Prejudicial propaganda doesn’t necessarily take aim at it’s target openly and directly. Often the person spreading prejudice will twist facts and insert insinuations to manipulate a third party. Manipulate them into hating a minority group who they have no rational reason to hate.
For instance, in 2015 the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website reacted to a report on economic inequality which named America and Israel as the world’s two most unequal nations by deciding that the cause of this inequality must be the presence of Jews. By contrast CNN’s coverage of the report quoted the author, Mark Pearson, as saying that the two nations stood out “because of comparatively low spending on social programs and benefits”, especially in comparison to France.
This use of propaganda is crass and unsubtle. But The Daily Stormer is the website which responded to the murder of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville by writing a piece of pathetic edgelordery saying that “a 32-year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value.” They’re dumb, unlikely to persuade anyone but the most persuadable.
Moving up a degree in sophistication, I recently had a short debate on a political messageboard, when a member posted an infographic which targeted the Rothschild banking family.
Larry Leftie:
Humanity will keep on suffering & being cursed under God’s Wrath so long as they’re under the yoke of usury bankers’ tyranny such as #Rothschild’s & their evil system of finance & power, this only ends badly, as God takes it upon Himself to wage war on those who partake in it.
Depicting the Rothschild family as the greediest and most amoral of all capitalists is a trope with a long history. The Rothschilds’ Shares in Waterloo – produced in Germany in 1940 – depicted the family playing all sides of the Napoleonic Wars with no aim higher than to increase their family’s wealth. This trope persists into the modern day. Googling the family name brings up videos whose titles contain the phrases “world’s richest family” and “the only trillionaires in the world”.
According to Forbes there are 2124 dollar billionaires in the world, only two of them with the surname Rothschild. Jeff Rothschild – whose wealth of $2.9 billion gives him joint position #822 – is not a member of the Rothschild banking family. Forbes puts Benjamin de Rothschild’s wealth at $1.9 billion, giving him a share of 1284th place. I don’t know how broadly the Rothschild family fortune has branched out, but I think it’s safe to say that the infographic over-estimates their current day wealth.
Building Order From Chaos:
Do you honestly believe that the Rothschild family own four times as much wealth as the rest of the world combined? Do you have evidence for this?LL:
They are not the only ones involved in power, there is also the Vatican, the Freemasons… there are plenty of books arguing about these matters.
At the risk of seeming excessively kind, I don’t think that Larry harbours a hatred towards Jews. My impression was that he had a general distrust of authority, and shared an infographic that he believed supported his worldview, and was reluctant to later admit that he’d made a mistake. His secondary targets are quite stereotypical – as if someone has recently bought him a copy of The Big Book of Nineteenth Century Conspiracy Theories. All he needed to add was a mention of the Illuminati, and he’d have a full house.
In my mind there are two reasons why the Rothschild conspiracy theory is still perpetuated. Firstly the fact that the conspiracy theory exists perpetuates itself, a kind of name brand recognition; secondly some people deliberately create and spread materials designed to increase hatred of Jews, doing with a chisel what The Daily Stormer do with a sledgehammer. People like Larry are the unwitting puppets of these type of manipulators.
LL:
They are not the only ones involved in power, there is also the Vatican, the Freemasons… there are plenty of books arguing about these matters.BOFC:
Do you believe that the Rothschild family have four times as much wealth as the rest of the world combined?LL:
OK, I sniff the entrapment – blocked #Rothschild lower life form sucker shill
I repeated my question, asking Larry to address the most glaring problem with the propaganda he had shared. He was unwilling to do so, and ended the conversation instead.
My reading is that Larry was not a hateful person, but that he saw in the infographic a criticism of inequality, and was blind to the fact that the infographic puts a disproportionate amount of blame for that inequality on a single, relatively obscure Jewish family. Not everyone who shares anti-semitic propaganda has a personal hatred of Jews.
Unfortunately some people are not willing to reflect on whether they’ve unwittingly been used, and perpetuated the spread of antisemitic tropes. When I challenged Larry to consider whether the infographic was factually accurate he first deflected, and then ended the conversation. Though I’m reluctant to speak with certainty on limited evidence, my experience is that people like Larry believe that because their intention is good, their actions must also be good. Therefore anyone who criticises them – even softly – must be bad. I think that there’s a great need for people to be more reflective and open to criticism in this regard.
Happy Sisyphus 
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