“Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’?” Tom Buchanan, Gatsby’s rival, asks in “The Great Gatsby.” “The idea,” Buchanan explains, “is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved… It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1925 masterpiece, knew well why he had his antagonist speak those words. The crux of the tension between Jay Gatsby and Buchanan is the question of truth and authenticity. On the one hand, the source of Gatsby’s wealth is dubious: He’s charming and charismatic, but his life is founded on a lie. On the other hand, Buchanan is a nasty piece of work, arrogant and boastful, but he’s a faithful son of the American upper class of the tumultuous 1920s. For a large slice of American society, the racist calumnies he spews out were the unvarnished truth.

The title of the book Buchanan mentions is a distortion of a real work: “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” published in 1920, which attracted interest in the United States. The author, Lothrop Stoddard, a prolific American thinker, writes of his concern that ineluctable demographic trends will transform the world’s whites into an oppressed minority. As someone who espoused a detailed race theory, Stoddard maintained that the “Nordic race” is superior to all other races and that, for the common good, it should continue to rule the world.

Stoddard’s book is just one link in a long chain, beginning in the early 19th century, all of whose parts are obsessed with the white person’s fear of becoming a minority. By ascribing these views to Buchanan, Fitzgerald marked him as being flesh-of-the-white-flesh of the particular social circle that’s caught in the grip of this anxiety and drawn to such works.

Stoddard has long since been forgotten, and the views he advocated – which, in certain versions, were accepted at the time even by people who considered themselves to be progressive – became the object of condemnation and excoriation. The concrete results that these race theories engendered in the 1930s and ‘40s made the subject taboo; in our time only fringe groups espouse such ideas. However, with the aid of the internet, what was for decades the preserve of the rejected and the ostracized has become the subject of a lively dialogue today. The web connects oddballs and fundamentalists, and it gives extremists the feeling that they are part of a broad movement. A rising, seething wave of toxicity is being ridden by unscrupulous politicians who are aggrandizing the feeling of white victimhood. Those who consider themselves the spearhead in the struggle against the “colored surge” are acting accordingly.

The footprints of these ideas are obvious in acts of mass murder perpetrated in recent years. Anders Breivik, who in July 2011 murdered more than 70 people, most of them teenagers, in and around Oslo, left a 1,500-page manifesto in which he warned against “white genocide” (the preferred term by those in the grip of the anxiety) and against the “Islamization of Europe.” In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, shouting, “You’re taking over our country!” In an essay attributed to him, Roof expressed concern at developments in Europe, “the homeland of White people.”

Brenton Tarrant, who last March murdered 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was fearful of “the great replacement” – a conspiracy theory revolving around the alleged replacement of whites by nonwhites. And Patrick Crusius, who in August opened fire in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, slaying 22 people, purported to be defending his country against a “Hispanic invasion.”

The massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue last year was also carried out by a white supremacist who used slogans such as “Diversity means chasing down the last white person” and accused the local Jewish community of assisting “invaders.” A year earlier, Jason Kessler, speaking at an alt-right gathering in Charlottesville that he helped organize, warned against “white genocide” and “the replacement of our people, culturally and ethnically.” “Jews will not replace us,” the torch-bearing marchers there chanted.

Return of the scarecrow

But how are the Jews actually connected to all of this? According to the widespread version of this white anxiety, Jews are the planners and orchestrators of the takeover by “inferior races” that is leading to the extinction of the white race. The Jews’ status as “whites” is provisional, as everyone knows, and depends on the good will of white Christians. For most of those who fear white genocide (though not all), Jews are themselves an inferior race, and the migration of nonwhites to Western Europe and the United States is a Jewish plot aimed at eradicating the superior race.

Norwegians pay their respects to the 76 victims of the killing spree perpetrated by Anders Breivik on July 22, 2011. He left a 1,500-page manifesto in which he warned against “white genocide.” Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Fitting neatly into the picture here is the tendency of Jewish Americans to be on the progressive side of the map and, similarly, the tendency of Jewish organizations and philanthropists to support progressive causes. It turns out that Jews who are fighting racism and working for tolerance are in reality advocating miscegenation and scheming to liquidate the whites. The Jews’ support for minority groups stems not from a moral commandment to love the stranger; it’s a plot against the light-skinned majority. Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist George Soros features prominently in right-wing conspiracy theories, but he also occupies a central place among those who play up white anxiety and even on morning talk shows. Middle East-affairs commentator Dr. Guy Bechor enthusiastically echoed the “replacement theory” in his regular slot on Israel’s Channel 13, and in another context said, “The Jewish progressives will inflict a terrible disaster on American Jewry; and that is exactly what happened in Europe.”

