In a follow-up paper, Hersh and Royden explored a striking racial pattern in the results. On both the left and the right, Black and Latino Americans were more likely than their white peers to agree with antisemitic statements. Today, it seems, the Americans most likely to express antisemitic attitudes are Black or Latino conservatives between the ages of 18 and 30.
In 2022, these results presented something of a puzzle. But after the 2024 election results, in which Trump shifted notable numbers of young and Latino voters into his camp, you can start to see a coherent explanation — one that also explains the surge of antisemitism on the young right.
There is substantial evidence that Trump does unusually well with voters who have low levels of social and political trust: little faith in government, experts, and even their fellow citizens. Over the course of ten years in politics, Trump has made the GOP the primary home for such low-trust voters, who used to be found more evenly across the political spectrum. In 2024, it seems likely that his gains among young and nonwhite voters came directly from their lowest-trust ranks.
Low trust is also, unsurprisingly, closely correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. And that is, at its heart, what antisemitism is: a 3,000-year-old conspiracy theory positing that everything bad in the world can be blamed on the secret and shady manipulations of a small group (i.e., the Jews).
Antisemitic texts are, historically speaking, the foundational basis of the modern pattern of thought and argument — the odd-stringing together of unrelated facts, the assertion of the corruption of mainstream narratives — that define everything from UFOlogy to vaccine denial. In his book Conspiracy Theories, psychologist Jovan Byford explains how this history causes modern conspiracy theorists to almost inevitably alight on Jews as the ultimate culprit:
Between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the Second World War, antisemitism was the dominant motif in conspiracy theories. Much of the conspiratorial literature of that period, but also about that period, revolves around the idea of a Jewish conspiracy. This means that, when authors today reflect on the history of the plot — a task that requires them to recognize the relevance of past conspiracies and past conspiracy theories — they invariably come into contact with the antisemitic legacy of the conspiracy culture.
When you put all of this together, you get a complete theory of why young conservatives — and especially young, nonwhite conservatives — have become America’s most antisemitic demographics.
Part of what it means to be a young conservative now is to have deep and profound distrust for established authorities and official narratives, to believe that the truth is what “they” don’t want you to know. In 2023, the conservative writer Mary Katharine Ham gave a simple answer when asked why conservatives have grown mistrustful of institutions: “in large part because the institutions deserve it.”
Since young people are disproportionate consumers of online content and influencers, that makes their world the natural habitat for right-wing antisemites looking to build a mass audience. People like Fuentes, Owens, and Carlson are all able to build an audience on these platforms because they can connect directly with an audience that’s interested in a distinctly right-wing variant of anti-semitism — conspiratorial and ethno-nationalist. Hence why Fuentes’ show is titled America First.
“There is populist spirit — a collection of cognitive traits — that makes someone want to be part of the populist Trump era GOP. It’s conspiratorial, it’s ethnonationalist,” says Richard Hanania, an influential writer on the right (and himself a former white nationalist forum poster). “Historically, have conspiratorial ethnonationalist movements liked Jews? No. That’s just the natural progression for where this is going.”
