Translated from German

American politics is now driven by conspiracy narratives, identity and algorithmic outrage. What is striking is not only the radicalisation of the right – parts of the populist left, too, are losing touch with materialist analysis and embracing storylines in which Israel, intelligence agencies, elites and shadowy networks become the universal explanation for everything. When this development spills over from the United States – the world’s dominant political, military, financial and technological power – into Europe, it is not just an American curiosity – it is a problem for anyone who reads their own political reality through an American screen.

A murder that needs no secret service

Andrew Callaghan is the face of a new, rough-edged American journalism. With his camera on the street, among the homeless, activists, protesters, conspiracy theorists and political fringe characters, Channel 5 was compelling precisely because Callaghan let people speak who are almost invisible in mainstream reporting. Starting out as a deadpan, uncommenting interviewer of, to put it mildly, “crazy” figures across the US on his channel All Gas No Brakes, Callaghan evolved into a kind of figurehead for bottom-up gonzo journalism.

Now the documentarian has himself become part of what he once merely documented.

Current debates see Callaghan accused of pushing the claim that Israel had Charlie Kirk assassinated. Viewers of his programme say they switched off at exactly that point. There is in fact a conversation in which Callaghan spins out a crude theory that Kirk was murdered in order to see what would happen if Trump were killed – and confirms that he regards this theory as plausible.

That would be grotesque enough on its own. What is even more remarkable is that Hunter Biden, son of former US President Joe Biden, has now also appeared in a similar milieu. In conversation with far-right conservative conspiracy pundit Candace Owens, a long-time ally of Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA, he backed her insistent questioning around Kirk’s killing and declared that the furious backlash for merely asking questions was absurd. Owens has repeatedly claimed that the official account of the murder is not credible and has floated, among other things, possible Israeli involvement. There is no reliable evidence whatsoever for any actual Israeli role.

One has to pause for a moment to take in the absurdity of this constellation: a once-progressive documentarian and the son of a Democratic president suddenly find themselves operating in a political space frequented by Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and other fixtures of the American right.

Charlie Kirk was not a protected head of state, not an intelligence officer, not a man whose murder would have required a complex international operation. He was standing on a stage, visible and comparatively unprotected. A lone gunman could kill him. That, according to the current indictment, is exactly what happened. Tyler Robinson is facing a capital murder charge; prosecutors have presented, among other things, video footage, DNA traces and further pieces of evidence that clearly link Robinson to the shot.

The conspiracy here not only lacks evidence. It demands an elaborate explanation for an event that simply does not require one.

This is the point at which healthy scepticism towards a government tips over into a conspiracy theory. Over the past 20 to 30 years the US has seen a remarkable boom in “alternative explanatory models”. In his book “A Culture of Conspiracy – Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America” Michael Barkun examines and analyses exactly these movements – and why they have such a grip on contemporary America.

Antisemitism as a popular strategy – on left and right alike

It is entirely possible to mount fierce criticism of the Israeli government and to regard Netanyahu’s war policy as criminal. One can fundamentally reject the occupation, the settlement project, Gaza policy, arms exports or the treatment of Palestinians. The accusation of genocide comes from the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry from September 2025; the International Court of Justice is hearing a case brought by South Africa. The International Criminal Court, for its part, has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, among others – on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. None of this is antisemitic.

The claim that Israel had Charlie Kirk killed is something entirely different.

The problem is not the mere mention of Israel. It arises where Israel is turned into the hidden key to events that can no longer be explained through verifiable interests, actions and causal chains: Israel controls the media, steers intelligence agencies, eliminates political opponents, drives wars, manipulates elections, stands behind attacks. What may on occasion be true is not a universal explanation, nor a verifiable pattern.

This is the classic structure of conspiracist thinking: a real institution or real power factor is elevated into an omnipotent, clandestine actor.

And it is precisely here that anti-Zionism can turn into antisemitism – not at the point of criticising Israel as a state, but where traditional antisemitic notions of a secret Jewish power are transferred onto “Israel”, “Zionists” or “Mossad”.

This is an important line.

The opposite reflex would be just as wrong: treating any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. It is precisely this conflation that weakens the fight against real antisemitism. How contentious the question of definition truly is can be seen in the clash between the IHRA working definition and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, signed in 2021 by around 200 scholars of antisemitism and Jewish studies – explicitly because they considered the IHRA examples vague and open to political instrumentalisation.

Hannah Arendt distinguished between the religiously grounded Jew-hatred of earlier centuries and modern antisemitism: a political ideology of the 19th century, from which – unlike older religious prejudice – assimilation offered no escape. Arendt developed this distinction to explain the rise of totalitarianism, not to settle today’s definitional battles. Even so, if we apply it, one conclusion follows: the more the term is stretched, the more it loses the precision that makes it useful. The accusation forfeits its specificity, and it becomes ever harder for the public to distinguish real antisemitism from ordinary criticism of Israeli policy.

Israel can therefore be the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories and at the same time, through its own political communication, contribute to blurring the line between state interest and Jewish identity.

America’s identity war

America is increasingly losing the ability to describe political conflict in material terms.

What does a worker earn? Who owns the land? Who owns the housing stock? Who profits from monopolies? Why are healthcare costs exploding? Which companies have which political interests? Which lobby shapes which legislation? Which economic interests lie behind which foreign-policy decision?

Those would be materialist questions – instead, the question more and more often is:

Who is behind it?

The left has found its own answers: capitalists, Zionists, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, AIPAC, Epstein networks, “the elites”.