This anti-Semitic narrative is far from marginal. The blood libel according to which Jews are working toward the eradication of the “white man” is in the background of most of the murderous violence perpetrated by white supremacists in our time. As Eric K. Ward, a social activist who has been researching these groups for three decades, says, anti-Semitism is the “theoretical core” in the conspiratorial schema of the white nationalist and white supremacist movements. According to Ward, anti-Semitism became a central element in white racism in the United States after the successful civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. The racist groups couldn’t fathom how “inferior races” had succeeded in getting the state to eliminate segregation, promote equality for women and gays, and above all also stirred public opinion in favor of those groups. Their conclusion: There must be a secret network of crafty, manipulative agents who pulled the strings and brought about this result. Inevitably, the “Elders of Zion” entered the familiar niche.

For white supremacist groups, Jews thus fulfill their classic conspiratorial role. But this time, the plot does not involve accumulating money or power, or undermining Christendom, the economic order or the nation-state. Now the eternal Jew wants to mongrelize the different races so as to cause the pure whites to disappear. As always, anti-Semites use the Jews as a scarecrow that embodies the threat that they feel to their identity.

‘Shabbos Goyim’

To grasp the narrative framework that renders this conceptual approach accessible, it’s worth delving into the book that Ward calls “the bible of generations of white supremacist groups,” and what the Anti-Defamation League describes as “one of the most widely read and cited books on the far-right” in the United States. They are referring to “The Turner Diaries,” by William Luther Pierce, writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The book, which was written, not by chance, in the 1970s – following recognition of the victory of the civil rights movement – is probably the most widely disseminated and influential anti-Semitic work since “Mein Kampf.”

“The Turner Diaries” is neither a manifesto nor a philosophical tract. It’s a novel. It tells the story of Earl Turner, who is part of an underground organization that is waging a battle against the federal government in the United States. Originally published in 1978, the book is set in the future, the 1990s, when the government, which is controlled by liberals and Jews, is adamantly pursuing racial intermingling and integration, is encouraging mixed marriages and is battling racism and segregation. In fact, it’s apparently doing everything in its power to bring about the disappearance of the white race.

This is not by chance: It’s the Jews who are pulling the strings here. The Christian liberals and progressives are the useful idiots who are helping them (in the book, they’re dubbed “Shabbos Goyim”), while the blacks and Hispanics provide the muscle and the cannon fodder. If the Jews achieve their goal, the white race will be eliminated and they will rule the world.

“The Organization” – the whites’ underground – uses guerrilla warfare and terrorism against the federal government, which is referred to as “The System.” Organization cells carry out terrorist attacks on American soil with the intention of destabilizing the social order. The aim is to awaken public opinion and induce whites to snap out of their pro-equality, pro-pluralism, pro-tolerance indoctrination and ultimately convince them to understand that they, the whites, are superior to all the rest.

The turning point in the book occurs when the government embarks on a campaign to confiscate all the firearms in the public’s possession. Police units, consisting largely of nonwhites, go house to house collecting the weapons, in a scenario that undoubtedly constitutes the worst nightmare of the National Rifle Association. The protagonist, Turner, understands that the time has come to act and he goes into the underground with his associates. They stay in contact with other terror cells, of which there are apparently many.

Turner’s first major act is to blow up FBI headquarters in Washington. The members of the squad park a commercial van packed with explosives below the building and topple it with its personnel inside. If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason: Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, murdering 168 people, drew his inspiration for the act from the book. Pages from “The Turner Diaries” were found in his getaway car.

Indeed, “The Turner Diaries” is not only a novel, it’s also a form of do-it-yourself manual. It teaches readers how to manage an underground cell, manufacture a homemade bomb, and rob and slaughter Jewish businesspeople in order to underwrite the underground’s activity. In its battle against “Jewish brainwashing,” the underground attacks the offices of a newspaper, fires mortars at a gathering attended by the U.S. president, and murders Jews and liberal activists. Finally, its members seize control of a military base and fire nuclear missiles at New York and Tel Aviv – which have the largest concentrations of Jews in the world.

