Shakespeare: Antisemite, White Nationalist, Conspiracy Theorist

This essay’s headline might have been stolen from an undergraduate literature paper submitted by Nina Jankowicz at Bryn Mawr College back in the early 2000s. I hereby preemptively apologize to the Mary Poppins of disinformation in case I have inadvertently plagiarized her, and to everyone else for bringing her name up just when you finally thought you’d heard the last of her.

My take on the evil dead white male antisemitic white nationalist conspiracy theorist from Stratford-on-Avon is not your garden-variety wokist denigration. I very much like Shakespeare, and do not hold it against him that he is white, male, and dead—nor, for that matter, that he is an antisemitic white nationalist conspiracy theorist. (And sexist to boot. If you want to piss off a feminist, just read aloud the choicest bits from The Taming of the Shrew.)

Disclaimer: I’m not a typical conservative, much less a Western chauvinist. Au contraire, I’m a defector from “Western civilization” who agrees with Gandhi that it would be a good idea. What’s more, I’m a Moroccan resident and convert to Islam. I don’t hold it against my wife that she is female, Muslim, and less melanin-challenged than I am. And I have no use for the nutjobs who think the way to save “Western civilization” is to expel all the brown people from Europe, North America, Australia, and wherever else they coexist with pallid Euro-wraiths.

Yet I appreciate Shakespeare’s antisemitism, embrace his conspiracism, and even applaud his white nationalism. To me, these are features, not bugs. They are essential aspects of his genius. Why? Because they are deep truths.

Shakespeare’s Antisemitism

Let’s start with the antisemitism. Everybody and his meshugganah brother-in-law knows that The Merchant of Venice is antisemitic, meaning anti-Jewish. Those who argue that Shylock—the madly vindictive, quintessentially Jewish usurer who wants to carve a proverbial pound of flesh out of the unfortunate goy hero Antonio—is the real hero of the play, know deep down inside that they are full of shit.

The Shylock-apologists say “hey, the poor Jew’s human,” and point to such lines as:

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Yes, Shylock, you Jews do bleed when pricked, laugh when tickled, die when poisoned, and seek revenge when you imagine yourselves wronged. The problem is, you are always imagining the wrong, or fabricating it, in order to justify your grossly inordinate “revenge” which is actually sheer unmitigated aggression.

Take Palestine. (No, Shylock, I did not mean that literally!)

You Jews have been committing genocidal “revenge” against the descendants of the family of Jesus, namely the Palestinians, for more than a century. And what, pray tell, is the Palestinians’ crime? In what way did they wrong you? Quite simply, they existed. They merely went about the business of living, but did so on land that you Jews claim, based on your Bronze Age mythology, that your putative ancestors received from your tribal deity Yahweh (complete with a title deed and “exterminate the current residents” clause) more than 2500 years ago.

Since nobody in their right mind cares about Bronze Age tribal deities and their genocidal real estate contracts, my dear Shylock, you and your tribe told a story about Hitler and the Germans committing outrageous wrongs—and through some sort of black magic convinced most Western goyim cattle that German wrongs somehow eternally justify the Jews’ genocidal revenge against the Palestinians! Consider the words of one such goy dupe, Piers Morgan:

Piers Morgan: "…Obviously they (Hamas) target and murder as many Jewish people as they can get their hands on. And you say it's because they are Israelis, not Jewish."

Ahmed Alnaouq: "Because they are occupiers, because they occupied our country."

Morgan: "And because they are Jewish."

Alnaouq: "No. Because they occupied our country, and colonised our country. Because they came to our country and kicked us out in 1948 and they killed thousands of Palestinians, including my grandparents."

Morgan: "But you know why Israel was set up after World War Two. Because Jewish people were the victims of an appalling Holocaust by Hitler and the Nazis where 6 million of them were exterminated purely for their ethnicity and for being Jewish. So the Jewish people were given the state of Israel."

Alnaouq: "My country."

