Antisemitism has now landed on the British Right

For many years, my beat has been the antisemitism of the Left: Jeremy Corbyn and his fan club of trade union apparatchiks, student activists and columnists who couldn’t see the Jew-hatred in the anti-Zionism if it was spelled out for them in neon lights. I’ve spent so long staring into that particular abyss that I could probably draw you a flowchart of how a Labour Party branch meeting curdles into a discussion about the Rothschilds. It has been, in a grim sort of way, my specialist subject.

But something has shifted, and only a fool would keep facing the same direction while the wind changes behind him.

Watch the footage from Ceuta a fortnight ago — tens of thousands of migrants pouring across the border, Spain lurching into a genuine political crisis — and you’d expect a row about sovereignty, about Schengen, about the limits of a liberal state’s obligations to the world’s poor. That row duly happened. But underneath it, on the platforms where Tucker Carlson commands 32 million followers and Hasan Piker commands nearly three million more, an older and uglier story was already being told: that Israel had engineered the whole thing, weaponising Muslim migrants to punish the West for its insufficient devotion to Gaza. No evidence required.

This is the Great Replacement Theory, and to anybody who has spent any time studying fascism, it will look horribly familiar: Hitler’s own ideology repackaged for TikTok. One in three Britons, according to King’s College London, believe some version of it is true. And it isn’t confined to the neo-Nazi fringe I used to be able to file away as unserious. It’s turning up in Restore, whose campaigners have blamed Israel for 9/11. It’s there in Rupert Lowe cosying up to Carlson weeks after Carlson platformed Nick Fuentes. It was there, briefly, in Tommy Robinson’s own writing before he thought better of it and quietly took the essay down.

Here is the symmetry. The Left’s antisemitism dresses up in the language of Palestinian solidarity; the Right’s dresses up in the language of border control. Both borrow a real grievance and posit antisemitic Jewish caricatures behind it.

Watching only one political flank was always going to leave the other exposed. Social media has done for the Great Replacement Theory what Twitter did for Corbynism’s fellow travellers: turned a fringe obsession into an algorithmic certainty, delivered straight to people who never went looking for it.

I used to think I knew where the threat was coming from. Increasingly, I have to watch both doors at once.