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Notes -
The 'National Day of Hate' - Anatomy of a Propaganda Hoax
The Dissident-Right Telegramsphere was bemused last month to hear alarmed media reports of a "National Day of Hate" allegedly planned for February 25th. Despite the fact that nobody had heard anything from anyone about such a plan, the story seemed to grow and grow. The episode is recounted in this article, 'National Day of Hate' was ADL hoax. Within the DR sphere it was of course immediately recognized as such. It seems the ADL was the first to spread the claim, and at least one research group also pointed the finger at the ADL. On February 9th:
The ADL continued to push the story, with Greenblatt tweeting on Feb. 23:
And with this, the ADL was able to mobilize law enforcement and national security action across the country.
The allegation trended on Twitter and within the Jewish community. The Israeli ambassador to the US made a tweet that went viral:
The story made the rounds among various blue checkmarks:
And an interesting reply from another blue checkmark to that tweet provides an interesting tidbit of information:
Related to my bolded emphasis above, on February 23rd the ADL tweeted:
The call for action:
Following the money, the Nonprofit Security Grant Program appeared to begin in 2016 with a total funding of $20 million. This allocation has grown enormously year over year to a 2023 allocation of $305 million.
Last year I took note of the Biden administration promising Jewish groups more federal funding for security at the White House Menorah lighting. On February 17th, about a week before the 'National Day of Hate', the Biden Administration declared it had followed through on that promise:
In its call to action, the ADL is lobbying for the "fully funded" $360 million proposed by the Biden administration. A quick search through Google News of the "Nonprofit Security Grant Program" shows that this lobbying effort extends to over a hundred Jewish organizations:
Both the Biden administration and ADL talk about places of worship and religion in a general sense as being the recipients of these funds, but I would like to see exactly how these funds are allocated. This is an enormous growth in funding- with one observer calling "nonprofits" the "big winners" of FY2023 Homeland Security Grants.
Looking at the FEMA datasets, they only record bulk allocations to state institutions who then allocate the funds to grantees. I would like to do more digging to see if I can find data on one or more states to analyze which nonprofits are receiving these grants. If anyone has experience data sleuthing grant allocations and can point me in the right direction that would be helpful.
While digging through the Google News surrounding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program when writing this post, I came across this article published yesterday in Jewish Currents, which to its credit, independently reaches the same conclusions I have here.
Ben Lorber writes a somewhat odd and revealing subtitle to his article:
Lorber tries to say that this hoax somehow works to the benefit of "white supremacists", but how? Lorber writes that it "plays into white supremacists' strategy", but this entire affair has been the strategy of the Jewish lobby, which worked to spectacular effect. The ADL isn't playing into their strategy, it's playing its own strategy and in doing so showing that the 'white supremacists' are right, which are not the same thing.
But that's only something that actually matters if non-Jews are willing to criticize this behavior. As long as this public criticism is restricted by right to "in-house" criticism in Jewish publications, there's no check to this sort of behavior.
If I'm able to find a dataset on which non-profits are receiving these grants, I'll follow-up with additional analysis on the NSGP.
I haven't read your links yet; this is some complex stuff with lots of plausible deniability. One of the reasons I'm grateful for my Russian background is precisely that everything is so much cruder than in the West, even though directionally similar, with comparable demographics, history and memes. Contrasting those two worlds, I think, lets one learn more about both.
In this case, I've been looking into «PMC Ryodan», an utterly bizarre… thing that has just happened. You can read the story on Bellingcat (actually a decent source) and whatever this outlet cited by Yahoo news is. Since the motto of the day is «believe
womenUkraine», the story of security-minded Ukraininan boomers is cited without comment:As one could expect, Russian boomers accuse Ryodan of being a Ukrainian psyop, and zoomers on both sides are having the time of their lives (except those who have to fight the actual war).
But this isn't the point. The point is: it isn't really something that is happening for real. There is no PMC Ryodan, outside of the Hunter X Hunter universe at least – or rather, there wasn't. Just some weeb teens who bought HxH merch, and a couple online groups that used the PMC meme, and kids who were assaulted by gopniks in a food court. Everything else was spun out of this seed – including, unfortunately, the minor campaign by actual thugs to hunt weebs, in a mockery of a turf war.
…Actually, this isn't the point either, as you may expect. While checking out the Ryodan stuff on the Russian Reddit analog (Pikabu), I've seen this story as a comment (abridged):
From the above:
One is free to choose what to believe.
