Bigfoot. Lizard people. Paul is dead, and Elvis isn't. Aliens. It's the stuff conspiracy theories traffic in, and it's mostly harmless.

The outbreak of Jewish cemetery vandalism and more than 100 bomb threats made against Jewish community centers? Anything but.

Spend enough time lurking around the conspiracy community's tangled webs of red string, the lines lead back to a single "culprit:" a Jewish shadow government bent on world domination. This anti-Semitic fear-mongering held sway a thousand years ago, when Christians portrayed Jews as baby-eating well-poisoners spreading the Black Plague. Since then, the story hasn't changed. But every time an innovative communication technology emerges, anti-Semitism has surged to fill these new channels with hate.

Today, certain dark corners of the internet obsess over the falsehood that liberal Jewish billionaire investor George Soros is the puppeteer behind everything from the International Women's Day strike to Black Lives Matter to Trump protesters to the European refugee crisis to the debunked DC-pizzeria-based child sex ring scandal known as "Pizza Gate."

None of these claims have any truth. But whenever paranoid populists get ahold of new media tech, the Jewish puppet master conspiracy theory reappears with an updated figurehead. The internet just provides the newest bullhorn for a millennia-old smear campaign.

From Formulaic Conspiracy

Could far-right conspiracy theorists just hate Soros? Sure. But to borrow from their rhetoric, that's what they want you to think. The Soros mythology has so much in common with anti-Semitic classics like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a pamphlet cooked up in 1903 during Russia's Jewish pogroms. It gained a second life in Nazi Germany. In today's anti-Soros invocations, you can't miss the signaling.

At the crux of The Protocols, a threatening cabal of cosmopolitan elites want to destroy the virtuous (white) nation state. That same formulation crops up in the contemporary alt-right's outcry against "globalism"—basically screeds against neoliberal globalization with a dash of racist fear-mongering about the end of America and the white majority thrown in. Instead of blaming "the Jews," today's more circumspect anti-Semites blame Soros. "It's gauche to say 'the Jews' now," says Spencer Sunshine, who researches the far-right for Political Research Associates. "So they pick a person like Soros or the Rothschilds before him, or a Jewish collective, like Zionists." And then maybe toss in some gentiles (like the Rockefellers) to throw people off the scent.

It's this "classed up" level of anti-Semitism the Trump administration dabbles in when they run an attack ad against Soros, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (who are also Jewish). "When he rants and raves about international bankers and the global elite, everyone on the radical right sees that as being about the Jews," says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Thing is, Trump himself may well not harbor anti-Semitic animosities. Yet when he sprinkles anti-Semitic codewords into his speeches, his perceived support amplifies and normalizes messages the internet had already boosted to an unprecedented volume.

To Internet Scapegoats

Throughout history, just about every media platform still in its infancy has acted as a vector for just about every upwelling of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. "The Dreyfus affair in the 1890s used anti-Semitic visual materials because it had become possible to reproduce photographs and lithographs very cheaply," Samuels says. The Protocols only ended up in so many libraries because the high-speed rotary printing press made mass printing affordable in the early 20th century. "Hitler made huge dramatic use of new technologies like radio and film, Samuels says. "Anti-Semites are early adopters."

Anti-Semites have also exploited the public's faith in these platforms to spread propaganda. "The Protocols succeeded because people trusted their libraries," says Adam Klein, who teaches courses on propaganda and online extremism at Pace University.

The internet just provides the newest bullhorn for a millennia-old smear campaign.

Over the past decade or so, people have come to trust the internet in the same way. Which isn't to say you shouldn't. New tech isn't isn't the exclusive province of anti-Semites. But in the early days, hateful stuff stands a good shot at rising to the top, or at least finding itself on par with everything else. When traditional arbiters of the truth—publishers, librarians, journalists—lose their primacy and new regulations and stopgaps have yet to solidify, you get a (potentially anti-Semitic) wild, wild west.

Trump, a leader whose political identity is inseparable from social media, has himself shown a bizarre reluctance to denounce anti-Semitism. In a conciliatory speech to Congress, he clearly aimed to undo some of the damage done by his hesitation to act or speak out against the country's recent anti-Semitic surge. But he also can't seem to resist anti-Soros–style signaling, whatever his personal feelings about Jewish people.

"Conspiracy theories loosen people’s relationship with reality," Sunshine says. "Then it works as a purely cynical organizing tool for people who don't necessarily believe what they're saying." This approach works particularly well if you're going for a populist vibe—conspiracy theories are very good at convincing people they've been screwed over, and anger galvanizes them to action. Trump's nationalist rallying cry wouldn't resonate as strongly if he didn't have an "other" to blame (or expel). You shouldn't expect that taper off any time soon: Nationalist leaders have to continually ramp up their claims of victimhood to keep their supporters from losing interest.

The facts don't matter to those who are sowing or consuming conspiracy theories, which makes them hard to counter. And the internet is a uniquely powerful and efficient way for conspiracy theorist to just keep stoking the flames. "We have to get back to the point where hate speech is delegitimized," says Ken Jacobson, deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "If a politician can point to some secretive Jew every time there's a crisis, that's an opportunity for a demagog to seize upon." If you page back through a history book, you'll see many already have.