona and Tom Tancredo here in Colorado. Do you think that we can pull back from that? Do you think that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and now we’ve got this kind of run-amuck monster that is just going to continue growing?
Mike Rothschild: Yeah, I think unfortunately, it’s going to continue growing. You know, there’s always been those sort of cranks in local politics. You know, every city council had the one guy who showed up to the city council meeting and had his one minute where he could complain about fluoride or, you know, chemtrails or whatever it is. I saw that even in researching the Rothschilds. I found the minutes of a Chicago police oversight board where a guy shows up and just starts complaining about the Rothschilds setting the forest fires in California. And he gets his one minute and he’s told to sit down now and that’s it. So that sentiment has always existed in those people who just need somebody to listen to them and pay attention to their grievances. But now they can go viral. So we can have that person who stands up at the school board meeting screaming about transgenderism. And it’s not confined to one room. It gets millions of views when the video goes viral. And a lot of that is people spreading it around to make fun of it. But you’re still spreading it around. And sometimes those people end up in bigger venues. They end up getting interviewed by Steve Bannon and they end up on Fox News. So you have something that’s very local, suddenly becoming a national talking point, and it’s spread around in part by kind of unwitting people who just want to make fun of it. We need to get a handle on how we spread these things around. And I think so much of this depends not on not platforming it, but on how we do that. So things like not sharing a video, but maybe taking a screenshot of it. Not sharing the latest deranged tweet by the Arizona secretary of state to build up his viral potential because they really dine on how many views they get and how many impressions and how many retweets and shares. We have to be careful about how we share this information. You saw this a lot in 2014, 2015 with things like Agenda 21. You had people showing up at city council meetings or town planning commissions screaming about “how dare you want to put in a bike lane and tear down our golf course and we’re going to fight the Soros-backed agenda!” It turns a very global conspiracy into a battle in your backyard over how long you can run your sprinkler. It’s taking these very large problems and making them very personal. And that’s very compelling to people when they feel like there is a global cabal running things. Now it’s so powerful that they want to restrict how many steaks I can grill in a week. We see that in the gas stoves hysteria and all this stuff that’s fueling the conservative culture wars. All of this stuff is getting tied together and it’s being exploited and monetized by major networks like Fox News. You find an enormous amount of pay dirt.
David Flomberg: What’s your opinion on the RESTRICT Act? [Ed: The RESTRICT Act is a federal bill designed to described as “address technology-based threats to American security.” While not mentioned by name, it’s seen as focused on Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok]
Mike Rothschild: I get very twitchy when the federal government wants to start banning things and doesn’t quite understand the reason why they’re banning them or understand the technology at play. You know, I did watch some of those TikTok hearings, and it was appalling how little it seemed a lot of the Republicans really understood this technology and they didn’t understand how people use it. I mean, certainly there needs to be protections in place for something like China wanting to harvest the data of TikTok users. That’s a real problem, but I think we can find ways to come up with a better solution than just outright banning something that 100 million Americans use. Most just use it for recreational purposes and don’t have any connection to Chinese intelligence. I think we need to understand how these things work and how people use them and make them safer and more and integrate them more into daily life rather than just wholesale banning them. Because now you’re driving more people to being interested in it. The lack of knowledge that a lot of members of Congress seem to have about how social media and the internet works is really appalling to me and indicates either just an unwillingness to unlearn it, or bad staff work, or just that they’re looking to score points with their constituents and get on Fox News. It’s just a huge part of this problem.
David Flomberg: That’s an interesting point. How much of that do you think is theater when it comes to the Right — how much is really just cynical, “I’m just doing what I can to do to toe the party line to get the votes,” rather than, “I actually believe the nonsense I’m spouting?”