A reading of the book, aside from inducing a physical feeling of nausea, shows how deeply its ideas have influenced the new right (the alt-right and other variations of the radical right in their American and Israeli versions).

The book inveighs against liberalism (more precisely, “the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague”) but also castigates classic conservatives. The latter are depicted as nerds who don’t understand when it is necessary to dispense with the law and take up arms. (The contempt for conservatives is echoed in the alt-right’s term for them – “cuckservatives” – where “cuck” is short for “cuckold.”)

The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. - דלג

Feminism, too, is the object of virulent hatred in the book, parallel to the misogyny that prevails today in new-right circles. Women’s lib is a “mass psychosis” that descended on the world before the triumph of the whites, and women who fell prey to it were persuaded “that they were ‘people,’ not ‘women.’” Feminism was actually a plot by The System to turn the white race against itself.

There is a lot of penny-ante Nietzscheanism in “The Turner Diaries,” from the ridiculing of liberalism as a “feminine” ideology to notions of social Darwinism holding that every person and every race must look after itself, and the strongest survive. People who seek equality and pluralism are either cheats (i.e., the Jews) or brainwashed (white liberals). A “healthy” and “sane” society is one of racial purity; it is masculine, militant, patriarchal and heterosexual. That, according to author Pierce, is what a normal people in its land looks like.

Liberals are idealistic but blind. They ignore the crimes of the minorities (blacks, mainly) and always take their side, even when they are clearly guilty. A girl who complains to her mother that African-American children are harassing her at school gets a slap in the face and is accused of being racist. Other liberals allow members of minority groups to rape their wives before their eyes, unopposed, then cover up for them to the police. The parallel to present-day accusations of liberals covering up for crimes committed by minorities – such as the allegation made by the Israeli television personality Avri Gilad that Notre Dame Cathedral was torched by Islamists and that the French police were lying about the cause of the blaze – is clear.

The book was also ahead of its time in the hatred of Muslims it expresses. The narrator, as early as the late 1970s, knows that there are too many “dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners” in the country, and when he and his associates take control of Southern California, they set about murdering them systematically. In later years, fear of so-called Middle Easterners would morph into an outcry that they are “taking control of Europe” – a libelous declaration the new right is disseminating in both the United States and Israel.

Surging anti-Semitism

As J.M. Berger, an expert on extremist movements, found, “The Turner Diaries” is only one text – albeit a very successful one – among quite a few centering on a “colored” threat to the white man. In the 1920s, publications like “The Rising Tide of Color” earned fame, and were accompanied by a call for “racial hygiene.” However, Berger actually found the genesis of the genre in the 1830s, against the background of the controversy over slavery and ahead of the American Civil War. The anxiety that gripped the white people of the South over the possibility that their slaves would be freed produced at least four dystopian (from their viewpoint) novels, which depict the United States as a place of indiscriminate mongrelization, to the horror of the light-skinned folk. Some of the works portray a war to restore the “natural order.”

The genre’s rise can be tracked through the history of liberals’ achievements. The struggle to free the slaves was the catalyst for the emergence and initial popularity of such literature. The second wave surfaced in the first decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the surge in the number of immigrants entering the United States. Analogously, this period also saw the appearance of the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, which perceived that a threat was posed not only by blacks but also by Catholics, Jews and the intellectual elite. That wave receded in the wake of the defeat of Nazism in World War II. The next surge did not appear until the late 1960s, with the legal prohibition of segregation and the triumphs of the civil rights movement. Here, the Jews played a central role in the conspiratorial structure. Those who chanted “Jews will not replace us” meant to say that they would fight so that Jews would not replace them with Hispanics and Muslims.

It is against this background that one can understand the complexity of the present upsurge in anti-Semitism. President Donald Trump is manifestly fanning the flames of xenophobia. His attitude toward migrants, his warning against an “invasion” of Hispanics and his refusal to dissociate himself from avowed white supremacists such as David Duke are fodder for the extreme right. On the other hand, advocates of the “replacement theory” cannot accept Trump’s positive approach to Israel, which is evidence, they feel, that the grip of the “Zionist Occupation Government” – as anti-Semitic, right-wing groups refer to the U.S. administration – is stronger than ever.

