Brief: Why Does Every Conspiracy Theory Lead Back to Antisemitism? (w/Ben Cohen)
We've seen it over and over again: somehow, in some way, globalists are involved. George Soros is pulling the strings. Jews will replace us, with other minorities, or fund the interests that are against "us."
Derek talks with The Banter founder, Ben Cohen, about the modern state of antisemitism. They also discuss Russell Brand's meteoric rise into right-wing celebrity, as well as Aubrey Marcus's uninformed takes on vaccines and politics.
Show Notes
The Banter
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Why does every conspiracy theory seem to lead back to anti-Semitism?
That's a question I asked on Thursday's episode about the anti-sunscreen movement, which as we learned from our guest Sarah Ianiano, there is some anti-Semitic roots in that movement as well.
And I want to explore that topic more today in the broader world of politics.
Welcome to A Conspiratuality Brief.
I'm Derek Barris, and I'm joined today by the Banter founder, Ben Cohen.
Thanks for joining, Ben.
Thanks, Derek.
So it turns out that even though we have appreciated each other over social media for a while now and following each other's substacks, and that's what we'll be talking about because the banter is now on substack, we also taught together at Equinox, although we didn't come across each other back then, but we were chatting for a while before we started recording about that.
But you're here to talk about the banter, which you founded as the Daily Banter in 2007.
So as someone who has spent my career between the fitness worlds and writing and journalism, it seems like you've had a similar trajectory.
So what led you to start The Daily Banter in 2007?
What got me started originally was the media coverage of, initially, the Iraq War on and off.
I was at college in the UK.
Then did a year abroad in 2003 at Oregon State.
We were talking about that as well, actually, before the show.
We seem to have followed each other around the United States, Derek, I think.
It seems so.
But I was in Oregon.
I went to Oregon State in 2003, right at the sort of beginning of the Iraq War.
I came from a very left-wing university in the UK, the University of Sussex.
And then I went to a very, what you would probably call a very right-wing University in Oregon which was in a kind of a in Corvallis.
I think it's a farming university even anyway it was a strange experience from going from one extreme to the other and they were kind of pro-war marches on campus and that where I'd come from a place where there were weed lock-ins in the in the science lab you know they were protesting the illegality of weed so they'd locked themselves in the science lab for three days I had sort of just watched in horror how the media did not
accurately report on any of the facts about weapons of mass destruction and so on.
And then I went back to the UK and then moved back to LA after I graduated and kind of founded
the Daily Banter kind of in response to what I was seeing in the media and this total failure
to report accurately on any of this stuff.
That was the kind of beginning of the blogosphere when people were kind of starting their own
blogs and trying to monetize it.
I mean, I didn't make any money out of it.
I made money teaching boxing and I was actually a boxing journalist at the same time.
So I was like three or four jobs trying to make ends meet.
But that was always my kind of passion was to write about politics.
I studied that at university.
And so that was that that was the beginnings of the Daily Banter and it morphed into several different configurations.
I ran an ad network for a lot of other group of bloggers and then brought them onto my platform
and then we became a bigger entity, kind of professionalized and put my own money into it
and lost a lot of money and so on.
I've been in the fitness industry for a long time Just right now the writer's strike is happening in Hollywood and part of that has to do with
Putting up guardrails against AI content creation.
So we'll have another battle to face in the coming years as writers.
But you moved to Substack in 2019, which I consider a very good platform.
There has been some controversy around it leaning right wing and the whole idea of citizen journalists, of course, is something.
But this is something you've been into for a while.
What is the focus of the banter, would you say, overall at this point in your history?
I would say for the most part it's combating right-wing disinformation and trying to highlight what I see to be a very obvious fact that we're facing a fascist insurgency in the United States and that the Republican Party is not a political party in the traditional sense of the word.
That what we're looking at here is something very, very different.
You know, it's something quite scary.
I've watched this happening over a long time now.
You know, 15 years of going from the neocon pro war media stuff now to a very dangerous ethno-nationalistic movement.
I'm not sure which one is more dangerous.
I fear this one more than I did the last one.
I wanted to talk to you specifically about anti-Semitism because it's something that has always been around, I mean, well before we were here.
I'm a little bit surprised at the resurgence of it and the ways that it has seeped into every conspiracy theory.
I grew up in a very Jewish area in New Jersey.
My ex-wife is Jewish, my ex-music partner is Jewish, my ex-DJ partner... I've been around the culture for so long.
