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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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