“ZOG,” explained

Yes. The Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy organization, defines ZOG in its hate-symbol database as “a white supremacist acronym for ‘Zionist Occupied Government,’ which reflects the common white supremacist belief that the U.S. government is controlled by Jews.” Conspiracy Watch (2024) dates the acronym’s first appearance to a 1976 text.

That leaves two plain questions: how far does the claim reach, and how many Americans hold anything like it? The named sources disagree on reach. The ADL limits it to the government, the Forward (2024) extends it to “the government, banks and media,” and Conspiracy Watch (2024) extends it to “world domination.” The closest American measurement concerns power, not government. In a 2022 ADL survey fielded by NORC, 20% of 4,007 US adults rated “Jews have too much power in the United States today” somewhat or mostly true.

Key Findings

• The Anti-Defamation League (undated entry, retrieved November 9, 2026), an advocacy organization, defines ZOG as reflecting “the common white supremacist belief that the U.S. government is controlled by Jews.” The entry lists 3 slogans built on the acronym.
• Conspiracy Watch (2024), an anti-conspiracism monitor, dates the acronym’s first appearance to a 1976 text by Eric Thomson. The Forward (Fox, 2024) credits The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel, with popularising it in neo-Nazi circles.
• In an Anti-Defamation League (2023) survey of 4,007 US adults, fielded by NORC in September and October 2022, 20% rated “Jews have too much power in the United States today” somewhat or mostly true. None of the survey’s 14 trope statements asks about the government.
• Among Malay adults in Kuala Lumpur, attitudes toward Israel were the strongest correlate of belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory, with a standardized beta of 0.56 (Swami, 2012, peer-reviewed).
• In a 2025 audit by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is not peer-reviewed, a TikTok profile posing as a 15-year-old boy was shown antisemitic conspiracy theories within about an hour.

Does the ZOG acronym allege Jewish control of the US government?

Yes. The Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy organization, defines ZOG in an undated entry of its Hate on Display database (retrieved November 9, 2026). It calls ZOG “a white supremacist acronym for ‘Zionist Occupied Government,’ which reflects the common white supremacist belief that the U.S. government is controlled by Jews.” The same entry lists three slogans the acronym generates: “Smash ZOG,” “Kill ZOG” and “Death to ZOG.”

The definition settles what the acronym alleges. Its expansion names a government, and the ADL’s gloss names who is said to control it. The acronym says “Zionist,” while the entry’s own wording is “controlled by Jews.” In each of the three slogans, ZOG stands in place of the state itself, as the thing to be smashed or killed. It does not stand for a lobby, a party or a single policy.

The ADL describes the belief as “common” among white supremacists. That is the ADL’s characterisation, not a measured share. The entry carries no count of how many people hold the belief, how often the acronym appears, or where it appears. It also gives no coinage date and no first user, so the term’s origin rests on other named sources.

The word “secretly” does not appear in the ADL’s definition, which describes control rather than concealment. The element of secrecy enters through a different named description. The Forward (Fox, 2024) calls ZOG a variation on a conspiracy theory “alleging that a secret cabal of Jews runs the government, banks and media.” The two descriptions differ in more than the word “secret,” and they differ on which institutions the alleged control covers.

The ADL’s hate-symbol entries are reference definitions written by an organization with an advocacy mission. The definition above is quoted as the ADL’s own wording and is labelled by that source type wherever it appears.

Who coined ZOG, and when did it start circulating?

Conspiracy Watch, a French anti-conspiracism monitor, wrote in a briefing note last updated August 5, 2024, that “the acronym ‘ZOG’ first appeared in a 1976 text by American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson.” On that account, the term began in neo-Nazi writing, the setting the ADL’s “white supremacist” label also points to. The first-use attribution is Conspiracy Watch’s alone.

The step from coinage to circulation runs through a novel. Conspiracy Watch (2024) states that the acronym “is used several times in The Turner Diaries (1978).” The novel was written by William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. The Forward (Fox, 2024) gives the same novel a larger role, writing that ZOG “originally gained popularity in neo-Nazi circles after its use in The Turner Diaries.”

