We have one of these every now and then:
• Fox News commentator pleads guilty to fabricating history of employment with CIA
• Fox News commentator claims John McCain betrayed United States and gave secrets to North Vietnamese
Wednesday’s is a good* one! (*Bad. A bad one.) It was flagged by Matt Gertz of the left-leaning Media Matters watchdog group in a new post about retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a regular guest on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham’s prime-time Fox News shows. (He has appeared on Fox eight times this year, according to a Nexis transcript search.) Macgregor’s spots typically cover military subjects, and he recently made headlines for having argued that Russia should be allowed to annex Ukraine without repercussions. (His reasoning was that Ukraine’s people are “indistinguishable” from Russia’s.)
As Gertz shows, Macgregor has also shared his beliefs about what Muslim, South Asian, and Latin American immigrants have done to “Americans” in a variety of radio and event appearances. At a Serbian American Voters Alliance meeting in Florida in October 2021, he laid out a theory of domestic U.S. politics built around his distaste for the changes that South Asian immigrants have made to the Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up. (Macgregor says that one such individual told him that it didn’t matter if the U.S. economy crashed because “I’m going to go back to India.”) He also thinks that there is a higher-level group orchestrating this—a cabal pulling the strings, if you will. From Media Matters:
“I remembered Philadelphia in the 1960s, then I heard this and something dawned on me,” Macgregor said. “This is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong now in the United States, because we have a huge problem with a class of so-called elites, the people who are wealthy, very wealthy in many cases and they are, as the Russians used to call certain individuals many, many years ago, rootless cosmopolitans.”
Added Macgregor: “They live above all of this, they have no connection to the country. There is nothing there that holds them in place, and they are largely responsible, in my judgment, for the condition that we are in today. That group more than anything else is what we’re up against, and the other things that you see, whether it’s BLM or antifa—those are just foot soldiers, they are being deployed to attack us.”
“Rootless cosmopolitans” is the term that was used by Josef Stalin’s regime in the late 1940s and early 1950s to describe citizens, almost all of whom were Jews, who had purportedly betrayed the USSR to the West. The 13 men executed during the deadliest event of Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” purge—the “Night of the Murdered Poets” in 1952—were Jewish, as were other writers and academics who were fortunate to merely be denounced and imprisoned or removed from their positions. (See this article from the Journal of Cold War Studies for more details—especially footnote 31, which claims that Soviets of that time created the practice of putting parentheses around surnames to mark them as Jewish. The same practice has been adopted in the present day by neo-Nazis, although the modern version uses triple parentheses rather than single, and it’s not clear if a reference to the Soviet-era marking was intended.)
The words cosmopolitan and globalist are thrown around a great deal in the contemporary white nationalist movement and are often, although not exclusively, used in reference to Jews. (The last campaign advertisement Donald Trump released in 2016 showed images of Jewish Goldman Sachs executive Lloyd Blankfein, Jewish financier and progressive donor George Soros, and Jewish Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen while a narrator asserted that “global special interests” and individuals who “control the levers of power in Washington” have “stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations.”) Among the more explicitly antisemitic far-right conspiracy theories is one that claims Jews manipulate nonwhite immigration to the U.S. in order to dilute its white Christian character. This belief appears to have motivated the man who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and is similar to Macgregor’s claim about “cosmopolitans” employing BLM as “foot soldiers.”
Now, is it possible Macgregor had some other group in mind, besides the Jews, when he referred to rootless cosmopolitans? Rich people in general, perhaps? Sure, anything’s possible, in the sense that we can’t do a scan of his brain to tell if he was picturing a Jewish cosmopolitan as opposed to a Gentile cosmopolitan (George Clooney). He also did not respond to a request for comment. On the other hand, Macgregor clearly understands the Russian origin of the slur, which was Jews-specific, in at least some sense. He’s the one who brought it up!
