In April 2026, The Washington Post reported that an Illinois-based live streamer named Nick Fuentes had pocketed roughly $900,000 from his viewers since the start of the year. The donations came in $5, $10, and $50 increments, often accompanied by messages of devotion.
One supporter, a woman in Indiana, had taken to calling the 27-year-old her “second son.” She prayed for his safety daily and sent him a $50 digital gift during a recent broadcast in which Fuentes ranted about “the Jewish Question” and what ought to be done with American Jews.
Four months. Nine hundred thousand dollars. One man in front of a camera, spreading poison.
Fuentes isn’t just another hate-monger. He’s a businessman – in a field with deep roots.
The cultural and theological history of antisemitism has been written many times over. The political history has been written. The dead have been counted. But the financial history – who got rich from spreading hatred of Jews, how much they made, who is still making it today, and through what mechanisms the money flows – has gone largely unexamined.
The business itself deserves examination.
The modern business of antisemitism begins, like so much else in modern Europe, in Paris. In 1886, a failed novelist named Édouard Drumont published a 1,200-page screed called La France Juive, accusing Jews of orchestrating France’s every misfortune. The book was a runaway bestseller, and its financial success gave Drumont the capital to launch a violent political organization, The Antisemitic League of France, in 1889 and a newspaper, La Libre Parole, in 1892.
By the time of the Panama Canal scandal a few months later, which Drumont blamed on Jewish financiers even though the principal figures were not Jews, La Libre Parole had reached a circulation of approximately 300,000, making it one of the most widely read papers in France.
The antisemitic lies around the scandal helped prepare the political and emotional ground for the Dreyfus Affair. When French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason in 1894, Drumont’s paper broke the story, and much of France was already primed to believe it.
Drumont was elected to the National Assembly in 1898.
His template established the formula every subsequent operator would follow: the pamphlet finances the newspaper, the newspaper finances the political party, the political party legitimizes the pamphlet. Hatred of Jews proved to be one of the few commodities that sold in every market and every political season.
Drumont died nearly destitute in 1917, having spent his fortune on the antisemitic cause. But the model he created endured – and for those who came after him, it generated money, influence, and political power on a far greater scale.
Three figures in the interwar period demonstrated just how powerful that model could become.
The first was Henry Ford. In 1919, his vanity newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, had a circulation of 72,000. By 1925 it had grown to 700,000, and by 1926 to at least 900,000 – the second-largest-circulation paper in America. Ford built that circulation by weaponizing the largest commercial distribution network on the continent. He required every Ford automobile dealership to purchase the paper and distribute copies to customers.
Beginning in May 1920, The Dearborn Independent ran a 91-week serial called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” lifted in part from the notorious Tsarist secret police fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to document the minutes of a late-19th century meeting by world Jewish leaders plotting world domination. When the articles were collected into book form, The International Jew sold more than half a million copies in the United States and was translated into at least 16 languages.
Ford issued a public apology in 1927, ostensibly retracted the book, and ordered overseas publishers to stop printing it. They ignored him, and circulation grew through the 1930s. Adolf Hitler kept a portrait of Ford behind his desk.
The Protocols, which was first published in 1903, outlived both Ford and the Tsarist regime that produced it. Exposed by the London Times and the Frankfurter Zeitung as a hoax more than a century ago, it remains among the most widely circulated antisemitic texts in the world. It has been republished across Europe, Latin America, and especially the Arab and Muslim world, where state media, political movements, and Islamist organizations have repeatedly recycled the book’s conspiracies about Jewish power and control. Few works of political fraud have enjoyed such a long and profitable afterlife.
The second figure was Hitler himself, who is rarely remembered as one of the highest-paid authors of the 20th century, though he was. Mein Kampf sold 9,000 copies in 1925, 54,000 in 1930, and 850,000 in 1933 alone – the year of his appointment as Chancellor. By 1945 the book had sold roughly 12 million copies in 16 languages.
