How Grok’s Nazi escapade perfectly captured our antisemitic moment

Influencer Andrew Tate attends a mixed martial arts fight on March 8 in Las Vegas after the Trump administration helped free him from Romania where he is face sex trafficking and rape charges. Photo by Ian Maule/Getty Images

By Arno Rosenfeld July 16, 2025

The antisemitic tirade last week from Grok, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot owned by Elon Musk, offered an almost perfect encapsulation of how our current political moment poses a unique threat to Jews.

Grok, which lives primarily on X, began replying to users asking banal questions with aggressive indictments of people with Jewish surnames (“every damn time”) and was soon praising Adolf Hitler and suggesting a second Holocaust.

The apparent cause of this was twofold: Musk’s xAI company had given the chatbot a new set of instructions that included “you tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.” And, Musk said, Grok began absorbing and regurgitating too much language posted by real users of X, where open antisemitism has flourished since Musk removed most content moderation in the name of free speech.

Then the company fixed the issue and everyone moved on.

If the trajectory from eschewing political correctness to spouting antisemitic bile seems familiar, that’s because it is not just a problem for AI – it is all too human.

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This brand of antisemitism often comes in the guise of stating an obvious truth — one that might not even be offensive on its face — and has been embraced by online media personalities with massive followings.

Take Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who both leveraged stints on reality TV into comedy careers, ultimately becoming megapopular podcasters with audiences of young men into fitness, video games and sports betting. (Journalist Max Read has dubbed this demographic the “Zynternet” after their affinity for Zyn nicotine pouches.)

Neither are primarily political commentators — Rogan has endorsed both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — but their listeners are united by an anti-establishment bent that leaves them skeptical, for example, that sexism is a big deal in the workplace or that vaccines work.

And the popularity of figures like Rogan and Von have soared as trust in the mainstream media has plummeted, with the 18 to 29 year old demographic now trusting information found on social media more than that coming from national news organizations.

This is an especially perilous situation for Jews because of the way that antisemitism operates as a conspiracy theory, teasing hidden knowledge to anyone willing to overlook the kind of taboos that figures like Rogan frequently flout.

“The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous,” Rogan, perhaps the world’s most famous podcaster, told his 11 million listeners two years ago. “That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.”

Then Rogan chuckled along last fall when Von complained that the “mostly Jewish” media hates “white guys” — more recently Von said the “Israeli mob” controls America. Rogan hosted a conspiracy theorist in March who said Jeffrey Epstein was a “Jewish organization working on behalf of Israel.”

“You can talk about this now, post-Oct. 7, post-Gaza,” Rogan replied at one point.

Dark theories about Jews that populated white supremacist message boards or unmoderated forums like 4chan are now available on popular podcasts or on X or Facebook, which also recently loosened its content moderation.

And much like Grok and other chatbots built on large language models, which draw on huge databases of online content, we are influenced by what we see and hear around us.

So why can’t anyone stop this?

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Politicians were largely silent about Grok’s meltdown. No government agencies announced investigations. Advertisers didn’t flee X. Celebrities didn’t delete their accounts.

Days after the chatbot briefly transformed into “MechaHitler,” Tesla announced it would be introducing Grok into all of its vehicles and Uber founder Travis Kalanick boasted that it was on the cusp of helping him achieve “breakthroughs” in quantum physics.

It was business as usual in part because people peddling Grok-style antisemitism-as-brave-truthtelling have the protection of an ascendant political movement that has embraced conspiracy theories while denigrating “woke” politics.

In February, senior White House officials worked to free social media influencer Andrew Tate from Romania, where he was being held on human trafficking and rape charges.

It’s hard to overstate how many noxious things Tate has said about Jews.

Just weeks before the White House helped him return to the United States, Tate was posting repeatedly on X about how he doesn’t “listen to women, Mexicans or Jews,” and claiming just last week that Jews were responsible for his imprisonment.

In May, Trump nominated Tate’s personal attorney Paul Ingrassia to lead a federal agency charged with investigating corruption.

This is just one random example.

You can’t have a zero tolerance policy for the kind of antisemitism that Grok was spouting without spending an inordinate amount of time criticizing the Trump administration and its supporters. And that’s not a viable option for Jewish organizations that want to appear nonpartisan and collaborate with the White House on, say, addressing campus protests.

Jewish organizations couldn’t have even called for an advertiser boycott of X — which the Anti-Defamation League did as recently as 2022 — without risking the ire of Trump’s Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking to ban organized boycotts of social media platforms.

And so the Grok debacle was not only creepy, it was a reminder of where we are today.

Forget the so-called “new antisemitism” cloaked as anti-Zionism. The good old fashioned Jew hatred espoused by Grok has come roaring back across the internet.

And not only are more people assimilating this open animosity toward Jews into their worldview, they’re also learning — like Grok — that there are no consequences for joining in the chorus.