There has been renewed interest from researchers and commentators on the so-called manosphere which includes a particular brand of male influencer – dating coaches, fitness gurus etc – figures who pride themselves on being hypermasculine ‘alpha’ males selling dating and fitness advice with a side of social outrage to millions of followers.

We have seen various figures interviewed, probing how extreme and often misogynistic views on gender bleed into broader conspiracism on women and elites. But along with their conspiratorial worldviews, this gender-driven subculture converges on a predictable scapegoat. The Jew.

This is usually framed as a problem of the political right, aka the ‘far right’, ‘alt right’, ‘woke right’, or whatever the latest iteration is.

Rarely is the camera turned on a similar ideological sentiment embedded in the left-wing academic class. The ‘soy boy’ counterpart to the alpha male. The self-described ‘ally’ who rejects masculinity and subordinates himself to whatever the Omnicause demands whether it be identity, gender, climate justice, Palestinian liberation.

Whatever the grievance, both types are based on the premise that the world is broken and that they alone see it clearly. And like every politics of grievance, they need a villain and end up at the same one. The Jew. Or, as the more socially acceptable version goes: the Zionist.

And this is how the story goes…

The hypermasculine right despises weakness. Their entire worldview is built on physical dominance, competitive hierarchy and the idea that power belongs to those strong enough to take it. So how do they explain Jewish power and influence? (Which is exaggerated in any case). Jews do not fit the alpha ‘Bro’ template. In the manosphere’s own taxonomy, the Jewish male is the archetypal beta – cerebral, urbane, historically persecuted, not exactly the image of the buff gym junkie super dater. And yet these men insist that Jews control governments, banks, media, and Western foreign policy.

The contradiction is the point. According to the alpha Bros, the beta Jew who runs the world does it not through strength or conquest, but through cunning, infiltration, and subterfuge. This is a direct reprint of 1920s and 1930s antisemitic propaganda and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fabricated text that purported to document a secret Jewish plan for world domination. Or think, the Weimar-era caricature of the Jewish banker pulling strings from the shadows.

To put it simply, the alpha Bro cannot accept that someone he considers weak (the Jew) holds power he (the Bro) lacks. Thus, the Bro resolves this dissonance with one answer: it must have been obtained by underhanded means. The Jews didn’t earn their place in this world. They schemed for it. This is why the alt-right, hypermasculine manosphere’s antisemitism is structurally necessary. Grievance culture requires an enemy that is both despicable and powerful. The Jew, as constructed by this tradition, is both.

The left arrives at the same conclusion via other contradictory means. Where the hypermasculine right fears and is bewildered by ‘beta control’, the progressive left is simply jealous of it – or more precisely, morally outraged by it. In their framework, power (and success) must be inherently corrupt in a capitalist system they abhor. Therefore, Israel represents concentrated corruption of power and success: a Western-aligned Middle Eastern Jewish nation, a capitalist tech hub of success, militarily capable, and refuses to apologise for existing – the weak and meek Jew became the powerful, unapologetic Jew. In radical Islamist rhetoric, coined by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, this framing has a name: Israel is the Little Satan, America the Great Satan, with the implication that the former directs the latter. One wonders how radical Islamist thought reached the Western intelligentsia. But here we are.

The irony should not be lost. Progressive movements that pride themselves on anti-racism have reproduced, almost verbatim, the antisemitic architecture they claim to oppose. The powerful hidden minority. The disproportionate control. The shadowy network. Change ‘Jew’ to ‘Zionist’ and ‘Zionist’ to ‘Jew’ and you have the same accusation that justified anti-Jewish pogroms, the Holocaust and every anti-Zionist massacre after that.

All of this is happening in Australia. We have our own manospheres – alt-right influencers, podcasts, and online communities pushing the same content to the same demographic of disaffected young men longing for a place in the world and longing for someone to blame. We also have a progressive activist elite, well-funded and institutionally embedded, that has spent years mainstreaming the idea that Jewish Australians who support Israel’s existence are acceptable targets for their faux moral outrage.

We have seen the right-coded version of this phenomenon documented, but not the left-coded version playing out on American (and Australian, British, European) campuses, in activist networks, and in Parliament.

Jew hatred has always been this: the conspiracy theory that explains everything and requires no evidence. It is as prominent on the right as it is on the left.