The Jewish Plot to Make America Great Again

Stephen Miller and the Great Deportation Theory

MAGA-Moshiach Donald Trump (center) conferring with the Elders of Zion (left and right) as the Shekhinah (back) looks on. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, is Jewish. At Trump’s 2024 Madison Square Garden rally, Miller declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” promising that “The invasion will end the instant that he [Trump] takes the oath of office.” Consequently, Miller supervised the team drafting Trump’s executive orders on immigration, including the suspension of asylum processing, declaration of an invasion at the southern border, and attempt to end birthright citizenship. Other notable Jews in Trump’s circle include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, AI and crypto czar David Sacks, envoy and golf buddy Steve Witkoff, staffing consultant Laura Loomer, consigliere Boris Epshteyn, and, of course, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The influential “new right” includes Israeli-American National Conservative philosopher

Yoram Hazony

, as well as Curtis Yarvin and Bronze Age Pervert, both patrilineal Jews.¹ Yet somehow, I don’t expect to see white nationalists marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews are not replacing us!” If Jews get blamed for the “Great Replacement,” why not some credit for the Great Deportation? Antisemites are proud of (((noticing))) Jews in positions of power and influence. But when prominent Jews don’t fit the narrative of an anti-white conspiracy (or “group evolutionary strategy,” to use the higher-brow parlance²), they seem to turn invisible or get rationalized away.

Thus antisemites might argue that Miller and the rest are aberrations, exceptions who prove the rule. After all, most Jews are on the left. Certainly, according to exit polling, 66% of American Jews voted for Kamala Harris, while 32% voted for Trump. But if around one out of every three Jews voted for Trump, then the Jewish community is hardly monolithic. Moreover, antisemites imagine that Jews support the left purely out of ethnocentrism (because liberalism is “good for the Jews” but presumably bad for everyone else). Yet the Modern Orthodox voted for Trump in greater numbers than less religious Jews, while ultra-Orthodox Jews were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. Thus Jews with the strongest Jewish identities (presumably correlating with greater ethnocentrism)—who are also the most vulnerable to antisemitism (since they wear yarmulkes or Haredi attire)—are typically more right-wing. The Orthodox are also the fastest-growing segment of the American Jewish population, so the number of Republican-voting Jews will surely continue to rise.

Additionally, from an international perspective, diaspora Jews don’t uniformly vote left. In France, Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party has increased its Jewish support, while the hard-right leader Éric Zemmour is himself of Algerian Jewish descent. The majority of British Jews voted Labour in the most recent parliamentary election, but for the Conservatives in the one prior (as did most Brits). Likewise, in Canada, Jews have swung between the Liberals and the Conservatives. In Argentina, most Jews likely voted for populist libertarian Javier Milei, who intends to convert to Judaism once he leaves office. Internationally, as in America, Orthodox Jews vote more for the right, while less religious Jews lean left. Sub-ethnic divides also play a role in Jewish politics, as non-Ashkenazi and Russian-speaking Jews tend to be more conservative. The Jewish state itself is increasingly right-wing, which reflects demographic differences with diaspora Jewry (less Ashkenazi, more religious), plus, of course, existential security concerns.

Yet even setting Israel aside, diaspora Jews are prominent on the political right. Antisemites point to historic Jewish leftists like Karl Marx (though he was baptized a Christian), Sigmund Freud (though he was politically ambivalent), and the Frankfurt School (who largely opposed the student protests of the 1960s)³ as evidence of a subversive Jewish plot. But historic Jewish rightists like Britain’s Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (like Marx, baptized a Christian), Philip Rieff (Freud’s most profound critic), and the Straussians (whose West Coast branch are intellectual supporters of MAGA)⁴ could be construed as evidence of a reactionary Jewish counter-plot. Even Fascism, in its original, pre-antisemitic Italian form, was disproportionately Jewish. (Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s Jewish mistress and advisor, wrote his biography and helped plan the March on Rome.) Remarkably, the Nazis also had some early Jewish support, though they sent the founder of the pro-Hitler Association of German National Jews to a concentration camp.

Jews are represented in nearly every ideology and cause, including those that are diametrically opposed.⁵ Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, was Jewish (though he told a Jewish delegation to “Go home to your Jews and tell them that I am not a Jew and I care nothing for Jews and their fate”). But so was Milton Friedman, the renowned free-market economist who advised America’s most stridently anti-communist president, Ronald Reagan.⁶ Noam Chomsky, the Jewish critic of American realpolitik, was on President Richard Nixon’s enemies’ list. But Henry Kissinger, the Jewish advocate of American realpolitik, was Nixon’s Secretary of State. In World War I, Jews literally fought each other out of opposing national loyalties: around 825,000 for the Allies and 375,000 for the Central Powers. (Contrary to the Nazi-propagated “stab-in-the-back” myth, Jews were enthusiastic supporters of the Imperial German war effort.⁷) And while most Jews now support the right of Israel to exist, Zionism has been subject to fierce debates since its inception.

