Interstate 81, southbound, you can’t miss it: Exit 185 PRESIDENT BIDEN EXPRESSWAY. The three-quarter-mile road leads into downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden. Keep going straight and you’ll eventually end up—where else?—on Biden Street. That these namesake roads exist while the president is still alive, let alone still in office, feels odd. But this exact strangeness—forced nostalgia, preemptive memorialization—is the essence of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Yesterday afternoon, inside the Scranton Cultural Center, Biden sought to remind a few hundred supporters of his lifelong Scranton values. His address coincided with the release of a new campaign ad, titled—wait for it—“Scranton.” The president’s event took place just down the road from his childhood home. Of course he popped by the old place to say hello, with his traveling press corps in tow. Subtlety has never been a Biden virtue.

The hometown crowd wasn’t treated to the booming, bombastic State of the Union version of Biden, but the president still managed to land a few genuine laughs during his 30-minute speech. His savviest moment was a fake-out. Biden appeared to be unspooling one of his trademark failed American-dream stories about a poor man drowning in debt, but it was a setup for a punch line: “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Donald. I can’t help you.’” Mentioning Trump’s name at all, as Biden repeatedly did yesterday, was a notable departure from an earlier period of this campaign season, when both Biden and his allies treated his opponent like Voldemort.

[David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump]

Still, an overwhelming sense of safety and caution defined the day—perhaps a fear of messing something up. Biden’s gathering wasn’t a rally so much as a town hall without the questions. He didn’t wax on about the Middle East, or Ukraine, or abortion, or other polarizing issues. He was laser-focused on taxes. Just a few hundred chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and the small-scale optics did not help him. Before Biden took the stage, a misleading image of many empty seats began going viral on social media. In reality, they were all eventually occupied, but there was no arguing that this campaign stop was a fraction of the size of the average Trump event. Yesterday’s energy was tame. It felt more like an early primary event for a minor candidate than a rally by the sitting president.

Many versions of Joe Biden exist, and they often compete against one another. There’s the doddering old man, there’s Dark Brandon, there’s the bighearted consoler, there’s the guy who uses variations of the word fuck under his breath. Biden’s campaign seems to hope that voters will come back around to good old Scranton Joe. This is the Biden who talks about faith, families, factories, and fairness. Millions of voters pine for this Norman Rockwell version of Biden—and of America, in general. Millions of others are demanding that the president plunge into the present moment and engage with Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Specifically, a significant portion of Democrats and liberals want Biden to call for a cease-fire and reduce (or eliminate) military aid to Israel. Biden knows this. Yet his campaign is doubling down on kitchen-table issues, such as the tax code.

He seemed most comfortable when operating squarely within the realm of the classic and the domestic. “I am a capitalist,” Biden proclaimed. Still, he occasionally sounded like his old Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher!” he yelled at one point. He scoffed at trickle-down economics and preached about the long-term effects of the child tax credit. All the while, he peppered in sayings from his grandpa, sayings the elder Biden may or may not have ever said.

Many voters don’t want to believe that it’s really going to be Biden and Trump again. And some people still seem surprised that Biden, in particular, is officially seeking a second term. A swath of Democrats dream of him withdrawing before the party’s convention. There is perpetual talk of a younger candidate—namely a governor such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro, who yesterday served as Biden’s opening act—stepping up to be the Democratic nominee in Biden’s place. All of this seems like West Wing fan fiction. The race is set, and it’s a rematch. (With wild cards like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to make trouble.)

[Read: The RFK Jr. Strategy Clicks Into Focus]

Biden long ago realized the stakes. Now he has to figure out how much to talk about himself and his accomplishments versus warn voters about Trump. “Listen to what he says, because you know he means it,” Biden said. Though he didn’t opt for the 30,000-foot “democracy is on the ballot” message in Scranton, he drew stark comparisons between himself and his rival. “He’s coming for your money, your health care, and your social security,” Biden warned.

Successful political campaigns are also movements. Trump and RFK Jr., for all their flaws, long ago internalized that simple truth. Until recently, Biden has more or less run what his allies referred to as a “Rose Garden campaign.” This week, he’s changing that. Scranton marked Biden’s first of three stops across Pennsylvania; he’s off to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia next. By no accident, the president is traversing a swing state while his Republican rival is glowering inside a Manhattan courtroom. But yesterday’s crowd struck me as a bunch of polite, well-behaved people who knew when to sit quietly with their hands folded, when to laugh, and when to cheer. It did not feel organic.

Just outside the venue’s security perimeter, I spoke with three University of Scranton students who had tried to see Biden and were turned away. One of them, Neveah Wall, a 19-year-old sophomore, told me that this would be her first time voting, and that she was torn between going Democrat or independent. She said she was passionate about prison reform, and that she liked where Kennedy stood on the issue. Her family members would likely vote for Biden. “I think I am pretty much leaning towards RFK,” she said.

It may seem surprising that the Biden campaign would put on an event within walking distance of a university and not try to welcome in as many students as possible. (A 20-something attendee inside the room told me he had been personally invited by a local politician.) Incumbents often go to great lengths to avoid disruptions and control the narrative. In a statement last night, a Biden campaign spokesperson told me, “Members of the public are invited through various methods including local groups and organizations, mass emails to subscribers to the campaign's email list, and by utilizing the voter file, which allows the campaign to target the voters we need to reach.” But new, younger, or first-time voters, such as Neveah Wall, may not even have voter files yet—and, like her, they may end up drawn to another candidate after being denied entry to a Biden event.

Perhaps Biden’s campaign was worried about young people bringing some of the present-day challenges into the room. When the crowd spilled back outside into the street, attendees were met by pro-Palestine protesters chanting “Genocide Joe!” One person held a sign that read I’M VOTIN UNCOMMITTED!

Biden can keep leaning into his roots as an antidote to Trumpism, but it may not be enough. Near the end of his speech, he brought up Trump’s infamous “losers” and “suckers” remark about veterans. “Who the hell does he think he is?” Biden shouted.  He could have used more of this. Scranton Joe—a harmless, affable character—doesn’t necessarily inspire unwavering devotion. Biden has just over six months to find a message that can simultaneously ground him in the present and point toward the future. He can only sell so many tickets as a tribute act playing old hits.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”

Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.

What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.

The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.

[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]

Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.

“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”

Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.

In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.

Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”

“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]

“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)

At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.

Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.

But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.

TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.

Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]

Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.

The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.

Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.