At the peak of his career as an author, Hitler was earning royalties of approximately $1 million a year, the equivalent of about $22 million in today’s currency. The German state, having appointed him its head, became his largest customer. Every newlywed couple in Germany was given a free copy of Mein Kampf on their wedding day, paid for by the German taxpayer, with royalties flowing to the author.
By the time Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, his lifetime earnings from book sales totaled some 7.8 million Reichsmarks – making him one of the richest men in Germany.
Hitler’s publisher, Max Amann, a Nazi official who was a member of the Reichstag and held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer, managed an offshore stream of Mein Kampf royalties from the book’s 16 translations. A 1944 U.S. Office of Strategic Services document – uncovered by the World Jewish Congress in 1996 in declassified files at the National Archives – recorded that these funds were being held at the Bern branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland. The bank, when finally asked, said the records were no longer available.
Of the foreign royalties that Hitler did not manage to move to the Swiss account, a portion was seized in transit. The U.S. government invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act to impound all American royalties from Houghton Mifflin’s editions of the book, redirecting them to the War Claims Fund for American POWs and refugees.
The third figure was the Nazi publisher Julius Streicher, whose weekly tabloid Der Stürmer grew from a circulation of 27,000 in 1927 to a peak of 486,000 in 1937. Streicher fabricated tales of Jewish ritual murder and sexual predation, illustrated with grotesque cartoons by his staff caricaturist Philippe Rupprecht. The publishing enterprise made Streicher a rich man.
After the war, he was convicted of crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg tribunal for his long history of inciting annihilation of the Jews. He was hanged in 1946.
Across the Atlantic, the pro-Nazi propagandist Father Charles Coughlin built his publishing and broadcasting business on promoting hatred of Jews. By 1930, his Sunday radio sermons drew up to 45 million listeners – roughly a third of the American population. His magazine Social Justice peaked at one million subscribers. The Royal Oak, Michigan, post office expanded specifically to handle the 80,000 letters Coughlin received each week.
He was driven off the air in 1939 by new National Association of Broadcasters guidelines that limited the sale of airtime to “spokesmen of controversial public issues,” and Social Justice lost its second-class mailing privileges in 1942 under the Espionage Act.
After 1945, antisemitism briefly stopped being a mass-market business. Not because the Jew-haters disappeared – they never disappear – but because the infrastructure that had carried Drumont, Ford, Hitler, Streicher, and Coughlin to their fortunes had been dismantled. Mass-circulation newspapers operated under editorial gatekeeping that closed off the most lucrative markets to open Jew-baiting. Broadcast radio and television were licensed under public-interest standards. Public revulsion at the photographs from the death camps did the rest.
The trade did not vanish; it shrank. In the United States, Willis Carto kept the apparatus alive almost single-handedly from a small office in Washington, DC near the White House. His weekly tabloid The Spotlight reached a circulation of about 300,000 in the early 1980s – a fraction of what Ford had achieved 60 years earlier.
Carto’s Liberty Lobby, Noontide Press, Institute for Historical Review – founded in 1979, the principal American Holocaust-denial outfit – and successor publication American Free Press together constituted what the Anti-Defamation League rightly called “a propaganda empire.” But the empire was modest by interwar standards.
In West Germany, the business of antisemitic agitation was carried forward by a multimillionaire neo-Nazi, Gerhard Frey. Beginning in 1959 he took over the failing Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung, renamed it the National-Zeitung, and grew its circulation from 27,500 to 131,000 by 1967. Frey used the paper’s cash flow to fund the Deutsche Volksunion, the far-right party he founded in 1971. His paper limped along until 2019.
In France, the various successor publications to La Libre Parole, and later the National Front’s house organ National Hebdo, served the same shrinking market. None of them ever approached Streicher’s 486,000 or Coughlin’s million subscribers.
That anomaly is over. The contemporary explosion of hate is a return to the historical norm.