This should've been a toplevel post tbh, imo more interesting than most of week's toplevels but it didn't get much visibility due to being a late reply. Honestly not a fan of the 'timely topic' focus of most toplevel posts vs the rarer 'non-timely interesting topic' ones
If you mean the Ryodan thing, it's developing rapidly, so maybe some other time. I'll plug this post for the second part.
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If you just read one link I would read the Jewish Currents article by Ben Lorber, it sums things up nicely. Primarily I think it shows that the ADL doesn't really have a lot of plausible deniability here. Everyone in the DR knows that telegram channels are closely monitored by an army of Jewish NGOs with ung-dly amounts of funding (incidentally, the same NGO that keeps the archive of all Reddit comments there), and that apparently includes rapidly-growing funding from DHS.
Lorber is a good example of an "expert account" by someone monitoring that network who could quite clearly see that there was nothing resembling some national day of anti-semitic action actually being organized. Of course even the alt-right in its heyday could have never organized such a thing. But the ADL drummed up anxiety and law enforcement response across the country.
Nobody following DR telegram, experts or followers, thought that this was a thing. The ADL signal-boosted a narrative that nobody who follows these channels could have plausibly believed, and Lorber attests to that as a witness. Particularly as the day approached, i.e. Feb 23rd, the ADL narrative intensified when nobody acquainted with the DR could have plausibly believed that this was an actual thing that was going to happen.
They have too many experts for plausible deniability here- they knew better but they were being strategic in manipulating a national response to their canned narrative and to put pressure on Congress for their grants.
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Awesome post. I had done some research but was too lazy to make a detailed post. Can you edit yours to include some of this information?
Between 75% and 97% of NSGP funding goes to Jewish groups. source 1 source 2 source 3
The group who “found” the extremism threat is Thomas Kaplan’s Counter Extremism Project. Kaplan is a big funder in getting us into war with Iran, funds the most prominent Jewish org 92nd street Y, and he funds (quite racist) ultra orthodox groups.
The threat originally came from Crew 319’s Telegram channel. Here Crew 319 talks about how he is just one person (2:30 in?) and has 20 subscribers on telegram.
Kaplan’s UANI lobbies to prevent medical goods from going to Iran through a name and shame strategy. Salon says he “is betting on war with Iran”
Kaplan has used his power to get academics fired for criticizing Israel’s war crimes in Palestine
“Kaplan, 47, regularly hobnobs with some of the most powerful Jewish philanthropists in New York. He and his wife, Daphna Recanati, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest and best-known families, also support major scholarship programs for arts education at the Y and have given millions to other charitable causes in Israel and the United States. Separately, Kaplan—who wrote a 788-page Oxford dissertation on Malaysia’s geopolitical positioning during the Cold War before, in 1994, opening a firm that prospected silver mines with financial backing from George and Paul Soros”
The earliest chatter on the day of hate, after the ADL, was Lakewood-aligned orthodox groups and rabbis
In Florida, shortly before the day of hate, a man named Barry Nockowitz walked to a bus station and grabbed a four-year-old child and threw them against a wall. When the police came, he said he was “tired of the anti-semitism” and that he was looking for another child to attack. Barry was actually born Baruch Nockowitz, and he’s a Chabad-aligned Orthodox Jew. Baruch has a YouTube page still up, and on that page he posted a video of a black community leader speaking to a rabbi and talking how Jews and blacks ought to come together to fight a common enemy. Baruch almost certainly heard about the Day of Hate, and it’s likely his assault on the child was motivated by anti-gentile stochastic terrorism.
Some more info: we can be sure Kaplan is the primary funder of CEP because the advisor of his fund sits as the head, as well as a few other employees, and he is the only publicly-known funder. Ultra orthodox groups in NJ are no strangers to massive hoaxes and fraud. A few years ago they were caught doing welfare fraud in the millions and received no jail time, and the famous “cars for kids” commercial fraud is from Lakewood NJ.
very late edit for posterity and neuroticism: The CEP had a huge write up on this which, in addition to the news talking about “telegram channels investigated by the CEP”, make me 100% certain they were chiefly involved. However, I only saved passages from their article, because why would I have to save an archive if I can just google the passage? Welp, the original page that I read was deleted. The original article contained: “The event has been promoted in online channels by the Goyim Defense League (GDL), National Socialist Movement (NSM), Crew 319, and Clockwork Crew […] Crew 319 and Clockwork Crew are known to operate in Iowa (Des Moines) and Southern California, respectively.” This now brings up zero results from the CEP, which sucks because their original article was all about how they were the ones who started the investigation. In fact, it was linked to by the ADL.