Mike Rothschild: I can tell you firsthand from having testified in Congress last year on election misinformation. There are Democrats who are extremely interested in these problems, and there are Republicans who are extremely interested in finding soundbites that they can use on social media against liberals. The questions that I got from Republicans had almost nothing to do with what I was talking about. I had to stay very much on target, very much on task- very short answers. Just say, ‘that’s not in my purview. That’s not what I came here to talk about.’ They want to find the “gotcha” moments. They’re not interested in the problems. They’re not interested in the solutions. That’s why I think we really can’t look to this Congress as any kind of an arbiter of solutions. We certainly can’t look at the tech companies because they’re not going to solve the problem they created. We have to do it ourselves in how we use these technologies and how we use these platforms. It’s a lot more complicated and it takes a lot longer. But unfortunately, with the kind of divisions that we have now in politics, that seems like the only real solution.
David Flomberg: If you were going to wave a magic wand, what else other than what you’ve already stated, comes to mind in terms of solutions for dealing with antisemitism?
Mike Rothschild: I think a lot of people still don’t really know any Jewish people or maybe know one or two. There’s just an outsized perception of what Jewish people are able to accomplish. This idea that Jews run everything and, you know, Jews have controlled world government for thousands of years — then why do terrible things keep happening to Jews? And of course, the conspiracy theorists have their own idea: “Well, you know, the ones who are in power, they’re not real Jews. They are fake Jews, and they’re just exploiting the real ones.” So I think really getting to know each other’s cultures and each other’s fears and hopes. So much of this stuff is really universal. So much energy toward Jewish people really just stems from this idea that they are outsiders and they have no real home and they have dual loyalties to the United States and to Israel or to the US and the Jewish population at large. We really need to work hard at pointing out that Jewish people just the same as everybody else. There are Jews born into poverty. There are Jews who live lives of disappointment. They’re just the same as everybody else. Unfortunately, these stereotypes are so powerful and get so much play in the media that we really lose sight of that. So I think finding the common ground that we all have is really the first step to dispelling some of these stereotypes and kind of finally putting these things to bed after thousands of years.
David Flomberg: Yeah, it’s a good point you make. That was a discussion I had with some friends who said, “Oh, Kanye, doesn’t matter. But there are 15 million Jews on the planet and he’s got 30 million followers right on his own.
Mike Rothschild: Yes. I think that idea of “I’ll just ignore it. Just let him bloviate. Let him hang himself” — that doesn’t work anymore. The whole idea of “don’t give it oxygen, you know, don’t feed the trolls,” we’ve seen what happens when we ignore these kinds of movements. They just get bigger and they fester and they suck more people in. There’s no pushback because everybody else thought it was stupid and ignored it. I think we have to push back against the major influencers who are saying this kind of stuff. We have to do it in a responsible way. We have to do it in a way that doesn’t platform the lies even more. But we have to push back at it because if we just ignore it, if we just let somebody like that just go on and on and on, they’re just going to pull more people in because nobody’s pushing back. Nobody’s offering an alternative. Nobody’s saying, “Hey, that’s not okay. You can’t say that. You can’t go on a major radio show or livestream like Infowars and talk about how much you love Hitler.” We can’t just pretend it’s going to go away if we ignore it because it never has.
David Flomberg: Yeah, very true. Final question: What would be the most important single takeaway you would want people to have once they get the chance to read this book?
Mike Rothschild: Oh, that’s a great question. I think the takeaway is that these signs of antisemitism are kind of everywhere, and they’re so built into our culture that we don’t even really see them anymore. And a lot of them can come off as benign or even complimentary: such as ideas of Jewish business wisdom and Jews having a sixth sense for money and Jews kind of concentrating on their own communities and Jews running European banking or running American entertainment. These things are so ingrained into how so many people look at Jewish life that I think we don’t even notice them anymore. And if we do notice them, we don’t see anything about that because, oh, “it’s just common knowledge or it’s just folk wisdom.” I think the thing I’d want to take away more than anything is that all this stuff comes from somewhere. All of this stuff has been meticulously built up, heavily monetized, ruthlessly exploited. And when we allow it to go on, we just ensure that it’s going to get passed on to another generation.