The right has its own: globalists, the WEF, Soros, the deep state, migrants, NGOs, the trans lobby, “the elites”.

And then the two sides converge in a striking way. Because once reality is understood only as a struggle between hidden groups, the ideological starting point no longer matters much.

The populist right says:

The globalists control America.

The populist left says:

Israel and the military-industrial complex control America.

The conspiracy theorist says:

A secret elite controls America.

And all three have committed the same epistemic error: they have turned complex social processes into pseudo-identifyable Groups. In doing so, they turn politics into identity.

The issue is no longer whether a statement is true, but who is allowed to say it. Truth is owned by one’s own group. The opposing group possesses only propaganda. Contradictory evidence is not a reason for correction but further “proof” of how powerful the other side supposedly is. This is a political dead end.

It now also affects people who once counted as rational or progressive voices. Callaghan is a particularly interesting case. His strength originally lay in listening to people without instantly forcing them into a ready-made scheme. That openness now appears to have morphed, at least in part, into a kind of epistemic defencelessness: if you listen to everyone, you eventually have to decide which claims are true.

The mere stance of “I’m just asking questions” is no longer a journalistic method once every single answer is allowed to be a conspiracy.

Exported dysfunctional debates

This is where things become interesting for us. Why are European societies so obsessively importing American political debates?

The answer is disarmingly simple: because they take place in English.

The internet is formally global. The digital public sphere we actually experience is not. A German-speaking user is flooded with TikToks, Reels, YouTube videos and podcasts from the US on a scale that bears little comparison to the visibility of debates from Portugal, India, Brazil, France, Turkey or China.

Not because the US is necessarily more interesting. But because English is the dominant lingua franca of the global internet. This produces a bizarre distortion of perception:
A European teenager sees US debates about trans people, racism, abortion, police violence, guns, white supremacy, Christian nationalism or Israel and does not experience these as American domestic politics, but as part of digital global normality.

The algorithm does not say:

“Here is an American culture war that may be completely irrelevant to your life in a European backwater.”

It says:

“This is what matters right now.”

And because the next clip also comes from America, a self-reinforcing illusion emerges. We watch America until we believe we are watching the world. That is the real import of American identity politics.

In my previous commentary I examined similar mechanisms; The business of outrage – how political influencers hijack debates for marketing purposes. That piece focused on the commercial exploitation of political indignation.

In the Charlie Kirk discourse, an American identity struggle is turned, via algorithms, into a European information product.

Identity politics is particularly effective here because it views universal questions through the lens of an allegedly privileged or marginalised group.

This inevitably makes political debate more particularist. The central question is less and less what is just or true and which material interests underpin a political conflict. Instead, the focus is on what a development means “for us”, from which position someone speaks and which identity the speaker belongs to. The quality of an utterance is judged less by its argument and more by the social or political position of the person speaking. As a result, political confrontation also shifts: away from interests and facts towards a struggle between competing identities and competing claims to define reality.

This is why identity politics, as the sole political method, is so dangerous: it is incapable of imagining a universal society.

Israel’s policy as an accelerant

The Israeli government exacerbates this problem drastically. The military violence in Gaza, the occupation, the settlement policy, the treatment of Palestinians and the political rhetoric of the Israeli leadership all provide very real grounds for outrage.

At the same time, Israel and pro-Israel lobby groups often respond to criticism by ever more tightly binding together Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity. Even where criticism is squarely legitimate, this creates a discursive vacuum: those who dismiss every accusation as antisemitic unintentionally bolster precisely those voices that claim Israel may not be criticised at all.

This is politically disastrous.

For when legitimate criticism is blocked, it does not disappear. It migrates onto the internet – and there it ends up next to conspiracy theories. That does not excuse antisemitism; it does, however, make it politically intelligible.

The bleak outlook

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about America today is therefore not that the right is becoming more radical – it is that shared reality is disintegrating.

Both left and right wallow in conspiracy theories and identity-based trench warfare – there seems to be no longer any universal perspective on problems.

American tankies can once again cosy up to Stalinism, while formerly progressive journalists drift into narratives about Mossad, Epstein and shadowy power elites. Figures like Tucker Carlson can suddenly appear almost rational – not because Carlson has become reasonable, but because the environment around him has moved so far outwards that his criticism suddenly looks moderate.

This is the real swamp.

What is missing is a strong materialist counterforce – a rational corrective to these debates – a culture clash not exported primarily via social media.

A sensible left would be talking about property, wages, classes, capital, monopolies, housing, public infrastructure and power – a sensible right would be talking about the state, institutions, borders, security, productivity and social order.

Instead, both sides talk about who is secretly pulling the strings. This is no longer politics that seeks to explain or change the world – it is a soap opera. It is politics as an identity contest.

The US can in fact ill afford this luxury: it is the world’s dominant military power, the hub of the global financial system, one of the key centres of technology and science, and still the crucial security guarantor for large parts of Europe and Asia.

When a state of that stature becomes irrational, its irrationality does not remain within its borders.

Its politics are exported via Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, Meta, Google, X, YouTube and other globally dominant information channels and thus become normative reality – in English, a language we all understand.

This may be the most dangerous form of American hegemony: not only American power is globalised, but American madness too.

From a European perspective, the real question ought to be:

Can we stop mistaking America for the world?

Sources: Channel 5, All Gas No Brakes, Turning Point USA, “A Culture of Conspiracy” Michael Barkun (2013)
Photo: Illustration PL