The Construction of a Conspiracy Theory

An antisemitic conspiracy theory does not begin with evidence. It begins with need.

A country fails. Its ruling party hollows out institutions, public services collapse, borders turn performative, police lose authority, and unemployment becomes generational. African migrants are threatened by other Africans on African soil, and the state cannot or will not protect them until the danger becomes internationally embarrassing. At that point the ruling class goes looking for an explanation that does not require a mirror. Not corruption, not the ANC, not state decay, not lawlessness, not Afrophobia, not the long betrayal of South Africa’s democratic promise. A Jew.

That is how it begins. I now sit near the center of the latest South African edition of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The country has every one of these failures. Somehow the hidden hand is me: Jews, Israel, The Times of Israel, Mossad, Zionists, “Empire,” Elon Musk, bots, algorithms, and whatever other ghost is required to spare the ANC from responsibility. The accusation is not serious because it is true. It is serious because it is useful.

My article, Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First, argued about sovereignty, state failure, inherited colonial borders, and democratic self-determination. It did not argue for attacks on migrants, instruct mobs, fund vigilantes, or create South Africa’s unemployment, corruption, border failure, or Afrophobia. It asked whether failed post-colonial states should be treated as sacred prisons when they deny identity, security, consent, and competent government to the peoples trapped inside them. The conspiratorial mind did not need the article to say any of that. It needed the article to exist. A Jew had written, an Israeli platform had published, the word “fragment” appeared, and the rest could be manufactured.

I publish in The Times of Israel because the platform gave me a blog long before I had heard of Substack. I built a readership there, and I keep writing on Lithuania’s Holocaust distortion, Jewish continuity, South Africa, sovereignty, recognition doctrine, antisemitism, Afrophobia, Somaliland, Mthwakazi, and the political uses of history. The platform is public, the byline is public, and the record is not hidden. That should end the matter. It does not, because conspiracy theory does not respect distinctions. Author becomes publisher, publisher becomes state, state becomes intelligence service, argument becomes operation, operation becomes Jewish plot. No fact has entered the room. None is needed. The accusation has already done its work.

The proximate Jew as alibi, the proximate Jew as culprit

Joanne Strasser recently described one form of this mechanism in The Ease of Antisemitism. She called it the “proximate Jew as alibi”: the Jewish spouse, dissenter, or witness produced to make a charge against Jews or Israel feel safe. A Jewish wife says “yes, it is genocide,” and the speaker feels pre-acquitted. The Jew is not engaged as a reasoning person. The Jew is used as a credential.

What has happened to me is the companion structure: the proximate Jew as culprit. In Strasser’s case, Jewishness is conscripted to validate an accusation. In mine, to manufacture one. A Jewish spouse can bless a genocide theory that does not exist; a Jewish writer, a foreign-operation theory that does not exist. In both, the conclusion comes first, and then the Jew is found and made to do the work evidence cannot.

This is affinity fraud with prejudice as the asset. Ordinary affinity fraud builds trust through a shared identity. Here suspicion is built through a hostile one. The audience is not asked to inspect evidence but to recognize signals: Jew, Israel, Mossad, The Times of Israel, fragmentation, Bantustans, bots, Empire, Zionists. The chain is not logical. It is associative, doing the work proof cannot.

The conversion in public

This is why Redi Tlhabi matters. According to Lawrence Nowosenetz’s article, The Antisemitic Gospel According to Redi Tlhabi, a user posted my “Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First” piece in Tlhabi’s comment section and claimed “they” were behind the “nyaka nyaka,” the chaos. Tlhabi replied “Nnete”—true—and added: “Mossad is GOOD. I hope our investigative journalists are working. I’m happy to give them leads.” That exchange remains the hinge.

The underlying exchange shows the construction before it becomes respectable prose. Marang Setshwaelo wrote to Tlhabi: “Danko! They are behind this nyaka nyaka, and will stop at NOTHING!!!!” The sentence does not prove who “they” are. It does something more dangerous. It creates a vacancy, and into that vacancy the old cast can be inserted—Mossad, Israel, Zionists, Jews, bots, Empire, and finally me. The post is the raw material. My article becomes “they,” “they” becomes chaos, chaos becomes Mossad, Mossad becomes Israel, Israel becomes the Jews, and the Jews become the hidden hand. This is not analysis. It is ritual.

