Conservative MPs have published anti-Semitic imagery drawn from Nazi propaganda: "cultural Marxist... bourgeois liberals" and a "clique of powerful" overlords are stabbing Britain in the back. The Daily Telegraph printed it. Why does nobody care? My first ever thread!

Anti-Semitism is usually imagined today as radical for its nominal anti-elitism (it "punches up") so that declared anti-anti-Semitism allows moderates to understand as progressive their fears about radicals from Corbyn to BLM. The truth about anti-Semitism is slightly different:

Anti-Semitism is a conservative bid to blame social problems on a tiny clique of outsiders, not the whole structure of social relations. On the Right, it imagines a cabal of cosmopolitan bankers funding black people and radicals to wage war on patriotism and slavery.

Liberals accuse BLM of anti-Semitism but for the Right, black militants are agents of the Jewish conspiracy. This is not "punching up", this is aristocrats fearing Rothschild or Soros will tear down the nation state. Ostensible anti-elitism can serve conservative ends.

"Cultural Bolshevism" was a Nazi trope, thrown at everything from modern art to the Frankfurt School. It was a "Jewish plot". It became "cultural Marxism" in the manifesto of the white supremacist killer Anders Breivik. A rootless elite are conjured as the enemy of the West.

People spreading these tropes might now deny they are anti-Semitic - they'll say, "I didn't mean Jews!" just as they say "I didn't mean blacks!" when they call certain neighbourhoods dirty and crime-infested. Why is "left" talk of "Zios" unacceptable, but not "cultural Marxism"?

It's almost as if rightwing panics about anti-Semitism aren't really about protecting Jews at all. Anti-Semitism can appear on the Right or the Left, but a deep and ubiquitous misunderstanding of it as radical, anti-systemic rage utterly obscures the danger.

Anti-Semites are like Russia obsessives who blame Trump + Brexit on Putin, avoiding the more radical thought that their own societies might have deep currents of resentment: they want the problem to be as shallow as a cunning conspiracy. It is an appealing thought in dark times.

Injustices from Wall Street to the West Bank stem from forces - capital and colonialism - that organise our world more profoundly than a reassuringly small cabal. When ending them feels impossible, people reach for lower hanging fruit. Rising anti-Semitism means we need a Left.