Framed like that it seems like you assume that Israel's war crimes in Palestine are settled fact. I don't think this is the case.
Do you think Ken Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, might have some valid criticisms about Israel illegally taking over Palestinian land? Because that’s the academic who was cancelled by the ironically extremist funder of the Counter Extremism Project.
No. The same as I discard wholesale the ADL accusations of antisemitism. Their job is to generate noise and false positives and take money. All kinds of professional activists - I feel nothing but contempt for them.
And taking land does not fit the definition of a war crime to begin with. It is the whole point of conquest.
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I am not sure why you are using the present tense when your citations are a decade old.
Regardless, this states that, from 1994-2020, "[i]n 14 of the 21 years between 1994 and 2019 in which fatal terrorist attacks occurred, the majority of deaths resulted from right-wing attacks. In eight of these years, right-wing attackers caused all of the fatalities, and in three more—including 2018 and 2019—they were responsible for more than 90 percent of annual fatalities.11 Moreover, "All of the religious attacks and plots in the CSIS data set were committed by terrorists who ascribed to a Salafi-jihadist ideology." Similar trends are in the data here. It is fair to expect that Jewish organizations are vastly overrepresented in those targeted by people like that, so, since the grants are meant for "nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of terrorist attack," perhaps the grant numbers are not inappropriate.
The NSGP is designed to do what its lobbyists have lobbied for. The lobbyists are overwhelmingly Jewish groups. A sane analysis would not warrant 200mil a year for security enhancement grants when there is <1 terrorist attack at a synagogue per year. Since 2019 there have been three attacks which could conceivably be prevented at a synagogue. Many of the security upgrades are inessential and would have been purchased anyway, like security cameras and gates.
Synagogues are not more likely to face a crime, when looking at newspaper analysis and NIBRS reporting 1 2.
Since $200 million is a pittance, whether a sane analysis would warrant that spending depends entirely upon the dollar value of the benefits derived from the program, which you do not provide.
They were both inessential yet nevertheless would have been purchased anyway? That seems unlikely. Surely it is essential things that are purchased anyway.
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Well that saves me some time, thanks. I strongly suspected that but good to see it confirmed.
Greenblatt has the chutzpah to talk about churches getting these funds in his public statements.
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What was the threat?
And no, I don't see any reality in which a tweet made by an Islamist with low engagement spirals into this sort of nationwide PR campaign that dovetails with lobbying for millions in Homeland Security grants. That's a hoax full and through. It was obvious to everyone in the DR that there was never such a thing, and as the weeks went by the PR campaign continued even though it was obvious to everyone that such a thing was not happening.
You even have an ambassador from Israel chastising the country for not being more outraged... at nothing. This is a hoax.
Yeah the ‘threat’ that killed 4000 Americans during 9/11.
As Scott pointed out loooong ago, this is fewer than the number of Americans who are killed by fridges annually.
9/11 was fake news. Not in the sense that it was fake, but in the sense that it wasn't news. Sure, it's flashy, but 4000 fatalities is, in the grand scheme of things, a nothingburger.
Not even close. About 10 are killed by a fridge falling on them. About 15 per year suffocated back when the doors actually latched; this was considered enough of a problem to ban said latches, and it is very rare now; in the rare cases where it does it almost always turns out to be a very old fridge with a latch.
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Is there not significant violence and discord in France, Sweden, and Britain due to small Islamic minority in those places? Riots, honor killings, grooming gangs, bombings, etc? US muslims aren't as bad, but that is mostly, because they are high socio-economic-status immigrants. If we actually had large numbers of muslim peasants who really believed in their religion who were here and allowed to vote it would be a very different situation.
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There's still that Building 7 that just collapsed without getting hit by a plane that was kind of fake?
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What was the threat? There was no threat. But the ADL worked very hard to convince a lot of people that there was a threat, with Jewish blue check marks tweeting about how they were scared to go outside. That is a hoax, it's not normal or acceptable behavior that should be tolerated.
Okay, so what should we all do about it?
For a start we shouldn't reward that behavior with a half a billion dollar slush fund. We should also keep this in mind the next time these same groups ask for special favors because of their alleged persecution.