The facts, in any event, are clear. A special report issued a year ago by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry found that “supporters of white supremacy in the United States are experiencing a resurgence” in recent years. An FBI report published in 2018 also found a consistent rise in the number of hate crimes since 2015, including a considerable uptick in anti-Semitic hate crimes. The reality is that murderous violence against Jews in the United States has reached unprecedented levels. It’s been a long time since every type of racist, homophobic and misogynist lowlife, as well as populists, demagogues and purveyors of conspiracy theories have felt as comfy-cozy as they do now. Anti-Semites drink from the same sources.

A copy of "The Turner Diaries." Jeff Gentner / AP

The Hardali connection

All countries are different, but the radical right in all of them tends to think along the same lines. Racism is racism, but that is not the end of the resemblance. The story of a Jewish conspiracy operating behind the scenes to persuade good white people to become liberals and pluralists is very much like the “irresponsible attempt to reprogram the human society […] which is being done by ‘white collar’ people who operate behind the scenes.” That quotation is from a pamphlet titled “The Courage for Independence,” published last May by Rabbi Zvi Yisrael Thau, a leader of the yeshivas affiliated with the so-called Hardali community (whose members combine ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, and national-religious beliefs). It’s aimed at those who are inducing the Jewish people to think that, heaven help us, women are equal to men or that gays deserve equal rights.

The similarity between the modes of thought (not of action) between the conspiracy theories espoused by the Euro-American anti-Semites and those of the Hardali yeshivas stems from the premise that the superior person (the white man or Jew) cannot be bad but is at most confused. If he’s liberal, feminist and gay-friendly, it’s not because that’s what he really thinks but because he underwent indoctrination by a small, manipulative group of miscreants. The latter disseminated an “unnatural ideology” (Pierce), but “that is not the nature of the people of Israel” (Thau). Deep down, the Jew or the white is perfectly all right: loyal to himself, his origins and his purpose. He’s an “authentic” white or Jew – in the same way that Tom Buchanan, the antagonist in “The Great Gatsby,” is an authentic Roaring Twenties wealthy American.

The heroes of “The Turner Diaries” try to awaken whites people from their progressive slumber, and in the same way Israeli homophobic groups such as the right-wing Orthodox Noam party or other Hardali movements appeal to the good-hearted but bewildered Jew. Because both movements depend on a far broader public than them, which they consider exalted but which doesn’t think like them – they are compelled to assume that this wider public has been brainwashed and to deny that its members truly think what they say they are thinking. The white supremacists want the whites to open their eyes and understand that they actually hate blacks and Jews; the followers of Thau are asking Jews to open their eyes and understand that they are actually revolted by gays and are superior to Arabs. When these things happen, the world will return to its “natural,” “true” order.

It’s precisely here that the Achilles’ heel of every racist project lies. Simply put: Racism is not compatible with the truth. In “The Turner Diaries,” the author presupposes that people of color are naturally dumb and violent, an assumption that’s a key cog in the plot mechanism. Liberalism, he maintains, is a lie that’s easily refuted, because nonwhites are “truly” violent and “truly” untalented, and mixed neighborhoods “truly” suffer from crime, despite liberal efforts to cover all that up. Because the government systems, security agencies and military units are “racially mixed,” their operation is faulty, according to Pierce. For this reason it’s easy for the white underground to outsmart them. If the nonwhites were as smart as the whites, the underground would not triumph in the struggle. The book, then, is not only dystopian; it verges on science fiction.

From this perspective, the war on facts that Trump, Thau and certain media figures are waging is understandable. The facts simply are not consistent with the racist theories they’re promoting. “It’s all scientific stuff,” Tom Buchanan says about “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” but that “science” is a ludicrous cocktail of prejudices, anxiety and self-victimization. And even if we ignore the reality on the ground, the one thing that refutes these racist conspiracy theories is the very fact that anti-Semites and Jews, white supremacists and Jewish supremacists, those who believe the Jews are subhuman and those who believe that the Jews are superhuman – ultimately believe in the same clichés.

Dr. Tomer Persico is Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute.