The election of Donald Trump appears to have unleashed a wave of right-wing, hate-group incidents, with data published by the Washington Post showing that the 36 incidents of right-wing domestic terror attacks in 2017 were more than twice as many in any previous year going back to 2002.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an independent group that tracks right-wing extremist activity, recorded a seven percent jump in hate groups in the year 2018 alone, and a 30 percent hike over the past four years.
But along with this disturbing increase in far-right extremism has come a bizarre conspiracy theory—about porn. According to a New York Times investigation published on Friday, numerous far-right groups and individuals online now believe that “Jews are trying to control the West by using porn to render white Christian men impotent.”
In a “manifesto” penned by the white supremacist San Diego synagogue shooter who killed one and injured three other Jewish worshippers in April, the gunman said that among the reasons he was attacking Jewish people was that Jews were “causing many to fall into sin with their role in peddling pornography.”
While virulent and violent anti-Semitism is obviously not a new phenomenon among the extreme right, their conspiracy theory falsely blaming Jews for using porn as means to destroy the sexual prowess of white Christians also has a surprisingly long history, according to the Times report.
In 2011, Norwegian right-wing mass killer Anders Behring Breivik blamed Jews for the supposed “moral decay” caused by porn in his own deranged writings, while Robert Bowers—who killed 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, last October—also posted online about his belief that Jews control the porn industry.
In 2016, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke posted a Twitter message claiming that “Jews dominate porn,” provoking a response from former porn performer Jenna Jameson, a recent convert to Judaism, who slammed Duke as a “loathsome monster.”
While the conspiracy theory claiming “Jewish” control of the porn industry may seem like a disturbing footnote to the recent rise of right-wing extremism, the bizarre belief clearly has deadly consequences, as the violence committed by right-wing mass shooters who cite the conspiracy theory in their writings makes clear. And there appear to be indications that the violence will continue or even escalate—and could at some point target the porn industry itself.
When the xHamster Twitter account recently launched a hashtag campaign to “combat stigma against porn,” it quickly received a flood of far-right-wing responses, declaring “PORNOGRAPHERS MUST DIE,” as the right-wing tracking site Angry White Men documented.
Another response included a meme depicting a stereotypically “Jewish” figure behind a TV screen with an “XXX” logo. The image appeared to be taken from, or inspired by, the cover of the 2017 book Merchants of Sin by neo-Nazi Benjamin Garland. In the book, Garland states that “there has been a war going on between Whites and Jews, with Whites struggling to maintain a clean and decent society, and Jews fighting to make filth and obscenity acceptable.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a scholar at Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, told The New York Times that he found anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about porn as far back as the 1990s, when he investigated far-right hate groups.
“In any sort of fundamentalist culture, there is a desire to control sexuality, and this one’s no different,” German told the Times.
Photo By Anthony Crider / Wikimedia Commons