The three sources make different claims and are cited for different things:

• Conspiracy Watch names a first appearance, 1976, and an author, Thomson.
• The Forward names no coinage author and credits the 1978 novel with popularising the term.
• The ADL entry gives neither a date nor a first user.

The 1976 date rests on Conspiracy Watch’s attribution, and none of the other sources cited confirms it. The longer lineage of the ZOG conspiracy, including the older texts behind it, is traced separately.

The sources agree on the setting. In August 2024 the Forward wrote that the acronym “had historically remained relatively confined to neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles.” It then entered wider online use that month, in a debate over the term that the Forward’s headline framed as a question about criticism of US support for Israel. That gives the acronym a span of 48 years in the named record. It runs from Conspiracy Watch’s 1976 date to the Forward’s August 2024 account, and throughout it both sources place the term inside the same circles.

Does ZOG name the government alone, or banks and media too?

The Forward (Fox, 2024) describes ZOG as “a 1970s variation on the age-old antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that a secret cabal of Jews runs the government, banks and media.” That names three institutions, where the Anti-Defamation League’s definition names one, the US government.

Conspiracy Watch (2024) scopes the term wider still. Its briefing note links the acronym to “the idea of a Jewish plan for world domination as set out in the false document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” On that reading, ZOG is a national instance of a global claim, and the US government is one site of the alleged control rather than its whole extent.

Source: Anti-Defamation League, undated; Fox, 2024; Conspiracy Watch, 2024.

The three descriptions also differ from the acronym in their subject. The acronym’s own expansion says “Zionist.” All three sources gloss that word as Jews:

• The ADL writes “controlled by Jews.”
• The Forward writes “a secret cabal of Jews.”
• Conspiracy Watch writes “a Jewish plan.”

This gap between the word in the acronym and the word in the definitions is part of the documented record of the term. A measured study, set out below, found attitudes toward Israel tracking belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory.

The Forward’s August 2024 piece sits at that gap: its headline asks whether neo-Nazi terms are “really the only way to criticize U.S. support for Israel,” which records that by August 2024 the acronym was being used in a public argument about US policy toward Israel. In that argument, the acronym’s wording and the definitions’ wording diverged in practice.

How many Jews live in the United States?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 6.3 million Jews living in the United States at the end of 2023. On the Bureau’s own count, that is 40% of a world Jewish population of 15.7 million. This is the official national-statistics figure for the population that the ZOG acronym alleges controls the US government, and it is published by Israel’s government statistics bureau.

The Bureau’s 2024 release, issued for Holocaust Day, sets the American figure beside the other large communities at the end of 2023:

• Israel: 7.1 million, 45% of the world total.
• France: 440,000.
• Canada: 398,000.
• The United Kingdom: 312,000.

On these figures, the United States and Israel together hold 13.4 million of the 15.7 million, about 85% of the world total. The next three communities, France, Canada and the United Kingdom, hold about 1.15 million combined.

The Bureau’s note carries a definitional caveat that applies to the American number. Outside Israel, the Bureau counts a “core” Jewish population, which is a narrower definition than the one it applies within Israel. The 6.3 million is therefore a core count. A broader definition, one taking in people of Jewish parentage who do not identify as Jewish, would yield a different total, and the Bureau’s release does not publish that alternative figure.

The release also does not give the American figure as a share of the US population. It reports shares of the world Jewish total only, so 40% is the United States’ portion of world Jewry, not the Jewish portion of Americans. No US share is computed here from this source.

The count is demographic. It records how many people the Bureau counts as Jewish and where they live. It carries no measure of office-holding, influence or institutional control, and it neither supports nor bears on the allegation in the acronym. It establishes only the size of the group the allegation names, as recorded by an official statistics bureau on its own stated definition.

What share of Americans say Jews have too much power?

