The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion claims to be the minutes of meetings where Jewish leaders plan to take over the world. It was first published in Russia in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, an antisemitic journalist, and spread widely in Russia in 1905 in an edition put together by Sergei Nilus. In 1921, Philip Graves of The Times of London published evidence that the Protocols were mostly copied from Maurice Joly's 1864 satire 'The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,' which had nothing to do with Jews. Historians today agree the Protocols was a fake, almost certainly made by agents of the Russian secret police (the Okhrana) in Paris around 1898–1902 as antisemitic propaganda.
Ford gave the sixth chapter of 'The International Jew' to the Protocols, before the Graves exposé came out. Ford was careful about whether they were real. He did not claim they were true minutes of actual meetings. Instead he argued the Protocols were remarkable because, real or fake, they matched how Jewish influence worked in the real world. His pitch was simple: look at what the Protocols describe — control of the press, control of finance, control of schools, stirring up class conflict to weaken Gentile societies — and compare it to what you can see around you. Whether the document is genuine matters less than whether the methods it describes are real.
Ford summed up what he saw as the main strategy in the Protocols: deliberately splitting Gentile societies — by class, by party, by race, by religion — to weaken them and make them easier for an organized, united minority to control. Ford quoted passages he said came from the Protocols on this theme. He argued the Jewish plan was to push liberalism and individual rights, not out of real belief in them, but to dissolve the bonds of family, church, and nation that might otherwise resist Jewish influence.
Ford cited Protocol 1, which he quoted as saying: 'The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who wishes to rule must have recourse both to cunning and to dissimulation... Violence must be the principle, cunning and make-believe the rule for governments which do not want to lay down their crowns at the feet of agents of some new power.' Ford used this to argue that the Protocols set out an amoral view of politics, one at odds with the Christian tradition of grounding government in moral principle.
Ford cited Protocol 10 on democracy, quoting it as saying: 'When we introduced into the State organism the poison of liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness — blood poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony.' Ford argued this passage laid out a strategy: push democratic liberalism — the idea that any group, however new or however concentrated its interests, has equal political rights — as a way to dissolve the united Gentile national communities that might otherwise resist an organized minority.