So in the last couple years, just to see the amount of it that has been put forward as this nefarious agenda under everything that comes up in the news now somehow goes back To that.
So why, in your estimation, is it so pervasive and repetitive?
The pandemic probably has a lot to do with that.
I mean, that was sort of the ignition for every conspiracy theory under the sun that came out.
I mean, that's why I started listening to you guys.
I was sort of horrified by what I saw happening.
In the new age movement, I've done psychedelics.
I drank ayahuasca in the jungle 2015.
I have a lot of friends in that space in the wellness space, people who touched on spirituality, like I found Russell Brand to be interesting.
And then the COVID pandemic hit.
I mean, also you have the combination of the Trump White House pumping out disinformation non-stop, the rise of right-wing media sites like Breitbart, where you had this kind of alternative reality.
Combine that with the pandemic and the explosion of conspiracy theorists, you know, QAnon, it was a recipe for disaster.
And if anybody knows their history, conspiracy theories at some point usually end back at the Jews.
And every Jew will tell you this.
It's always bubbling beneath the surface that anti-Semitism is always there in society.
It doesn't necessarily flare up.
I heard someone refer to it almost as like a dormant virus.
In times of extreme stress, it blows up and attacks the host.
And that's what we're seeing now.
And that's due to the fact that we've got, obviously, the internet, social media
that allow these conspiracy theories to take off with no way of stopping them, no way of fact-checking them,
at least when they're spreading.
It takes massive amounts of effort to combat some of this disinformation.
I mean, I sometimes feel like I'm, along with other people who I regard as being responsible figures in the media, you know, like you guys, it's like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
You know, I'm of Jewish heritage, I find it to be personally kind of scary.
I've never experienced this level before, the outright hate.
And also, I've seen it spread across the political spectrum as well.
I see it in left-wing circles as well as right-wing circles and the alt-left and the alt-right.
Watch this in the UK, and the Labour Party has become a serious problem.
Jews almost have it.
It's almost like a genetic memory.
You kind of have this knowledge or this understanding that things can go pear-shaped quite quickly.
And when they do, you'll be held responsible.
Have you experienced any of it directed personally at you?
What some people might call...
Call microaggressions, right?
I'm not really a fan of the word, of the term microaggressions, but that's the kind of antisemitism I experience in person.
And I've experienced a significant amount of that.
And I would say almost exclusively from people on the left.
And that's probably because I live in a very liberal area and most of my friends are very liberal left wing, but that's where I've seen the most of it.
When I was younger, it would be from the right at school and from teachers.
in the UK, that was more of a kind of traditional, your bog standard antisemitism.
But now it's morphed into something very weird where it kind of gets within the kind of whole
identity politics movement that Jews are seen as being ultra privileged in the hierarchy
of oppression.
The comedian David Badu, I think, has written a great book about this called Jews Don't Count.
It calls them Schrodinger's Jews.
I think he took the phrase from somebody else.
Schrodinger's Jews, who are white or non-white according to the politics of the observer.
To the left, you're white and you're privileged, therefore not worthy of protection.
Therefore, you know, you can say what you want about Jews and it's not really racism.
It doesn't really count because Jews are white.
And then obviously on the right, the right don't consider you white.
You're at the bottom of the heap.
You're the vermin, the rats at the bottom.
I think there was a T.S.
Eliot poem about that, about the rats at the bottom and then underneath that are the Jews.
I feel like getting it from all angles at the moment.
It's definitely been, I would say, personally challenging as well, because it's rocked my faith in what I thought I was a part of.
Can you give some examples from the left?
Specifically, you said that it was in your circles that you're getting it.
Is this unconscious or is this very conscious directed at you?
I would say it seems like more unconscious in the way of comments.
One example might be, okay, I'll give you two examples.
So I rent a space, I teach martial arts and I rent a space and the gym recently got closed down because they couldn't afford the rent and the
guy who ran the martial arts school he knows I'm Jewish and he kept saying
to me goes oh they've raised the rent I can't afford it but you know he's a Jew
the landlord's Jewish like he raised the rent you know his name is this
you know he kept repeating the name to me that would be one example another
one would be another friend of mine talking about I had a conversation with him
about boxing and I said you know there were a lot of Jewish champions back in
the early 1900s There were a lot of Jewish in New York, in the east end of London.
And I was like, Oh, so you guys did use your fists at one point, not just tanks and guns against the, you know, making a joke about Israel.
It was a joke.
I don't think he meant it, you know, I don't think he really understood what that meant.
