The KKK taught today’s anti-Zionists their favorite slur.

The anti-Zionist movement turned the KKK code word "Zio" into a trendy insult — and most people have no idea.

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This is a guest essay by Matt Field, who writes the newsletter, “That Jew.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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“Zio” is the rare slur that people fling with pride, unaware that they are repeating a word polished and popularized by white supremacists.

You see it now everywhere, scattered across comment sections and stitched into TikTok videos, spray painted on protest signs, shouted through megaphones by people who insist that they are fighting oppression rather than borrowing its language. It appears with such confidence that you could almost mistake it for a legitimate political category instead of a hand-me-down from extremists.

Most slurs vanish once their origins are exposed. This one spread. It slipped across the internet like static, attaching itself to global outrage and carrying the illusion of moral clarity. Say it loudly enough and often enough and it begins to feel like truth. And in this moment of chaos and tribal certainty, the world has grown comfortable with a word whose entire purpose is to collapse Jews into a single contemptible idea.

There is something unsettling in that comfort. People who would never dream of using a slur against any other minority speak this one casually, as if it were enlightened vocabulary rather than the linguistic residue of hate movements. They speak it with a kind of swagger, certain that history is on their side, certain that intention erases impact. It does not.

The truth is simple. If you whispered this word into the ear of a white supremacist from the 1990s, he would smile in recognition. He would tell you that he used it too. He might even thank you for carrying the work forward.

That is the quiet horror behind its popularity. A word born in the margins of extremism now marches openly in the streets, wrapped in the language of human rights. And the people who speak it have no idea who first taught them how.

To understand how “Zio” traveled from the shadows of extremism to the center of public discourse, you have to start at the beginning, in the places where this kind of word first takes shape: the pamphlets no one read, the conspiracy newsletters no one should have read, and the ideological margins where dehumanization is always born quietly.

The compounded use of “Zio” as an insult is first recorded in the 1990 edition of the American Jewish Year Book, which cites graffiti at Binghamton University in New York that paired “Zionazi” with “Kill Kikes” on campus walls. It is an early glimpse of a pattern that would become familiar. Even in that embryonic form, the syllable “Zio” lived inside language that treated Jews as a problem to be erased rather than as human beings.

From there, the term shows up in fringe “anti-Zionist” circles and Far-Right conspiracy literature in the late 20th century, two communities that rarely agree on anything except their suspicion of Jews. These were small publications and marginal spaces, the ideological alleyways with little sunlight where slogans are tested on the edges of acceptable speech. The vocabulary that grows in such places often reveals more about the future than the present.

These early appearances were not neutral shorthand. The word sat inside rhetoric that cast Jews and “Zionists” as abstractions, forces, or threats. It echoed alongside talk of “ZOG,” or “Zionist Occupied Government,” in material that already treated Jews as a hidden hand. The spelling might have looked harmless. The intent did not.

The specific origin story matters less than the pattern. Extremist slang often begins as insider code, a verbal wink that proves you belong. Most of it remains underground. Some of it grows teeth. When a word survives the journey from obscurity to wider circulation, it usually carries the DNA of the place it was born. “Zio” is no exception.

Those first echoes created the template that others would later magnify. A word that collapses Jews into a single suspect identity. A word that implies a hidden force rather than a human community. A word that makes contempt efficient. This early period did not create the modern slur, but it prepared the soil. And in the 1990s and 2000s, one figure in particular transformed that soil into a platform.

That figure was David Duke.

David Duke¹ did not coin the word “Zio.” His contribution was more consequential. He made it operational.

Beginning in the 1990s, Duke wove the term through his speeches, essays, interviews, and online posts. Philologos, a respected Jewish-language etymology column, later noted that Duke’s website used “Zio” obsessively as a hyphenated prefix in phrases like “Zio-Communism,” “Zio-economics,” “Zio-history,” “Zio-supremacism,” and “Zio-occupied America.” Reporting in Haaretz, echoed in The Forward, similarly described “Zio” as “a pejorative brought into prominence by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and often deployed by white supremacists.”

Duke used “Zio” as a vessel for familiar antisemitic fantasies, recasting Jews and “Zionists” as the masterminds behind media, finance, and government. None of this was political critique. It was conspiracy dressed as vocabulary. He repeated the word until it became part of the scaffolding of modern white supremacy, a sleeker alternative to older slurs that sounded political rather than racial and gave bigotry the illusion of precision.

He was not the father of the word, but he was its architect. He gave it structure, purpose, and reach.

That meaning did not stay confined to the Far-Right.

By the early 21st century, “Zio” began appearing in parts of the Far-Left. It surfaced in campus organizing, anti-globalization protests, online anti-Israel forums, and eventually inside the British Labour Party’s activist circles. People used it believing they were resisting oppression, unaware that the vocabulary they had chosen carried the fingerprints of the very movements they claimed to oppose.