Tlhabi also posted that “they want the return of Bantustans” and “they want South Africa fragmented into smaller states,” naming my Times of Israel article directly. That is the first conversion. Self-determination becomes apartheid, a sovereignty argument becomes Bantustans, a private blogger becomes Israeli intelligence, and a domestic crisis becomes a Zionist operation.

I answered with the only evidentiary test that matters. If anyone has evidence that I funded, directed, coordinated, incited, or organized anti-migrant violence in South Africa, publish it. Show the money, the instruction, the meeting, the intermediary, the organizer, the operational chain. That test remains open. If there is no chain, then say what this is. They did not discover causation. They discovered convenience.

A South African writer applied that test and published the result. Mzoxolo Mpolase, in Political Analysis South Africa, called my article hostile to the state and easy to exploit for anyone already convinced Israel wanted to weaken South Africa after the ICJ case. Then he refused the move everyone else made. A blog in the Times of Israel is not Israeli policy, an Israeli platform is not the Israeli state, and none of it shows that Israel funded, instructed, or organized anything on South African soil. He found no funding channel, no instruction, no operational link. He wrote that the existence of my article was being made to do the work evidence should do. Mpolase disagreed with me and still told the truth. That is the distinction the conspiracy cannot survive.

The respectable version

The construction did not stay on social media, and it did not stay crude. My article appeared on 2 January 2026. Within months it surfaced in comment threads as evidence of a Mossad hand. By 30 June it had reached establishment print, and the accusation had acquired manners.

Pregs Govender, a former ANC Member of Parliament and former Deputy Chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, published a TimesLIVE article headlined Reclaiming ourselves in a time of hate. She named my piece directly and then performed the conversion in public. My argument about self-determination, failed inherited borders, and political consent became, in her telling, a strategy to destroy South African sovereignty, restore apartheid homelands, fragment the country, isolate it, and punish South Africa for standing against Israel at the ICJ.

The same construction, in a more careful register. A sovereignty argument becomes apartheid, a legal argument becomes destabilization, an article becomes strategy, strategy becomes “Empire,” and hidden coordination becomes Israel and then the Jews. Association does the work evidence cannot. This version rarely shouts “the Jews.” It says Times of Israel, Empire, algorithms, paid bots, punishment for the ICJ case. It points to a Jewish writer and an Israeli platform and lets the reader finish. Modern antisemitic conspiracy needs the old structure, not the old vocabulary.

The ANC’s use for the lie

The ANC benefits from all of this. It need not fix South Africa if it can keep accusing someone else of breaking it. It need not explain why migrants live in fear, why citizens face vigilante politics, why private formations now decide who may remain, trade, travel, or receive services, or why the liberation movement became the custodian of decay. It needs only a villain large enough to distract from the ruins. Israel serves. Jews serve better. A Jewish writer with an Israeli byline serves better still.

This is no longer confined to columnists. Ronald Lamola, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, put the weight of the state behind it. Given South Africa’s international role and its ICJ case, he said, one “cannot exclude state and non-state actors” trying to erode the country’s human rights standing. He invoked megaphone diplomacy, fake news, and disinformation, and tied all of it to the ICJ. A sitting minister handed the theory an official shape and produced none of the evidence a coordinated foreign operation would require. The South African Zionist Federation and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) both named the maneuver for what it was: a government reaching for hidden foreign forces instead of accounting for what happens at home.

South Africa’s Afrophobia crisis, the fear of migrants, and the collapse of public trust are all domestic. But the ruling class and its intellectual auxiliaries do not want a domestic accounting. They want a foreign author, so they took my article and made it useful.

The public record they pretend is secret

I have made this argument openly and repeatedly. In South Africa’s Path to Failed State Status I set out the pattern of decline. In The Apartheid State Is Failing I argued that the ANC hauled Israel before the world’s court while preserving racial administration and watching Africans flee other Africans. In June 30 Is South Africa’s Failed-State Test I argued that state failure arrives unevenly, one institution and one community at a time, and that wherever private actors decide who may remain, trade, travel, or receive services while the authorities cannot stop them, the state has surrendered part of its function. In South Africa’s Israel Obsession Will Not Save Migrants I made the cumulative point: a country that wants to be seen as the moral prosecutor of Israel should first explain why African migrants again live in fear on its streets.