In September 2025, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs published a year-long study of antisemitism on Elon Musk’s X platform. Using AI to scan English-language posts between February 2024 and January 2025, the researchers identified 679,584 antisemitic posts that had collectively been viewed 193 million times. Of these, 59% contained explicit conspiracy theories – Jewish control of governments, Jewish satanic ritual, Holocaust denial – and accounted for 73% of all likes.
Ten “antisemitism influencers” generated 32% of all likes on antisemitic posts in the sample. Six of them paid for X Premium subscriptions, giving them verified checkmarks and amplified visibility.
The platform itself, the study calculated, was earning up to $141,000 per year in advertising revenue from just those 10 accounts – a figure that almost certainly understates the total by an order of magnitude, since the analysis covered only English-language text, not images, video, or non-English content.
The CyberWell organization’s parallel study of YouTube found that 24% of antisemitic content on the platform was monetized, with less than 11% removed even after being reported. For Arabic-language content the monetization rate was 36%.
The individual operators are flourishing. The rabid antisemite Candace Owens left The Daily Wire in March 2024 after Ben Shapiro publicly called her statements about Israel and Jews “absolutely disgraceful.”
Within 16 months, her independent podcast was ranked the number-one show globally in downloads and views per episode, averaging 3.5 to 3.6 million downloads per episode. Her YouTube channel, with 5.58 million subscribers and more than 1.1 billion lifetime views, generates between $118,000 and $353,000 in monthly advertising revenue – roughly $1.4 to $4.2 million per year on YouTube alone. Industry analysts estimate her total annual income from podcast advertising and her “Club Candace” subscription product at well over $10 million.
Her financial position wasn’t damaged by her antisemitism; it was strengthened by it.
And then there is Joe Rogan, whose podcast Spotify renewed in early 2024 in a deal worth up to $250 million – roughly two and a half times the size of his original 2020 contract. Rogan reaches an estimated 11 million listeners per episode and routinely platforms guests who traffic in antisemitic tropes, from Roger Waters to Andrew Tate.
In May 2025 he told his audience that Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler” was “kinda catchy” and complained about its removal from streaming services.
The ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has repeatedly objected to Rogan’s “antisemitic tropes about Jews and money.” But Rogan keeps broadcasting and Spotify keeps paying.
Tucker Carlson is part of the same business. After Fox News fired him in 2023, he reinvented himself as an X-based broadcaster. In September 2024 he interviewed an obscure Substack writer named Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson introduced to his audience as “the most important popular historian of our time.” Cooper proceeded to argue that the murder of millions of Jews was an unintended consequence of Hitler’s logistical unpreparedness, and that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the chief villain of the Second World War.
Liz Cheney called the broadcast “pro-Nazi propaganda.” It accumulated more than 19 million views. Cooper’s Substack subscriber count surged to 112,000 paid accounts.
Carlson has since hosted Nick Fuentes for a friendly two-hour conversation in which the two debated, as one observer put it, “how far to go in their opposition to Israel and its Jewish supporters.”
When Senator Ted Cruz pushed back at Carlson during a heated exchange, he named the pattern directly: “You’re not talking about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Brits… You’re asking: ‘What about the Jews? What about the Jews?’”
Industry estimates place the Tucker Carlson Network’s annual revenue at $12 million to $30 million, drawn from paid subscriptions, sponsorships, and ad revenue from his YouTube channel. Carlson commands an additional $50,000 to $150,000 per appearance on the corporate and conference circuit. Estimates of his total annual income across all platforms run from $12 million to nearly $40 million – more, in a single year, than Willis Carto raised in a lifetime of trying.
The conclusion is clear and frightening: antisemitism has moved well beyond the fringe and into the profitable center of American media and politics. It is what La Libre Parole and Der Stürmer and The Dearborn Independent would have looked like with WiFi and smartphones. Antisemitism is a disease – and an industry. Every industry has investors, beneficiaries, and enablers. Follow the money, and you find the people who keep it alive.