Morgan: "I understand that argument, but it wasn't 'Israelis' given that land. It was the Jewish people."

Alnaouq: "Who are you to give the Jewish people my country?"

Who indeed, Piers? I’ll tell you who. You—the typical goy dupe, that’s who. You are apparently too stupid to understand that Germans wronging Jews justifies Jews wronging Palestinians doesn’t compute. Most children can handle that level of moral reasoning by age three or four. But not you, apparently. And not the rest of your genocide-inciting media, genocide-funding taxpayers, and genocide-perpetrating arms industry.

What, precisely, has reduced Piers Morgan’s (and the West’s) moral-intellectual capacity to the sub-two-year-old level? The answer is obvious, but taboo: The crazed, vicious, ultra-vindictive, genocidal, tribal-psychopathic Jewish propaganda that dominates Western media because Jewish usurers, the descendants of Shylock, have bought it up and turned it into a Jewish-supremacist genocide-propaganda machine.

Jewish ideology justifies unlimited Jewish aggression, i.e. endless plundering of the goyim, as purported revenge for wrongs suffered. Whether it’s Shylock seeking murderous revenge for Antonio falling behind on loan payments, or Israel claiming its genocide of Gaza is retribution for October 7, Jews pretend that their lust for bloody humiliation and liquidation of their perceived enemies is natural—when in fact, as Portia shows in The Merchant of Venice, such tribally-inculcated viciousness is profoundly unnatural and inhuman.

The Jewish tribe’s penchant for grotesque and disproportionate vindictiveness, justified by lies or exaggerations about alleged wrongs suffered, is deeply rooted in the religious tradition that gave rise to Jewish tribal identity. An old Jewish joke has it that every Jewish holiday is exactly the same: “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” The Jews celebrate the massacre of their purported Egyptian enemies every Passover. They rejoice over the genocidal slaughter of 75,000 Persian men, women, and children every Purim. They make merry over the mass slaughter of Greeks and Hellenistic Jews by maniacal Maccabbees every Hanukkah.

Maybe that joke’s tag-line should be re-written as:

They tried to genocide us. We genocided them first. Let’s eat.

Or more accurately:

We made up a lie about how they, or somebody, tried to genocide us. Then we genocided them and stole their stuff, which was the whole point all along. So let’s squat on their stolen land, piss on their graves, eat from their larders, and prance around in the their murdered women’s undergarments.

Christians have traditionally viewed the Jews’ legendary penchant for bloody vindictiveness as a natural attribute of a people who base their identity on having rejected and killed Jesus. Indeed, Jewish sages have spent more than two millennia avenging themselves on that turncoat Jew Yeshua, envisioning him boiling in excrement for all eternity alongside his %$@ of a mother. Perhaps more to the point, they also spent those two millennia lying and dissembling, because they lived as a vulnerable minority among Christians and Muslims, both of which groups revere Jesus and would react badly if they knew what Jews really believed and said to each other when the goyim weren’t listening.

Getting back to The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s lust for Christian blood echoes the Jewish boast of having spilled the blood of Christ: “We killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of God.” Sara Silverman’s update became an instant classic:

Today’s Jews’ figurative bloodthirstiness, on literal display in Gaza, has also been taken literally in traditions recounted in Israel Toaff’s Passovers of Blood, which marshals historical evidence indicating that medieval Jews really did ritually murder Christian children and drain their blood, a prized and highly profitable commodity:

…Professor Toaff shows that there were a rash of these deaths over the course of two hundred years that almost always involved Ashkenazi Jews and almost always occurred during the spring (corresponding with Holy Week and Passover). The assorted records from these other ritual murder trials range from none to scant—but there is a theme that runs throughout: Jews were interested in Christian children and their blood, and there appears to be something of a network of Jews whose business was to procure such children (often, most easily, from beggars or orphans). There is also a suggestion that the Ashkenazi community closed ranks when someone or some group was accused of such a charge—and either bribed, attempted to bribe, or purchased the freedom of whomever they could.