The idea that all Jews are responsible for what the state of Israel is doing, which I don't agree with, which I've got a long history of rying out and speaking out about Israel and the treatment of the Palestinians, but there's a lot of that kind of, those kind of statements.
Jews money.
I hear it from extended family members who are non-Jews.
I've had it from my own family about Jews being good with money.
Stereotypes and things like that, that I feel like are deemed permissible within liberal, more liberal circles now.
Not even liberal, I would say.
It's strange, right?
Because I think the more towards the centre you get, the more, at least for me, I feel more comfortable in the centre, because the centre right and the centre left, they don't engage in that kind of, what I would call, casual anti-Semitism.
But the more you feel towards the extremes on either side, it gets, A, more casual, and B, a lot more offensive.
My dad had an example of that as well.
He was on a painting course and someone said, you know, he said, oh, you're Cohen.
Oh, Cohen, yeah.
I don't know what you guys are doing in Israel.
As if my dad's never, you know, I think my dad went to Israel when he was 19 or something.
It's interesting because I've spoken about this before, but I've gotten flack from the further left because I consider myself just a little more centered in terms of political spectrum and especially when it comes to culture war stuff.
It's always dangerous.
I mean, you talk about, you brought up Israel recently.
It is a very difficult conversation to have in all directions.
And so you have a really confounding case right now where on the American right, you'll have this surgence of muscular Christianity.
You were talking about ethno-nationalism before, but you have to identify that as a big driver of that.
And so you have a party who will be pro-Israel certain times and then will be completely brokering in George Soros conspiracy theories.
On the same day that they might be pro-Israel for another reason, what is it like experiencing from the right anti-Semitism in America as compared to what you saw growing up in the UK?
It's a lot more frightening, I would say, in the US when the evangelical movement in the US is that we don't really have anything like that in the UK.
It's pretty terrifying that you have this very strange relationship with Israel and Jews.
They hate Jews on the one hand, but they love Israel.
I think, you know, it's probably related to the end times philosophy that Israel will help precipitate the beginning of end times.
And in the UK, the UK, I mean, it's there.
It's just it's more subtle and not quite as kooky, I would say, in the US.
And I found it bizarre listening to a lot of the far right stuff about The antisemitism of the white nationalist movement in the U.S.
I don't like the antisemitism on the left.
I feel uncomfortable and slightly betrayed by my own side, as it were, but I don't fear it.
I fear what's on the right.
Particularly, I fear what's on the American right.
Besides, obviously, we have an uptick in hate crimes.
We know about this.
What else do you fear specifically coming from the right when you hear these remarks?
I fear that it's going to become, it will turn violent.
I mean, it already has turned violent.
I mean, you had the Charlottesville protests when they were talking about the Jews will not replace us, which is, they weren't chanting about Jews actually replacing them.
It was about Jews replacing them with other minorities.
So the Jews are in the background of this, right?
They're the ones holding the, pulling the strings and they're getting the other minorities to come in and dilute the white race.
Uh, so we're not just, we are not just replacing white people, but we are getting other minorities to come and replace white people as well.
So that I, I fear that very much.
And I think that people don't really know what they're playing with, with this type of hatred towards Jews or this, this type of antisemitism that is, if it's left unchecked.
We've seen what happens.
We have an example.
80 years ago, they were burning Jews in ovens and using them as fertilizer.
For a lot of Jews, this is still a very present thing for their families.
I see where this is going.
We know what the FBI statistics are.
The biggest threat to America are white nationalist terrorists.
We know this.
And a part of their deepest philosophy is a hatred towards Jews and globalists.
Right, whenever I hear the word globalist, there's like an alarm bell that rings and I'm like, ah, they're all bankers.
George Soros, you know, the capitalists.
The Jews, we created capitalism as well, right?
And communism, apparently.
I don't turn to Twitter to get my political understanding of the various types of politics and economics that exist.
They're often scrambled.
Right, right, right, right.
But it's that scrambling, it's that confusion that is even scary.
It's not coherent.
None of this stuff is coherent at all.
It's kind of crazy.
But again, you follow the path, it's somewhere it gets back to juice.
You said you studied politics.
How is your understanding of history?
And I ask that in the sense that there's always this idea that, oh, well, the Holocaust, nothing like that could happen in America.
When I hear that, I don't think people understand.
I don't want to move into Godwin's law here, but, you know, how long Hitler You're talking decades.
Imagine a Trump does get into office in 2024, which is not beyond the pale, the grievances he's going to bring if that were to happen.
I can't imagine.