The rest of the record is equally public. In Afrophobia Must Be Named I argued that unnamed hatred becomes uncounted, and uncounted hatred becomes ungoverned. In The Necessary Fragmentation of Africa I argued that Mthwakazi must be heard through law, evidence, and peaceful organization rather than dismissed because colonial borders suit incumbent regimes. In Palestine’s Precedent and Africa’s Future I placed Mthwakazi, the Western Cape, and Somaliland inside the international system’s own contradictions over self-determination and territorial integrity. In Antizionism’s Target: Sovereignty I argued that anti-Israel politics attacks some sovereignty claims and ignores others depending on whether the people seeking self-determination fit the anti-Western script. In Israel Recognized Somaliland. Why Is Africa Afraid to Follow? I argued that recognition is not destabilization; refusing reality is.

None of this is hidden, and that is the embarrassment for my accusers. The material, the argument, the platform, the byline, and the distinction between a private blog and state policy are all public. Yet the conspiracy requires secrecy, so secrecy is invented.

The old structure in new vocabulary

The structure is old enough to be recognized on sight. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery used for more than a century to promote the lie that secret Jewish power controls world events. The vocabulary changes; the structure survives. The South African version does not need to say “elders of Zion.” It says Mossad, Times of Israel, algorithms, bots, Empire, Bantustans, and “they.”

“They” is the most useful word in any conspiracy theory. It is empty enough to fill and dark enough to menace. It lets the speaker avoid evidence while manufacturing suspicion, lets a mob imagine an architect, a failed state imagine sabotage, a ruling party imagine its own innocence. The migrant is blamed for unemployment. The Jew is blamed for the mob. Israel is blamed for the state. Everyone is guilty except the people with power. That is the obscenity. African migrants are scapegoated by South Africans, and Jews are scapegoated for the scapegoating. Afrophobia and antisemitism are not opposites here. They are partners in evasion. The foreigner becomes the visible enemy, the Jew the hidden one, and the state escapes twice.

Preparation for hate

This is not merely stupid. It is preparation. Before persecution comes permission, and before permission comes explanation. A society must first be trained to see the Jew not as a person, writer, citizen, or critic, but as the hidden author of visible events. Once that habit returns, anything can be Judaized: a riot, a protest, a border crisis, a failed municipality, a political embarrassment.

History will record both those stupid enough to believe these theories and those evil enough to build them. They are not morally identical; the fool and the architect do not share a rank. But they share an archive. They participated, normalized the suspicion, and turned prejudice into public explanation.

The ANC should be seen clearly. Not as a liberation movement fallen on hard times, not as a misunderstood steward of a complicated society, not as a moral voice distracted by geopolitical principle. It is a ruling party degraded enough to haul Israel before international tribunals while failing to govern its own streets, inverted enough to speak the language of human rights abroad while African migrants hide from mobs at home, exhausted enough that accusation has replaced administration, and bankrupt enough that the old Jewish conspiracy has again become useful.

Peter Greenwall has already turned the absurdity into song. The laughter is not trivial. Ridicule refuses a conspiracy theory the dignity it demands from its targets.

So here is the construction, start to finish. First fail. Then deny the failure. Then find a Jew, call the Jew evidence, call the evidence Israel, call Israel Mossad, call Mossad the hidden hand, and declare yourself innocent.

If anyone has evidence that I funded, directed, coordinated, incited, organized, or operationally influenced anti-migrant violence in South Africa, publish it. If there is no chain, say what this is. They did not find proof. They found proximity. They did not need facts. They needed a Jew.

South Africa’s failures were not made in Jerusalem, drafted by me in California, or coded by Zionist bots. They were made in South Africa, by South Africans, through years of ANC rule, corruption, racial politics, lawlessness, and governmental decay. My article touched something raw because it challenged the sacred fiction that inherited colonial borders are holy, that failed states are permanent, and that captive peoples must remain trapped inside arrangements they never chose. That argument can be challenged, debated, or rejected. Turning it into a Jewish conspiracy is none of those things. It is old hatred finding new material. This time, the material was me.