That description of the Jewish community closing ranks and using financial power to unjustly free their guilty co-religionists could also be applied, with minor modifications, to the birth of the ADL, which emerged from Jewish oligarchs’ efforts to free their child-murdering child-raping co-ethnic, Leo Frank. In all such cases, and thousands if not millions more, wrongs done by Jews have been magically and mendaciously reimagined as wrongs done to Jews, thereby legitimizing unlimited future Jewish criminality as legitimate vengeance.

Shakespeare disposes of proverbial Jewish blood-lust by having his bloodthirsty ultra-vindictive Jew, Shylock, denied the Christian blood he so passionately yearns for, on the basis of a legal technicality: Shylock’s “pound of flesh” contract didn’t mention blood:

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

Portia’s judgment, read figuratively, amounts to a ban on Jews’ continuing their bloodthirsty tribal-psychopathic ways—and requiring conversion to Christianity, the hideous fate that awaits poor oppressed Shylock. But is Shakespeare’s solution realistic? At a conference last year Dr. E. Michael Jones argued that mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity (presumably forced) is the real and desirable “final solution to the Jewish problem.” I raised my hand and interjected: “You’re saying that where zyklon B didn’t work, holy water would?” The ghost of William Shakespeare, from his seat in the shadows of the last row, chuckled almost audibly.

Shakespeare as White Nationalist

So Shakespeare’s antisemitism is a feature, not a bug. It’s not something to be explained away by perverse readings casting Shylock as the real hero, and his Christian tormentors as a gaggle of grubby antisemites. Nor does it require apologies: “It’s a great play, but…” That should be corrected to: “It’s a great play, because.” Shakespeare expresses what is today tendentiously termed antisemitism because that term is designed to conceal truth, while Shakespeare’s purpose was to reveal it.

And what about his white nationalism? Here I am exposing myself to charges of another terrible -ism: anachronism. There was obviously no such thing as white nationalism in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, there weren’t even any “white people.” Those who today might be considered white were then known as all sorts of things, and most identitarian labeling involved language, geography, and religion, not skin pigmentation. So in what sense can Shakespeare be termed a white nationalist?

To answer that question, we need to consider the deep structure of white nationalist ideology, according to which there is a white race that, because it is in danger of extinction, must rise up and overthrow its oppressors (namely the Jews and the brown people those Jews are “replacing” whites with). In other words, the WN movement grows out of fears of “replacement” and ultimately “extinction.”

Are those fears justified? According to demographers, whites were about ten percent of global population at the time of Jesus (who was not white, by the way, but Palestinian) and still just a little over 10% a thousand years later. But for various reasons, including technological innovations and global conquests, lightskinned folks of Euro-origin reached 20% of global population by 1800 and peaked at 35% by around 1900. That huge white demographic bulge imploded during the second half of the 20th century and is collapsing even faster now, with white Earthlings currently only representing around 15% and projected to dip below 10% around 2100.

Along with demographic collapse, the white nationalists fear a corresponding cultural collapse. White peoples’ traditional cultures are in disarray. Religion has been in retreat for at least a century and a half. High culture has lost ground to vapid pop culture. People’s manners and morals, their lifeways and folkways, seem empty and undignified compared to those of their ancestors.

Accompanying this demographic-cultural collapse, according to the WNs, is the rise of anti-white ideology. Nonwhites used to be underrepresented in mass media. Now it is the whites who are underrepresented. Every other commercial seems to be hyping mixed marriage. And discrimination against whites is OK—it’s called “affirmative action”—whereas every other kind of discrimination is taboo. Wokeism, in particular, features a veritable symbolic war on whites and their ostensible privileges, while the current American administration, with its anti-woke stance (and anti-immigrant hysteria) has garnered a degree of support from the pro-white movement…and plenty of blowback that could erupt with a vengeance once Trump and Trumpism have passed from the scene.

