This February, long-shot Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback campaigned in front of a group of supporters at the University of Central Florida, promising to promote healthier alternatives to the food in schools. “If you wanted to set our kids up for failure,” he said, “you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias.”
For the “rage-bait” candidate’s hyper-online fanbase, whom he has energized with a steady stream of anti-Israel and nativistic rhetoric, the term “goyslop” would likely have been familiar. It’s an off- shoot of the conspiracy theory that says Jews are poisoning the gentiles, either through chemtrails or “mindless programming that keeps people’s brains dull so they won’t understand what’s going on or object to it,” says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. But in this iteration, it’s food—cafeteria junk—that corrupts people’s minds and bodies.
How did we get here? In biblical Hebrew, “goyim” means “nations,” particularly non-Jewish ones. Later, in Yiddish usage, “goy” became shorthand to refer to anyone who isn’t a Jew, operating similarly to “gringo” for non-Latin Americans or “haole” for non-Hawaiians. These terms can be pejorative depending on context, but aren’t necessarily. The linguist Adam Aleksic, known on Instagram as @etymologynerd, says “goy” and “gentile” “are more about marking a shared Jewish identity than specifically discriminating against non-Jews.”
But some of our most provocative minds have used it as a dig, as in Philip Roth’s tirade in Portnoy’s Complaint: “Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not contaminate our humanity thus.”
Enough Jews used “goy” negatively that white supremacists began to adopt it for themselves in the mid-2010s. A former member of the Proud Boys once tried to rebrand the group as the “Proud Goys.” The neo-Nazi Goyim Defense League (GDL) operates an online video platform, GoyimTV, that spreads conspiracy theories including that Jews caused the COVID pandemic. “It’s natural people who are antisemitic pick up on goy and embrace it, expand upon it,” Pitcavage says. “They’ll self-identify as goyim, because it contains an implicit stance against Jews.”
This co-opted version of goy exploded in popularity in 2022, thanks to X’s more relaxed content moderation policy, says Phillip Hamilton, the editor of KnowYourMeme. “The floodgates are open and they have been ever since they stopped banning you for saying blatantly antisemitic and racist things.”
Goyslop naturally oozed out of this toxic environment, making its first appearance in 2016 on the online forum 4chan, where someone called In-N-Out burgers “greasy goyslop food.” On the same platform three years later, someone used it conspiratorially: “How can you have a functional society when you willing[ly] feed your kids and youth GOYSLOP? No wonder they’re having depression, mental breakdowns and violent outbursts.”
There is a distinction between goyslop and content slop. The latter is used to refer to anything low-quality and bland, “something that is slapped together just to offer the bare minimum level of entertainment or satisfaction,” Hamilton says. Use of the term has picked up a lot more as AI videos have clogged Instagram feeds. “Slop” was even Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year.
While “slop” is a harmless term for the plethora of artificial content, Hamilton says that “goyslop” refers to slop “catered specifically to goys, the implication being that it is slop produced by Jewish people for non-Jewish people to indoctrinate, harm or brainwash them in a way that they can still enjoy it.”
Goyslop entered mainstream politics in 2024, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned for president on a promise to “Make America Healthy Again.” Some commenters joked that he was going to ban goyslop, which is how Mira Fox, a culture reporter at The Forward, first heard the term. Deeming low-quality food goyslop suggests that “some corporation, cabal, is trying to feed lesser nutrition to weaken everyone,” Fox says. “[It’s as if] Jews save the best for themselves and feed the slop to the masses.”
By now, people further to the right of both MAHA and MAGA have introduced “ZOGchow,” a more insidious goyslop synonym employing the acronym for “Zionist Occupied Government.” “I’m sick of eating ZOGchow,” someone posted on 4chan in 2017, its earliest known use. Labeling Donald Trump’s famous love of McDonald’s as ZOGchow is a way for detractors to both critique Trump’s unhealthy habits and cast him as a lackey of Zionist interests, says Kye Allen, an extremism researcher at Oxford University. Jews, the memes purport, are keeping “Zion Don” fat and happy—and the American people, too.
“One of the biggest facets of the alt-right has been to create joking frameworks for its white supremacist ideology,” Pitcavage says. “When you frame antisemitism or racism around something that could be seen as funny or a joke, people are more likely to spread it.” Accordingly, gubernatorial candidate Fishback downplayed why he used the word goyslop in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Because it’s funny. Get a life.”
Hamilton, of KnowYourMeme, says it’s easy for people to miss goyslop’s origin: “If you don’t understand exactly what it means, or just heard of it in passing, it doesn’t even come across as antisemitic or problematic at all.” People like Fishback or livestreamers like Sneako or Adin Ross very likely understand the antisemitic connotation, but their viewers, young and impressionable, might not.
Pitcavage agrees, and likens goyslop to words like “gyp” or phrases like “Jew down,” offensive terms that people spread, unaware of their history. (I recall a friend of my mother’s being horrified to learn that her saying a salesman tried to “Jew her down” was antisemitic.) Goyslop shouldn’t be swallowed as mere slop—it’s an antisemitic term, even when used unknowingly. If you taste it in the lexicon, best to spit it out.
(Top image credit: Anthonyjayphotos (CC BY-SA 4.0))