So when someone says to you, well, it's America, you'll be okay here.
What does that make you think of?
Historically, and for what is possible in the future here.
Yeah, I mean, historically, that's just that just hasn't proven to be true for Jews all around the world.
This is a sort of, again, ingrained is almost a genetic level that wherever you're at, like, it's like having the right to go and live in Israel.
Not that I don't agree with what Israeli government is doing.
I don't even agree with the way that it was founded or whether it should have been founded.
Like I have issues with that.
But I know that is there and they will accept me if it all goes pear shape and people I don't think this is hyperbole or being hysterical, but when this stuff flares up, you know, it's kind of scary.
Before the U.S.
entered World War II, a lot of Americans were actually pro-Nazi because anti-Semitism, again, back then was extremely common and extremely socially acceptable to openly dislike Jews.
I mean, I saw, actually, I saw a map recently of racial discrimination.
There were housing policies where I am in Maryland and in D.C.
But not that long ago around like the 40s and 50s I believe it was right and the two minorities who were not where there was widespread discriminate housing discrimination were Jews and black people.
All Jews know what can happen when things go pear-shaped and and there's this idea that because we have money right we control the levers of power that There were a lot of wealthy Jews in Germany, you know, in Russia during the pogroms.
This hasn't stopped the local populations massacring them or making life extremely difficult for them.
I mean, you've got people who are drawing swastikas on high schools in Maryland at the moment.
This is more and more commonplace.
I feel I'm being in this kind of strange place of like, I know my history and I know what can happen, but I've also sort of, I believe in democracy in America and Britain.
I think they're, by and large, actually safe, liberal places to live, comparatively speaking.
I don't think America is uniquely racist.
I don't think America is a uniquely evil country at all.
I think it's in many ways a great country and a great democracy.
And it does a lot to try to protect minorities compared to our history, but it's rocked my confidence a little bit, I have to say.
Let's talk a little bit about the crossover into wellness spaces.
In terms of our work, we might touch upon more anti-Semitism because you can't avoid it, but one thing I noticed is we've both kind of latched on to the rise of Russell Brand in recent months.
So what made you want to focus on him at the banter and identify him as a problem?
So we spend a lot of time looking at figures in the alt-right and alt-left.
We sort of pegged this quite early on, particularly when it came to the alt-right, that there was this Quite powerful political movement happening that seemed to have its own set of facts, its own separate reality, and some wildly popular kind of charismatic figures, particularly on the alt-right.
It seemed to metastasize and you saw something similar happening to the left.
You had this kind of horseshoe effect where a kind of mirror image of the alt-right appeared on the left.
I don't think it's anywhere near as dangerous or as well-funded or as big as the alt-right Because when we talk about the alt-right, what you're talking about is the MAGA party.
You're talking about the GOP, which is now essentially an alt-right entity, at least from my perspective.
There is this, I would say, cottage industry on the left that I saw as being troubling because of the sloppiness of how they presented arguments and their quote-unquote journalism, right, which never actually Turns out to be, you know, they haven't actually done their homework properly.
They haven't actually done, they haven't actually reported on whatever subject it is they've done properly.
And then I saw, you know, Russell Brand and I'd followed Brand for quite some time.
I kind of thought he was interesting.
I did appreciate, you know, I think it was about 10 years ago where he He was actually, he began the Trues, that YouTube channel, the Trues, that I thought was good.
And he had some interesting guests on and he seemed to be a kind of open-minded, I didn't necessarily agree with him on everything, but I felt that he was, his heart was in the right place at least.
But then it kind of morphed into something else, something very strange.
And I kept saying, you know, I'm like, why is he on Jordan?
Talking to Jordan Peterson, why is he panning around with Candace Owens?
Talking to Ben Shapiro, all of these grifters on the right.
And then the defense was, you know, oh, I'm just talking, we're just having an open conversation, which I'm for that, but I also think that when you platform these people, when you give these people oxygen, you're validating her, you're saying that she's a legitimate person who we need to speak to.
Which is the same thing with Donald Trump, right, that you have to, you know, it's this whole idea of both sides being equal.
Right.
Both sides are the same.
Well, the Republicans and the Democrats are just as bad.
So why don't we have a debate between a Democrat and a Candace Owens?
I mean, I don't really see the point in arguing with a climate change denying anti-vax 5G conspiracy theorist.
And I think when you legitimize them, it shifts the debate in a very dangerous way where you now have to spend a lot of your time debunking nonsense.