In a survey by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research, fielded by NORC in September and October 2022, 20% of 4,007 US adults rated “Jews have too much power in the United States today” somewhat or mostly true. The ADL, an advocacy organization, published the result in 2023 from NORC’s AmeriSpeak probability panel, weighted to the US population.

It is often said that belief in Jewish control is confined to white supremacist movements, the circles where Conspiracy Watch (2024) and the Forward (Fox, 2024) place the ZOG acronym. On the ADL’s 2022 measure, the related belief in Jewish power is held by one in five American adults. That share is far larger than any movement those two sources describe.

The same survey recorded higher agreement on neighbouring items:

• 26% thought Jews have too much power in business.
• 38% thought Jews always like to be at the head of things.
• 39% thought Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States.

These items are not exclusive, so a respondent could agree with several, and the shares cannot be summed.

Two features of the instrument shape how the 20% reads. First, “agreed” means a rating of “Somewhat True” or “Mostly True,” so the figure combines firm and partial assent. Second, the topline removed the “Unsure/Don’t Know” option, which leaves respondents without a neutral exit, and ADL’s own methodology appendix carries caveats on comparisons with its earlier waves.

The survey measures attitudes, while ADL’s incident tallies count reported events under ADL’s own definitions. These are separate products, and the 20% is not combined with or compared against any incident count.

Has any survey asked whether Jews control the US government?

The Anti-Defamation League’s 2022 survey, fielded by NORC, tested 14 anti-Jewish trope statements, and none of them asks whether Jews control the US government. The instrument combined the 11 statements of the ADL Index, asked since 1964, with three statements added for this wave.

The nearest item is the one reported above, “Jews have too much power in the United States today.” That wording measures power in the country at large. It names no institution, and it does not use the word “control” or the word “government.” A respondent who agreed with it may have had business, culture, politics or nothing specific in mind, and the item does not separate these.

The difference matters for the question at hand because the ADL’s definition of ZOG is specific: it concerns “the U.S. government.” The survey’s business item, at 26%, shows that respondents rate institution-specific wording differently from the general power item, at 20%. It follows that a government-specific item could produce a figure different from either, and the instrument does not record one.

Source: Anti-Defamation League, 2023, advocacy organization survey fielded by NORC.

The one national attitude instrument in the evidence assembled here therefore measures a general belief in excessive Jewish power, not the specific allegation the acronym encodes. The 20% is the closest checkable American figure on the premise, and it is reported as a measure of power rather than of government control. The two are different quantities, and no share of Americans who believe Jews control the US government appears in this record.

The ADL Index items have been asked since 1964, which gives the instrument a long run of comparable wording on the power item. The three statements added in 2022 extended the instrument, but none of them introduced government as a named institution. As a result, the survey’s 14 statements leave the acronym’s core claim untested in the American population.

What predicts belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory?

In two surveys of Malay adults in Kuala Lumpur, Swami (2012, peer-reviewed, Frontiers in Psychology) found attitudes toward Israel to be the strongest predictor of belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory, with a standardized beta of 0.56. The sample is not American, and the fieldwork is now more than a decade old. The study measured belief in a conspiracy theory directly, using a 12-item scale.

Study 2 (n = 314) produced a regression model that accounted for 39% of the variance, adjusted. After attitudes toward Israel, the next predictors were:

• modern racism toward the Chinese, at 0.17;
• right-wing authoritarianism, at 0.15;
• social dominance orientation, at 0.14.

Study 1 (n = 368) found that belief in the Jewish conspiracy theory was only weakly associated with general conspiracist ideation, at r = 0.22. Once the ideological variables were accounted for, general conspiracist ideation was no longer a significant predictor.

These are associations in cross-sectional survey data. The study does not establish that attitudes toward Israel produce the belief, or the reverse. It reports that, in this population and period, the two moved together more closely than the belief moved with a general tendency toward conspiracy thinking.