The truth is that Jews are not inherently tied to any single ideology; nor is there some secret alliance between Jews of opposing political stripes. Historically, many Jews supported the left for the understandable reason that right-wing movements—and, certainly in Tsarist Russia, the traditional rulers—were often anti-Jewish.⁸ Socialism also appealed to Jews because (despite the rare Rothschild) many were poor and working class. Some Jews also anachronistically conflate the prophetic tradition and tikkun olam with social justice, or view the Jewish history of exile and persecution as requiring solidarity with the oppressed. But rightists can point to the Jewish values of family, tradition, and community as being fundamentally conservative in nature. After all, insofar as there is a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy,” it is encapsulated not by the revolutionary creed of the apostate Marx, but by the patriotic message of the prophet Jeremiah (29:7): “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jews continue to pray for the government in synagogue services to this day.

In the United States, Jews only began reliably voting Democrat in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt attracted ethnic minorities as part of his New Deal coalition. Even then, around 40% of Jews voted for the Republican tickets of Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. American Jewish voting patterns, then, are not due to any innate Jewish liberalism. Jews elsewhere in the world often support conservative parties, as did American Jews historically (and as a minority still do), while some contemporary Republicans have been able to attract significant Jewish backing. In part, modern American Jews may disproportionately vote Democrat due to the unique strength of the liberal Reform movement and support for the separation of church and state (ie, fear of the Christian right). But most secular Jews hold their political positions for the same reasons as their non-Jewish neighbors (and, increasingly, spouses and children). They are urban, well-educated, and professional, and vote like non-Jews who fit the same profile. Even when it comes to Zionism, the supposed Jewish wedge issue, more Evangelicals than Jews favor stronger American support for Israel.

Does Stephen Miller’s own Jewish background inform his anti-immigration politics? I have no idea. Racial minorities are more likely than whites to hold antisemitic attitudes, so—contra the “Jews will not replace us!” crowd—it would be in the Jewish interest to oppose wholesale demographic change. But it would also be ad hominem conjecture to suppose that Miller’s primary motivation is Jewish ethnocentrism. By all accounts, he truly believes in reducing immigration for the good of America. Likewise, to pick a Jew of opposing politics, George Soros sincerely supports an “open society” for the good of humanity. Their shared ethnoreligious origin may or may not have influenced their ideas; but it has no bearing on whether those ideas are right or wrong. Jews qua Jews are not trying to replace white people. Nor are Jews qua Jews trying to deport immigrants. When we bother to (((notice))) Jews on the right as well as the left, throughout history and across the globe, then antisemitic grand theories fall apart.

1.

Bronze Age Pervert

was baptized in the Romanian Orthodox Church (though he’s inspired Jewish “Bronze Age Zionists”), while

Curtis Yarvin

has written, “My father is Jewish, at least racially. This does not make me Jewish, but surely it makes me suspect, at least to some anti-Semites.” Nevertheless, if leftist patrilineal Jews like the Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno (who was baptized Catholic) “count” for antisemitic purposes, right-wing patrilineal Jews should carry equal weight.

2.

Nathan Cofnas

has systematically dismantled this take, which is ultimately The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with footnotes.

3. Interestingly, Paul Gottfried, the Jewish paleoconservative and “godfather of the alternative right,” studied under Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse and has been called its “right-wing proponent.”

4. Leo Strauss himself was a German-Jewish political philosopher who studied ancient Greek thought and the origins of modernity. While his politics have been subject to debate, he was certainly not a conventional liberal democrat. In 1933, after the fall of the Weimar Republic, he wrote that “the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible . . . to protest against the shabby abomination.”

5. Even Islamism has its Jewish-born thinker, Muhammad Assad (born Leopold Weiss), who helped draft Pakistan’s constitution and authored classics like The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961).

6. Other notable Jewish libertarians include Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand, anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, and “minimal state” advocate Robert Nozick.

7. In one of history’s worst ironies, Fritz Haber, a German Jew, invented chemical weapons for use by the German army in World War I. His work later helped the Nazis develop their gas chambers. On the Allied side, future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann created an acetone production method to assist the British arms industry.

8. Yet even in the antisemitic Russian Empire, the Alter Rebbe—founder of Chabad—sided with the Tsar against Napoleon’s invading army. To the west, in the more tolerant Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was said that “The only true Austrians are the Jews.” Jewish writers Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig were the empire’s foremost memorialists.