AG Report 3.12.2025
On Antisemitic Conspiracy Theorists and Foreign Influence
There was a lot of discussion last week after Joe Rogan hosted Ian Carroll, a prominent promoter of antisemitic conspiracy theories, on his podcast. Carroll’s claims are filled with intentional falsehoods. His theories are specifically aimed to dehumanize and his denial of those motivations is a strategy to mainstream his views. All this has triggered much debate.
However, there is another angle relevant to the larger political conversation. Carroll claims his primary concern is foreign influence in the U.S., but the way he and other antisemitic conspiracy theorists ignore the truth about such influence reveals their true agenda.
Since 2007, Qatar has openly spent nearly $6 billion funding American schools and lobbying the U.S. government. They have also spent billions more under the table bribing business leaders, influencers, and politicians. Recently, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting bribes from individuals associated with the Qatari government. The Attorney General Alliance regularly sends influential state Attorneys General on Qatar-funded trips.
Qatar controls Al Jazeera, one of the world’s largest news organizations. It has also invested heavily in other Western media to dictate narratives. You would think this would be prime territory for conspiracy theorists concerned with foreign influence, yet people like Carroll show no interest in it.
The biggest foreign spender on lobbying over the past decade is China. There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is engaging in widespread subversion to influence Americans. Just this past week, two U.S. Army soldiers were charged with selling sensitive secrets to China. Yet, once again, these conspiracy theorists show no interest in that influence. In fact, during widespread discussions about evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was stealing American data and manipulating users through TikTok, Carroll propagated a baseless conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the Jewish CEO of Oracle, rather than China, controlled TikTok's algorithm.
It’s just like last year, when an important story emerged about a secret influence operation within the U.S. State Department linked to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Again, these conspiracy theorists saw nothing important to cover there.
In every case, these people only care about Jews and Israel. The approach is always to play a game of six degrees of blaming Jews. This is despite Israeli and Jewish-American lobbying efforts accounting for only about 1% of total U.S. lobbying spending each year. Americans should be concerned about the influence of foreign governments, but we should also be wary of those using selective concern to normalize bigotry instead.
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