The finding bears on the acronym’s wording. ZOG says “Zionist” where the definitions from the ADL, the Forward and Conspiracy Watch say “Jews.” Swami’s data place attitudes toward Israel, rather than general conspiracism, at the centre of the measured association with a Jewish conspiracy theory. The study did not test the ZOG acronym, did not sample Americans, and cannot show whether the same pattern holds in the United States today. The relationship between anti-Zionism and measured antisemitism in other populations is set out separately.

The study is useful for a different reason: it is a peer-reviewed measurement of what tracks the belief, rather than a description of the belief. On the record assembled here, it is the only such measurement.

Where do teenagers encounter claims of Jewish control online?

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported in 2025 that a TikTok profile posing as a 15-year-old boy, set up with an interest in male-lifestyle-influencer content, was shown antisemitic conspiracy theories within about an hour. The report is a structured organizational audit, not a peer-reviewed study.

It ran 10 TikTok profiles posing as 15-year-olds, plus Rumble, over 14 days and collected more than 5,500 recommended videos.

The audit traced the route rather than only the endpoint. Stickers, sounds and comment sections connected benign videos to overt antisemitic content. That content included Holocaust memes, neo-Nazi imagery and far-right codes. The profiles did not search for the material; the recommendation feeds supplied it, starting from interests that had no stated connection to Jews or politics.

Rumble differed from TikTok in timing and in how explicit the content was. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2025) found that Rumble surfaced more overt antisemitic content than TikTok from the outset, in its Editor’s Picks section. That content included slurs, Holocaust distortion and conspiracies about Jewish control. On Rumble, then, claims of Jewish control did not have to be reached through a chain of recommendations, because they were present on first view.

The audit records the general claim of Jewish control, and its published findings do not report a count of the ZOG acronym itself. Its evidence therefore concerns the belief the acronym encodes, not the acronym’s vocabulary. It also shows exposure, not adoption: it records what the feeds served to test profiles, not what any teenager came to believe.

This finding sits beside the Forward’s 2024 account of the acronym, which described ZOG as “relatively confined to neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles” before that year. The ISD audit locates the broader idea of Jewish control in mainstream recommendation feeds that serve teenage accounts. That is a different setting from the movement literature, and the audit dates it to 2025.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence here comes from four source types, each labelled where it is used.

• Monitoring or advocacy organizations. These supply the definitions and the dating: the Anti-Defamation League’s hate-symbol entry, which is undated and was retrieved November 9, 2026, and Conspiracy Watch’s briefing note, last updated August 5, 2024. Both are reference characterisations, not measurements.
• US press. The Forward (Fox, 2024) is cited for its account of the term’s popularisation and its August 2024 spread online.
• Official record. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (2024) supplies the population count, which uses a “core” definition outside Israel and mixes reference periods across its tables.
• Measurement. Two attitude surveys and one audit supply the measured figures: the ADL’s 2022 survey fielded by NORC (n = 4,007, probability panel, weighted), Swami (2012, peer-reviewed, n = 368 and n = 314), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s 2025 recommender audit.

Several points remain open in the record. The 1976 first-use attribution to Eric Thomson rests on Conspiracy Watch alone, and no peer-reviewed or scholarly confirmation was retrieved. The Forward credits The Turner Diaries with popularising the term but names no coinage author. The ADL survey removed the “Unsure/Don’t Know” option, and ADL’s appendix caveats its comparison with 2019. Swami’s samples are Malaysian and date from 2012, and the associations he reports are cross-sectional. The ISD audit is organizational rather than peer-reviewed, uses test profiles rather than real users, and does not count the acronym. No source cited here measures how often ZOG itself appears on any platform.

Conclusion

So does ZOG claim that Jews secretly control the US government? Yes. On the Anti-Defamation League’s definition, the acronym encodes exactly that belief, and the Forward (Fox, 2024) supplies the element of secrecy with its phrase “a secret cabal.”

