Months after watching Donald Trump praise some of the white nationalists in Charlottesville as "very good people," Gary Cohn resigned as chief economic adviser Tuesday, deciding the president's newly declared tariffs on steel and aluminum were his red line. That evening, Director of the Office of Budget and Management Mick Mulvaney thanked Cohn for his service as only a member of the Trump administration could: with an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
While the term "globalism" has gained new currency since Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, it has been a far-right conspiracy theory for the better part of a century, echoing the tropes of a fraudulent text titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and disseminated across Europe and the United States, Protocols served as a basis for modern anti-Semitism, outlining a fabricated plot of Jewish global hegemony.
Those decrying "globalists" similarly maintain that a shadowy cabal controls the news media, the banks and the federal government. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Ryan Lenz, “Globalism is a principle driver for the fears that animate the radical right in the United States. It is the enemy, ultimately.”
That a far-right ideologue and moral cretin like Mulvaney ascribes to this worldview is unremarkable. What is remarkable, and what makes his statement so foreboding, is that he has no compunction about sharing it.
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