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It was absolutely a hoax. The “Islamist parallel” would be a random Islamist with no following making a tweet where he told his followers to distribute pamphlets about how Christians are evil and/or control the world. Such an irrelevant tweet with no views or engagement is utterly mundane on social media. There are threats with more engagement made every day. I don’t even know if this guy is real or a fed but it’s not even possible to find his content except on his irrelevant telegram channel crew_319.
Remember that the threat was to… distribute fliers about how Jews have an outsize influence on media. 🤔
You’re assenting that there is an organized grift to steal government funding. Why do you suppose that there is not an organized grift to pay less taxes, like Phil Knight? The problem with grift is that it tends to take over other aspects of life, too, even making grifts to cheat God’s Law and not just taxes.
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Wait a minute- so the national day of hate was a hoax(duh) by the ADL(unsurprising) to justify grants to synagogues(a little too on the nose) for security expenses(almost self parody now)?
The most uncertain part of that is how much of these funds go to security and how much are just embezzled, with a confidence that nobody is ever going to be held to account.
Well sure, I’m assuming a lot of those security expenses are generous consulting fees to extremism experts who then recommend an off duty police officer(as anyone would at any point ever).
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From the Twitter thread you linked:
Unless you're claiming the ADL was behind these "few small groups" Knightsbridge mentioned, hoax is too strong a term here. Sounds to me like there was a credible-but-low-risk threat that the ADL reacted to for either political/financial reasons. It's also possible ADL blaring this as loud as possible deterred those few small groups from actually going through on their plans. It's one thing to hit a target that's not expecting you, it's quite another to hit a target with beefed-up security.
EDIT: Added a link to the specific tweet.
I think hoax is a perfectly adequate term. There are billions of people in the world, there's a near certainity that there will be someone, somewhere who will vaguely fit the profile of what scenario you wish to conjure up. But the scenario itself is still fictitious, a deliberate choice to misrepresent (and necessarily fabricate) information.
Even if you want to make the 'well, technically there was at least one dude somewhere saying something along those lines, so it's not a hoax' the obvious and immediate counter-argument is that the hoax is not the fact there is that one guy somewhere, but rather the hoax is the deliberate misreprentation of a non-credible threat as a credible threat, in a situation where it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it's a non-credible threat, least of all supposed 'hate crime experts' like the ADL.
On principle, this is not dissimilar to a situation where someone sees a bunch of mischievous teenagers messing about with some paintball guns, this someone knows they're nothing but mischievous teenagers with paintball guns (who might even talk a big game but everyone including the someone knows are harmless), calling the police on them as an active shooter situtation,where people are being shot and 'potentally' killed then literally everyone believes and parrots the caller, up to the top level of government and media, no one does any due diligence investigating because it plays into their political incentives (an active shooter situation is great fodder for gun control politics). Oh, and it turns out the caller is a owner of a private security firm who tends to gets a lot of contracts after something like this occurs. What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?
A plot? A scheme?
Yeah, maybe like a scheme to maliciously deceive a mass audience... wait, that's a hoax...
I mean, the goal seems to be for money rather than pure mastery-of-reality, I guess it's a hoax in the same way as something like the jackalope and less like the normal conspiracy theory inflection the word "hoax" might have.
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I would firmly say it is a hoax because (1) crew 319 is approximately one weird person, (2) the request was to distribute fliers, (3) the telegram post has only 1000 views when I saw it (absurdly low, and this was after it went viral) plus only four reactions. The hoax is in the nation-wide coverage that led to 150,000 tweets, because someone on telegram told his followers to distribute flyers
Hoax calls to mind the Smollet incident or some kind of false flag. "Over-reaction" or "exploiting an opportunity" seems a better descriptor.
I don’t think “over react” conveys the magnitude of the exaggeration. “Hate groups declare” -> it was one guy. “A day of hate” -> it was putting up flyer. “Police order extra patrols” -> no one found any serious threat.
For example, if the story was titled “nation in horror as rabbi takes to street to hunt children on racist day of hating gentiles”, would this convey the singular incident of Baruch Nockowitz attacking a child? Or would it be a 1000x exaggeration which would benefit antisemites?
I'm equally okay with both this incident and your hypothetical story-title being classified as exaggerations instead of hoaxes. If you can find me some evidence the Crew 319 is really an ADL plant, then I'll call it a hoax.
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