“Cynical Uses of Suffering: Gaza, Antisemitism, & the New Digital Right,” TRAFO: Blog for Transregional Research, April 16, 2026. Link.
Excerpt: As with Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” the misinformation grift took advantage of real shock or trauma generated by the world-wide pandemic, harnessing the legitimate pain and paranoia widely shared among Western publics to turn a quick buck. But Covid-19 is an old story now: the first harvest of a now-routine Internet strategy. This strategy is spearheaded by a political movement I am calling the New Digital Right: it relies on social media influencers, platform affordances, and online virality to scramble political alliances and mobilize collective emotions of fear and outrage towards dark and destructive ends. The latest rupture online surrounds the topic of Israel in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Gaza after October 7th, 2023—an invasion that human rights organizations around the world, from the United Nations to B’Tselem, have declared a genocide. The case I make in this piece is as follows: the far-right is taking advantage of global attention to the genocide in Gaza, alongside Israel’s plummeting popularity among Western publics, to radicalize and recruit new followers. The U.S.-American far-right in particular is seizing upon the media vacuum created by government censorship of anti-war and anti-Zionist voices to launder and normalize their own virulently fascist and antisemitic politics.