The British case made this visible in stark terms. In 2016, the Labour Party commissioned barrister Shami Chakrabarti to investigate antisemitism in the party. Her report called “Zio” a “modern-day racist epithet” that had gained currency on campuses and social media and recommended that such epithets have no place in party discourse. At the report’s launch, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn described “Zio” as “a vile epithet” that had no place in Labour’s ranks.

The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission later investigated Labour’s handling of antisemitism and listed use of “Zio” as an example of antisemitic conduct in its evidence. Activists were suspended or expelled in cases where they used “Zios” or “Zio-Nazi” as interchangeable terms for Jews.

The picture is not ambiguous. A major Western political institution and its own regulators concluded that “Zio” functions as a racist epithet, not a neutral label. Yet even that formal recognition did not slow its spread. The internet was waiting.

The internet rewards language that is sharp, repeatable, and uncomplicated. “Zio” fits neatly into this template. On TikTok and Instagram, it appears in sarcastic captions and stitched videos where rage travels faster than thought. On X and Reddit, it is paired with images meant to degrade and mock. On message boards, it shows up in memes that talk about “Zio puppets” and “Zio control,” recycling classic antisemitic imagery.

A Jewish student writes about her finals week and receives replies calling her a “Zio rat.” There is no politics in her post, only identity. Yet the slur arrives anyway.

This does not happen in a vacuum. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in the three months following the Hamas-led massacre on October 7th, it recorded 3,291 antisemitic incidents in the United States, an average of 34 anti-Jewish acts every day and roughly a 360-percent increase over the same period a year earlier. More recent annual audits show antisemitic incidents at their highest levels since tracking began, with thousands of cases of harassment, vandalism, and assault each year and a large share tied to anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activity.

In that environment, a term like “Zio” thrives. Slurs do not gain traction by accident. They persist when they reinforce the story people want to believe. “Zio” is simple, easy to type, and vague enough that its users can pretend not to know what they are doing.

A society that prides itself on sensitivity and inclusion has made a remarkable exception for this term. No other community would be expected to tolerate a slur with this origin story.

If “Zio” were simply an abbreviation, it would appear in neutral contexts. It would be used descriptively. Scholars would use it in print. Policy papers would contain it. You would find it in careful discussions where language is chosen with precision.

You do not.

The word is used almost exclusively as condemnation. It collapses distinctions between Jew, Israeli, and Zionist until none of the categories hold meaning. It transforms identity into threat. It replaces argument with accusation.

Mainstream Jewish organizations that track antisemitism now treat “Zio” as part of a cluster of code terms that pretend to target “Zionists” but in practice are directed at Jews. The American Jewish Committee’s “Translate Hate” glossary cites examples like “Zio puppet” and explains how such language recycles classic antisemitic imagery. The reference works on antisemitism and the widely cited entry on “Zionist as a Pejorative” both note the term’s use as a slur and link its modern prominence to white supremacist circles and parts of the British left.

The usual defenses fail under the slightest scrutiny. Slurs reduce, flatten, and target entire communities. Their histories cannot be separated from their present use.

“Zio” functions the same way. It is not shorthand. It is inheritance.

Modern users of the word fall into three categories: Some do not know where it comes from, some know but pretend they do not, and some know and approve. Intention matters less than impact. A word shaped in extremist spaces, polished on a former Ku Klux Klan leader’s website, and carried forward by conspiracy theorists cannot be purified through new intentions. It retains its original purpose. Ignorance does not erase the past. Repetition does not absolve the present.

When people speak this word, they are not innovating. They are remembering. Whether they realize it or not, they are echoing the movements that made it meaningful.

To Jewish ears, the word does not sound political. It sounds historical. It sounds like collapse. It sounds like the old habit of turning Jews into categories and villains. It sounds like the long tradition of reducing a people to a single condemned idea.

Jews do not hear “Zio” as shorthand for a policy position. They hear it as shorthand for themselves. They hear it as a verdict issued before any facts have been presented. They hear it as a reminder that antisemitism adapts with ease. It changes its accents, not its aims. No one else gets to decide for Jews what is or is not a slur. The people who bear the consequences of a word are the ones who understand its weight.

There is a simple moral principle at the heart of every honest movement for justice. You do not borrow the vocabulary of hate to speak about liberation. You do not fight racism by adopting the language of racists. You do not advance human rights by repeating the phrases extremists taught you.

“Zio” is not resistance; it is repetition. It is the echo of a slur that should have died in forgotten pamphlets and abandoned forums, but instead was carried forward by people who never paused long enough to learn its history.

A word born in hate should die with the hateful. It has no place in the mouths of people who claim to stand for justice.

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1. David Duke is an American politician, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, conspiracy theorist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives.