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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.
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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