Fake News, Real Jews

By Abe Greenwald

A decade ago, the country was in a state of outrage over the rise of “fake news.” Today, few seem to want any other kind. 

Technology has enabled us to manipulate so much of our daily landscape. But reality itself remains stubbornly inelastic. This fact, like having to wait in line, has become an intolerable anachronism. So we go in search of alternate realities more suitable to our tastes. 

The options are overwhelming. For years, we’ve been awash in false information of many sorts: AI slop, foreign ops, anonymous rumor, conspiracy theory, dishonest journalism. More recently, though, it seems as if all of these have found their inevitable way toward harmonization. So the lie is broadly reinforced but bears no identifiable point of origin. It lives on as a free-floating narrative, hovering over real-world events.

Here's a recent stunner. A new NewsGuard/YouGov poll asked Americans about each of the three attempted assassinations on Donald Trump’s life. “For each attempted assassination,” the poll found, “a majority of Americans said either that it was staged or that they were not sure—averaging 54 percent across all three.” Only 38 percent believe that all three were legitimate.

It's not a secret that America is in the throes of a major trust crisis. But that’s really half the story. Americans are at once militantly untrusting and hopelessly credulous. It all depends on whether the story they’re told supports or undermines their position. 

More often than not, given the dominant ideological trends of our day, this means rejecting the simple truth and believing the fantastical lie. It means denying the assassination attempts we’ve all seen, to one degree or another, with our own eyes and buying a vague cloak-and-dagger fantasy about a coordinated false-flag diversion. 

But that’s not all it means. 

The paradoxical combination of popular distrust and widespread gullibility has always been a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. Suspicion and superstition are mutually reinforcing, and both are elemental to Jew-hatred. So it also means dismissing the self-recorded savagery of Hamas and believing the impossible and unverified tale of dogs trained by the IDF to rape Palestinians. It means hearing calls to globalize the intifada and deeming them peaceful cries for liberation. It means seeing a man’s Nazi tattoo and refuting that the man has Nazi sympathies. It means witnessing synagogues come under attack on a weekly basis and declaring that Islamophobia is a national scourge. It means interpreting population growth in Gaza as a genocide.

For anti-Semites and those they’ve recruited, this is the alternate reality that suits their tastes. It justifies the hatred in their heart. And in the minds of an ever less discerning American public, it’s becoming the “truth”—which incentivizes suppliers. This is why it’s where the AI slop, foreign ops, anonymous rumor, conspiracy theory, and dishonest journalism are most likely to harmonize. When it comes to Israel, they’re indistinguishable.  

For Jews, this is the virtual reality overlaying our real one. It’s the false narrative we wake up to each morning. It floats overhead, growing larger and fouler, casting a darker shadow on our lives every day. For us, reality has never felt more undeniably real.  

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.