The extinction anxiety underlying white nationalism has a strong sexual-reproductive tinge. The movement’s online fora feature plenty of incels and others having issues with the fair sex in general and feminism in particular. Young white men are frustrated with the sexual market that has replaced religiously-sanctioned reproductive marriage. The smarter ones note that post-religious sexual mores, under which sex outside of reproductive marriage is no longer widely viewed as evil/shameful/illegal, are the real reason for white demographic collapse. The problem isn’t immigrants, it’s that whites are no longer having enough children to replace themselves, because they have become addicted to ease and short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term reproductive joys and sufferings. The result is plenty of angry young incels, feminists, and others who will grow old and likely end their lives as lonely old men or JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies.” And the angrier everybody gets, the faster white birthrates plunge.

And this is where Shakespeare the white nationalist comes in. Listen to him; open up his slim volume of sonnets, and right there, at the beginning, you’ll find his eloquent call to relinquish the ease and pleasure of carefree bachelorhood, and embrace the joys and travails of marriage and reproduction. Shakespeare’s sonnets 1 through 17, the so-called procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man or “fair youth” (fair meaning both “fair-skinned” and “beautiful”) and, as Wikipedia notes, “urge this youth to not waste his beauty by failing to marry or reproduce.” White nationalists, some of whom are convinced that white people are the most beautiful people in the world, might resonate with the opening couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die…

If they want to solve the actual problem that is bothering them, white nationalists will need to re-establish reproductive marriage as a cherished norm, which implies relegating extramarital sex to its pre-birth-control status as despised and marginalized deviance. Good luck with that! I suppose it could happen, if enough well-connected influencers amplify Shakespeare’s eloquence in the first 17 sonnets and issue an unrelenting stream of powerful calls to drop all this trivial bullshit you’re so obsessed with and just reproduce, dammit! But frankly, that’s a long shot. You white folks would be a whole lot better off just converting to Islam, marrying four wives, and peopling the Earth with the kind of folks who could revive Andalusian-level civilization and, God willing, build the next Alhambra.

Shakespeare as Conspiracy Theorist

“Okay,” you say, “so Shakespeare was an antisemite, as we already knew, and you’ve shown he’s at least adjacent to the white nationalist movement. But surely he can’t have been a conspiracy theorist as well?”

Actually—and I know this is going to come as a shock—Shakespeare is the ultimate conspiracy theorist. Consider, if you will, his classic history play Julius Caesar. Was Shakespeare’s Caesar killed by a lone knifeman? I don’t think so! The whole play is built around a conspiracy to kill a head of state. And as all right-thinking normies know, such things never, ever happen in real life. I’m sure we can all agree that Brutus acted alone. Indeed, Caesar’s real last words were not Et tu Brute (you too, Brutus?) but Solus egisti, Brute (you acted alone, Brutus!) Additionally, there is absolutely no record of Brutus ever uttering the classic line “Modo patsy sum” (I am a patsy). What’s more, doubts about whether Brutus’s Mannlicher Carcano butterknife could have inflicted the hundreds of deep gashes and lacerations that riddled Caesar’s corpse are completely unfounded. Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s conspiratorial misinformation has somehow evaded the firewalls, shadowbanning, and deplatforming, and produced a pro-Iran, pro-Russia, pro-Hamas conspiratorial Caesar narrative that is widely believed by people who don’t get their information from professional fact-checkers.

Clearly Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar as a paranoid, conspiratorial rant designed to fuel doubts about the Kennedy assassinations and perhaps also the killings of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. The fact that he wrote it centuries before those killings does not absolve him.

Aye, marry! Twas a mere jape, forsooth. Prithee, take no offense. But many a true word is said in jest, and jesters do oft prove prophets. To wit: The worlds of Shakespeare’s plays are profoundly conspiratorial. Julius Caesar is a mere Exhibit A.