But then I saw Russell Brand sort of engaging more and more with alt-right figures.
And then I'm sure he probably figured out, hey, there's audience capture here and his YouTube channel exploded.
I mean, he's, I was watching a clip of Russell Brand from a couple of years ago and he was, he had like 4 million subscribers and now he's got like 6 million subscribers.
I mean, that's crazy.
That's an insane number of people that he can reach.
These are all right-wing conspiracy theories that he's talking about.
He may not necessarily agree with everything the right-wing is saying, but he's using those topics.
Whenever I see his media appearances, it's just so lazy.
His arguments are so lazy.
And it's usually anytime you say, hey, Russell, like, why are you hanging out with these crazy people on Fox News and Tucker Carlson?
And he's like, well, MSNBC is just as bad.
And she's not true.
I don't like MSNBC very much.
I don't like saying I don't watch them, but they're not in any way remotely comparable to Fox News.
Right.
I just think that anybody who believes that is not paying attention.
Right.
Or not doing any serious journalism or serious work.
And Russell Brown likes to think of himself as a journalist, which is Insane.
And you always hear the globalists come up in pretty much every discourse that he has at this point.
Yeah, and I don't think that Russell Brand is an anti-Semite.
I really don't.
I don't think he's an anti-Semite at all.
I just think he's kind of greedy, and I think he's a narcissist, and I think he likes hearing the sound of his own voice.
He's clearly got savvy social media people working for him, and they know how to amp the channel up.
And they say, hey, use these terms, say globalist, you'll get a lot more views.
And he does.
Predictably.
But it's also a good example of how that unconscious anti-Semitism creeps into the discourse because of audience capture.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's exactly how these ideas are kind of impregnated.
You plant a seed and all of a sudden You listen to Russell Brand talking about Davos and World Economic Forum and global banks and globalists, right?
A lot of his captions on YouTube are about globalists.
The algorithm will feed you into right-wing content, and that right-wing content, where they'll just say it outright, is the Jews.
So it doesn't take that long for your brain to get warped on this stuff.
Given that you've worked in this world, the broader world of wellness and martial arts and psychedelics, are there any other figures you've covered that have come to your attention that have been really problematic?
One other person I think I'd like to do more stuff on actually as well is Aubrey Marcus.
There's trouble brewing there.
I followed him for a while and I actually enjoyed some of his content about psychedelics.
Oh, you know, he's an interesting guy and he seems very open minded.
But then I saw I had this weird experience and I'm sure like many other people did at the beginning of the pandemic.
Having done ayahuasca and having been involved in some of these new agey or more spiritually, you know, listening to podcasts or like I've got friends in that space and I thought, you know what?
Okay, here's I wonder what they're going to say about this.
I wonder whether they're going to have like because they've done this plant medicine I almost felt, like, sort of prepared for the coronavirus pandemic because the feelings it brought up were actually quite similar to the feelings I experienced during an ayahuasca ceremony.
I don't know what to make of that, but this destabilizing experience that we're all having, I'm familiar with this, and I'm familiar with, like, how you might try to navigate that.
And I thought, Oh, okay.
I hope these other leaders, these other thought leaders who are experienced with this stuff are going to be helpful as we go through this very, very, very difficult, you know, an ecological crisis, right?
We have a pandemic.
I think it's clearly to do with human activity on the planet.
So how are we going to handle this?
And I just watched, one by one, every person that I'd followed just lose the plot and go crazy.
And All Remarkers was one of them.
And he slowly descended into anti-vax stuff, and he was talking about, you know, he got obsessed with, what is it about save the children?
There was the whole QAnon adjacent thing about saving children.
So I pegged him as a dangerous influencer.
You know, he's in the Joe Rogan sphere of influence.
Joe Rogan, obviously, another major source of disinformation.
I saw that whole sort of network of podcasts and wellness influencers in the psychedelic space as being pretty dangerous and veering into politics.
And you hear like, you know, Aubrey Marcus talking about politics and you just think, you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's just like, if you're going to speak on a subject, it's like them talking about vaccines.
Anybody who's studied vaccines will tell you quickly that they're talking complete nonsense.
So when you hear a lot of these influencers with huge YouTube channels jumping in on the topic that you actually know quite well, there's a lot of alarm bells start ringing.
You're like, wait a second, you can't say this.
This is nonsense.
And try to push back against it.
But again, it's like bailing out the Titanic with the reach that I have, for example, and the reach that somebody like Aubrey Marcus or Joe Rogan or Russell Brand has.