The record assembled here draws a consistent picture across its sources:

• The acronym is old. Conspiracy Watch (2024) dates it to 1976, and a 1978 novel carried it into wider use.
• It is explicit about its target. Each of the ADL’s three slogans treats the state as the thing to be destroyed.
• Its sources agree on who is meant, even where they disagree on how far the alleged control reaches, from the government alone to “world domination.”
• Its general form is widely held. In 2022, 20% of American adults rated Jews as having too much power, in a survey whose 14 statements never named the government.
• Its route to new audiences is short. In the 2025 ISD audit, a teenage profile reached antisemitic conspiracy content within about an hour.

One feature recurs through the whole record: the acronym says “Zionist,” every definition says “Jews,” and in Swami’s Kuala Lumpur samples, attitudes toward Israel tracked belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory with a beta of 0.56. When a word for a political movement serves as the label for an old claim about Jewish power, and that label now travels in arguments about American policy and in feeds served to fifteen-year-olds, does the substitution make the claim easier to repeat without recognising what it is? On the evidence here, the vocabulary has shifted and the survey instruments have not followed it, so that question remains unmeasured.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the ADL say ZOG is used outside white supremacist movements?

Yes. The Anti-Defamation League states that the term originated with white supremacists and is “also occasionally used by some anti-Israel activists in the United States, particularly since the Hamas-led terror attacks of October 7, 2023.” The entry gives no count of that use, so “occasionally” is the ADL’s own characterisation.

Did use of the ZOG theme change after October 7, 2023?

Conspiracy Watch (2024) writes that the theme “received a boost” after October 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza. The briefing note does not quantify that boost, so the claim stands as the monitor’s own description rather than a measured trend.

Who was William Luther Pierce?

Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries (1978) under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, according to Conspiracy Watch (2024) and the Forward (Fox, 2024). The Forward identifies him as the founder of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization.

What share of Americans agreed with at least one anti-Jewish trope in 2022?

In the Anti-Defamation League’s 2022 survey fielded by NORC, 85% of US adults rated at least one of the 14 trope statements somewhat true or more. That threshold is low by design, since a single item is enough to count.

Did agreement with anti-Jewish tropes rise between 2019 and 2022?

On the ADL’s comparison, 20% of US adults agreed with six or more of the 11 original Index statements in 2022, against 11% in 2019. ADL’s own methodology appendix caveats that comparison, because the 2022 topline removed the “Unsure/Don’t Know” option.

Who was surveyed in the ADL’s 2022 attitude study?

NORC at the University of Chicago drew 4,007 US adults from its AmeriSpeak probability panel and weighted the results to the US population, according to the Anti-Defamation League (2023). The sample included an oversample of 1,292 respondents aged 18 to 30.

Sources

• Anti-Defamation League, 2023. Antisemitic Attitudes in America: Conspiracy Theories, Holocaust Education and Other Predictors of Antisemitic Belief. ADL Center for Antisemitism Research, survey fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago. https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-conspiracy-theories-holocaust-education-and-other. Monitoring or advocacy organization.
• Anti-Defamation League, undated (retrieved November 9, 2026). Hate Symbol: ZOG. ADL Hate on Display hate symbols database. https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/zog. Monitoring or advocacy organization.
• Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. On the Occasion of Holocaust Day, 2024. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/doclib/2024/132/11_24_132e.pdf. Official record.
• Conspiracy Watch, 2024. Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG). Briefing note, last updated August 5, 2024, Observatoire du conspirationnisme. https://www.conspiracywatch.info/en/brieffing_notes/zionist-occupied-government-zog/. Monitoring organization.
• Fox, Mira, 2024. Are neo-Nazi terms really the only way to criticize U.S. support for Israel? The Forward, August 12, 2024. https://forward.com/culture/643491/zog-zionist-occupied-government-antisemitism/. US press.
• Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2025. Amplifying Antisemitism: How Recommender Algorithms Serve Harmful Content to Children. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. isdglobal.org. Established research organization.
• Swami, 2012. Social Psychological Origins of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory in Malaysia. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00280. Peer-reviewed.