Hey ChatGPT, can you name some of the conspiracies in Shakespeare's plays, starting with the conspiracy to kill Caesar?

1. Julius Caesar –
   Conspiracy to assassinate Caesar: Led by Brutus, Cassius, and other senators who fear Caesar's growing power and ambition. It's the quintessential political conspiracy in Shakespeare’s canon.

2. Macbeth –
   Macbeth’s conspiracy to murder King Duncan: Spurred by prophecy and his wife’s ambition, Macbeth plots to kill Duncan and usurp the throne.
   Later conspiracies include the murder of Banquo and Macduff’s family to secure his power.

3. Hamlet –
   Claudius's conspiracy to kill King Hamlet: He poisons his brother to take the throne and marry Queen Gertrude.
   Further conspiracies include Claudius’s plan with Laertes to kill Hamlet during a rigged duel.

4. Othello –
   Iago’s elaborate conspiracy: Iago manipulates everyone around him to destroy Othello, driven by jealousy and revenge. It's a personal and psychological conspiracy of devastating effect.

5. King Lear –
   Goneril and Regan’s conspiracy against Lear: The two daughters conspire to strip their father of power once he divides his kingdom.
   Edmund’s conspiracy: The illegitimate son conspires against his brother Edgar and father Gloucester to gain inheritance.

6. Richard III –
   Richard’s multiple conspiracies: He orchestrates the deaths of his brothers, nephews, and others to seize the English throne. Perhaps Shakespeare’s most villainous schemer.

7. Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2) –
   Rebellion conspiracies: The Percy family and other nobles conspire against King Henry IV.
   In Part 2, further plots involve manipulation of alliances and betrayals.

8. The Tempest –
   Antonio and Alonso’s conspiracy against Prospero (before the play begins): Antonio usurps his brother’s dukedom.
   Later, Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban conspire comically to overthrow Prospero.

9. Much Ado About Nothing –
   Don John’s conspiracy: He schemes to ruin Hero’s wedding by making her appear unfaithful.

10. Titus Andronicus –
    Tamora, Aaron, and her sons: They conspire to destroy Titus and his family in a cycle of revenge.

—

Enough jesting, time to cut to the chase. This whole essay thus far has been little more than a lead-up to what I am about to say about King Lear.

King Lear is Shakespeare’s magnum opus, the play in which he most seriously goes about kicking emotional ass. The other tragedies may be tragic, evoking plenty of vicarious cathartic suffering over the sad fates of doomed lovers or unwise kings and princes, but Lear is beyond tragic: It is genuinely pissed off, raising its moral outrage to the infinite power.

The plot is fairy-tale silly: An aging, doting dotard divides his kingdom in preparation for retirement, but doltishly demands that his three daughters compete in expressing their love, with the best third of the kingdom as prize. Lear secretly hopes that his favorite daughter, Cordelia, will win. Unfortunately, she’s honest and won’t play the game, while the two evil bitches, Regan and Goneril, outdo each other in exaggerated empty flattery. His ego pricked, Lear banishes Cordelia, cuts the kingdom in two instead of three, and hands it to the bitches, who proceed to torment and finally dispossess their father, driving him out of his house and, what’s worse, out of his mind, rendering the once glorious monarch just another crazy homeless person…though an unusually eloquent one, with an equally eloquent “fool” or jester. The heart of the play is Lear’s outraged and outrageous suffering: his torment at the untender hands of his daughters, then his heartbroken mindbroken curses as he wanders soaked and tattered through wind and storm and ever-worsening political situation.

So what does this have to do with conspiracy theories? Pretty much everything. The blue-pill normie world, the world of Gonerils and Regans, is basically one big contest to see who can best say what the rulers want to hear. The winners of that contest—those who flatter the rulers most convincingly—become the rulers’ advisers, and sometimes even join the ruling circle. Such flatterers tend to be evil, blackhearted scum, like Goneril and Regan.

