At Least This Chuck Woolery Tweet Controversy Isn't About Antisemitism

On Sunday, original Wheel of Fortune host Chuck Woolery alleged that "everyone is lying" about the COVID-19 pandemic, including the media, "most" doctors and the Center for Disease Control—a false accusation lent credence by a retweet from President Donald Trump, who is ostensibly in charge of the federal agency he's accusing by proxy of participating in a conspiracy to destroy the U.S. economy.

But while the 79-year-old host of Love Connection may seem like a strange source for claiming society-scale lies about the coronavirus and the more than 135,000 people in the United States who have died from it, Woolery has a long history of conspiracist provocations, including a 2017 flap evoking an antisemitic staple.

In May 2017, as reported by Newsweek at the time, Woolery claimed "most of the original Soviet Communists were Jewish," further falsely describing the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, as Jewish.

German philosopher Karl Marx, who developed socioeconomic theories of class conflict that came to underpin subsequent communist and socialist movements, was raised in an ethnically Jewish but largely non-religious family. His father converted and became a Protestant Christian before Marx's birth.

Lenin was an atheist raised Christian by a Russian Orthodox father and Lutheran mother. Soviet documents tracing Lenin's genealogy declassified decades after his death revealed that Lenin's maternal grandfather was Jewish (though he had converted to Christianity). It's unknown whether Lenin was aware that he had any Jewish ancestry.

While scholars have long debated the Jewish intellectual contribution to the Russian Revolution, conflating Judaism with Marxism or communism is also an antisemitic narrative with a long history.

"The role of Jews in the Russian Revolution, and by extension Communism writ large, has always been a sensitive subject because antisemitic voices often painted Soviet Communism as a Jewish plot, or 'Jewish Bolshevism,'" Seth Frantzman wrote in The Jerusalem Post in 2017.

Woolery subsequently spread further falsehoods regarding connections between Communism and Judaism—including the false claim that "Lenin's mother was Jewish"—while also objecting to a backlash accusing him of participating in antisemitism.

"Amazing to me, I point out that Marx and Lenin were Jewish, Fact of history, and now I'm being called anti Semitic? why do people do this? [sic]" Woolery tweeted, later in the same day, further spreading his false claims while protesting how they were characterized.

A day after, responding further to accusations of antisemitism, Woolery called former Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders a "Jew and a Communist" as part of a string of tweets contending the Jewish senator would ultimately "betray you as well." While ostensibly describing Jewish communists as traitors who persecute other Jews, most replies understood Woolery as invoking antisemitic narratives and stereotypes alleging Jewish duplicity.

In the years since, Woolery has often invoked Marxism and communism as a catch-all smear against non-Marxist organizations, people and political inclinations opposed by the game show host and the right-wing at large.

In 2020, Woolery described the administration of former president Barack Obama as having a "third world," "Fascist, Marxist, mentality." Obama, who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, is not a fascist or Marxist.

Woolery has also falsely characterized the Democratic Party, liberal progressivism, the media and even the World Health Organization as Marxist, communist or operating identically to the Chinese Communist Party. The anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement against police violence has also been declared by Woolery to be a "Marxist Communist Progressive political movement" conspiring to overthrow the United States.

Woolery's repeated invocation of Marxism and communism in describing his political enemies, often as treasonous conspirators, echoes long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theories regarding fabricated Jewish plans for global domination, lending credence to critics who believed Woolery's 2017 tweets were an intentional invocation of antisemitic connections between Judaism and the formation of the Soviet Union. Newsweek's 2017 reporting also documented how far right antisemites celebrated what they interpreted as Woolery's support for their worldview.

A June 2020 tweet by Woolery made the conflation of Judaism and Marxism a step more explicit, by invoking "Cultural Marxism," which falsely claims Marxist academics are conspiring to undermine and destroy Western society by promoting a subversive multiculturalism.

Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "conspiracy theory with an anti-Semitic twist," "pushed by much of the American right," Cultural Marxism has direct antecedents in the fabricated "Cultural Bolshevism" promoted by Nazi Germany, which described modern art and certain schools of architecture as part of a joint communist and Jewish conspiracy.

When contacted by Newsweek with questions regarding what importance he assigns to the connections he has made between Jewishness and Marxism, Woolery and his podcast co-host said they did not have time to respond, but wished me "good luck with your story."