JK Rowling captured the conspiracy theorist mindset perfectly in the fifth Harry Potter book. The Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, and his underling, Dolores Umbridge, cannot face the frightening reality of Voldemort’s return. So they create a fictional conspiracy centering on Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore, the two people sounding the alarm about the real threat to Wizarding Britain. In their cowardice, those government officials seek to avoid facing the real threat by inventing a fake threat from a far less terrifying source, an act that allows Voldemort to grow too powerful for them once they can no longer pretend reality does not exist.

This is the primary reason conspiracy theories almost always lead to “the Jews are behind it all.” Conspiracy theorists do not seek real solutions to real problems. That would require bravery they do not have.

We saw this again with Tucker Carlson and other right-wing figures - even surprising ones such as Megyn Kelley - when they claimed without any evidence that the Mossad is the real power behind the case of Jeffery Epstein. Why the Mossad? Why not an actual opponent of America like China or Russia? Because the Mossad is a more comfortable choice.

Deep down, they know that neither Israel nor the Mossad are going to plot attacks in America, that Israel will not attempt to undermine the American government, and that Israel values and needs a strong America. So, blaming Israel in a bizarre way lessens the threat and the impact of the conspiracy they have deluded themselves into believing exists. Far less has to be done about such a conspiracy than if Russia or China were the designated scapegoats or behind a real conspiracy.

Blaming the Jews is a comforting thought because the Jews are so few in number. Real threats such as Jihadists are too scary for cowards like Tucker Carlson to accept. With about two billion Muslims in the world, suicide bombings, airplane hijackings, and the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents shed by terrorist gangs such as ISIS, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda, that is a threat that is too real and frightening to even acknowledge.

In a world where cartoonists who draw religious figures and people who are actually brave, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are threatened with death for standing up against real evil, cowards like Carlson pick targets who don’t stab their opponents and threaten to murder them.

Carlson and his ilk do not want to lose an eye because their beloved Iran put out a fatwa against them, as Salman Rushdie did. They hear the chants of “death to America” and are cowed into obedience and silence. They look at the billions in China and the sheer size of Russia’s landmass and nuclear arsenal and slink away in search of cost-free enemies who are small in number. Little Israel, barely the size of New Jersey and a tenth of the population of Iran, which does not go around killing people who criticize it, is a far more tempting target. Never mind that Iran’s actual military is far weaker than Israel. Iran is willing to kill people who annoy its leaders, so it cannot be criticized or angered or else “World War Three” will somehow break out.

This mindset also explains Carlson’s love affair with Vladimir Putin and hatred for Ukraine. Russia is bigger. Russia has a lot of nukes. Therefore, Ukraine must be at fault because acknowledging the reality of Putin’s aggression is too scary.

The Jews always become a convenient target for this reason. White supremacy and racism seem like insurmountable problems to the radical left since there are more than 200 million white people in the US. But if you reduce the number by 95%,; saying that the problem is not white people but the relatively tiny Jewish population, it starts to look a lot more manageable. Suddenly, the target of your ire is just the Jewish population of the US, a population of under six million. Instead of blaming Europeans and Middle Easterners for the slave trade, you can similarly reduce the problem by solely blaming the Jews.

So too, if you can blame all the problems of the world on a population of 15 million people or on a tiny nation of 10 million people, suddenly, you have made complex problems simple and solvable. Just deal with the Jews and their state. That is how the Nazis arrived at their final solution and how generations of Western leaders and diplomats arrived at the same asinine belief that pressuring Israel into surrendering to those who seek to finish what the Nazis started would magically solve all of the problems in the Middle East.

Attacking the Jews and Israel allows cowards to pretend to be brave. But the attacks of cowards disprove the conspiracy theories in and of themselves. If the conspiracy theories were true, if the Jews and the Mossad really were that dangerous, if criticizing Israel resulted in the same danger as drawing a cartoon of Mohammed or writing a novel about him, if Israel was an actual threat to the US, they would not have the courage to criticize the Jews or the Jewish State.

When true acts of bravery take place, like President Trump’s decision to engage in limited but powerful military action to prevent the threat of a nuclear Iran, they shame the cowards who merely pretend to be brave, deepening the need for the conspiracy theory.

Reality ultimately wins in the end, but the fake courage of cowards is an especially dangerous thing. While it allows people like Tucker Carlson to justify inaction, the spread of their lies influences people who have more of a backbone. The deranged man who held worshipers at a Texas synagogue hostage in 2022 believed the conspiratorial lies about Jews and that if he threatened the Jews who supposedly had all the power, that would automatically change American government policy. The monster who assassinated a young couple outside a Jewish museum and the monster who thought burning elderly Jews to death was a moral good were similarly influenced by those lies.

The lies of cowards can be the deadliest weapons of all.

Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva staff.