Those who directly oppose this world of lies undergo a “King Lear experience”: They realize with supreme horror that the comfortable platitudes they and their compatriots inhabit are infamous lies, that they have given their world over to the vilest and most despicable criminals, and that the only true word that can be spoken is a scream of pain, or, alternately, a scream of pain barely allayed by a glittering veneer of jest. In such a world, only madmen, like Lear and his Fool, are truly sane.

If you still haven’t figured out what this has to do with conspiracy theories, let me clarify what I mean by that term. The conspiracy theories I’m interested in are those that give voice to taboo truths.

“I’m not interested in conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true.” - Michael Moore

The two prototypical conspiracy theories of my time and place, the post-World War II USA, concern the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11. In both cases, supreme moral outrages were committed in broad daylight—murderous coups carried out and covered up by lying, treasonous scum who barely bothered to hide what they were doing. Both crimes divided the American public, and to some extent the world, into two kinds of people: Those who refused to accept the lies and pushed back, and those who didn’t.

The first category mainly consists of people who so suffered from the horror of these crimes—and, worse, their countrymen’s silent complicity—that they vented their anguish through rants and screeds and, in a few cases, organized campaigns of activism. These Americans after JFK, and again after 9/11, found themselves dispossessed of their democracy and living under a dictatorship of murderous Regans and Gonerils. If they spoke up and demanded their natural rights, and indeed the universe’s natural right to a bare minimum of truth, morality, and justice, they often as not found themselves ejected from that evil house, wandering homeless, looking and sounding crazy. For seeing and saying too much, they had their hearts lacerated and their eyes plucked out.

‘Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.’ (4,1)

Those complicit in the lies invent excuses. They raise doubts, parrot platitudes. Like Chomsky, they ask: Even if you’re right, why are you so upset about the Kennedys and 9/11, when the Empire has slaughtered millions? Global warming is going to kill us all anyway, right?

A parallel exists with Lear. A reader with no heart, just leaden reason—say an AI algorithm—might ask: Why is Lear so upset about Regan and Goneril imposing DOGE-style budget cuts on his courtly retinue, and why should we share Lear’s indignation? And more broadly, isn’t there a disconnect between the extreme emotions evoked in the text, and the silly fairy-tale story that evokes them?

Lear ravishes our souls because it so perfectly depicts its villains’ outrages on human decency, and the limitless, almost infinite anguish that arises in a healthy heart exposed to such offenses. The literal or quantitative magnitude of the crimes depicted in Lear, like the actual murders of 11/22/63, 6/6/67, and 9/11/01, is beside the point. At issue is our shared sense of justice, of implied contracts, of expectations. A father does not expect his daughters to puncture his dignity, wickedly compete in humiliating him, and finally turn him out of the house in the midst of a storm. A citizen does not expect his government to treasonously collude in the sacrificial murder of his beloved leader and/or thousands of his fellow citizens, and then to lie outrageously and transparently about such deeds. These bizarrely brazen and unnatural crimes are so shocking in their callousness that they raise questions of whether actual human beings, as we know them, can possibly be behind them. They shock us in such a profound way that we are left with only two choices: Pretend we didn’t see them (“pluck out our eyes”) and live on as numbed half-human semi-zombies; or rage against them as Lear does.

So Lear is the ultimate conspiracy theorist because the conspiracies, at least the ones that matter, are real and unspeakably evil, and anyone who acknowledges this noble truth inevitably reacts, at some level, as Lear does. Those who walk the path of truth risk dying heartbroken, like Lear. But unlike their tormentors—meaning not just the criminals, but also those fellow citizens who have blinded themselves to reality, or worse, held their tongues—these tragic heroes still at least have hearts to break. They partake of the real and the good, and hence have ontological heft, ergo souls, that move on to better things.

King Lear ends with a call to truth that acknowledges its emotional and moral underpinnings, as well as its cost, and offers good advice that in our “sad time” only the “conspiracy theorists” have taken:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.