We're Just Starting to See the Tip of the Iceberg

In this first edition of the Cholent, the ADL's Kendall Kosai breaks down conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, the role of tech, and what it all means for the Washington state Jewish community.

Jan 22, 2021

The Beginning: An Epilogue

It’s the third week of January and already a year has gone by.

Within the first two weeks of 2021, we saw the Capitol get stormed and Trump impeached a second time. This threw off my Cholent rollout plan. I was going to start on a much cheerier note of Covid-related stuff. I decided to reach out, instead, to Kendall Kosai, the associate regional director and interim director of the Anti-Defamation League’s PNW region to talk about what this means for our community. (Kendall is filling in for Miri Cypers, who is out on maternity leave. Full DC: I’m on their board.)

The ADL’s response to the Capitol siege was a giant “We told you so.” The most interesting and important thing ADL does, for me, is tracking online craziness and connecting the red strings to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism really is the glue that holds a lot of the worst conspiracy theories together, most notably the ones perpetuated by QAnon. This is not to say everyone who supports Trump or who marched on the Capitol is an anti-Semite, obviously, or that they are all conspiracy-minded morons. This kind of generalizing is bad and we all need to stop doing it. Yet, it’s becoming more evident that conspiracy theories have infiltrated normal America at a higher rate than anyone could have imagined. And that is not good for the Jews.

Four years ago, I wrote a scathing editor’s note about Trump’s election. I was worried about what his policies and his people would do. But I was worried about the wrong things. Policies can change. Courts can stop things. Judges and justices can follow the law. People burn in, burn out, go to prison. Leaders can locate their consciences. Power, it turns out, can be transferred peacefully.

What has actually happened over the past four years, though, is so much worse. We are more paranoid, hateful, scared, and bitter. We have lost whatever clammy grip we still had on facts and truth. We are beyond divided — many of us are living in entirely different realities.

Trump and QAnon both refer to themselves as “storms” (the latter inspired by the former). They were the storm, and we were the mobile homes. We have some serious cleanup work ahead of us.

—Emily

“We’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg”

Kendall Kosai is the Associate Regional Director at the Anti-Defamation League, PNW Region.

The Cholent: First off, in the wake of the riots, what are some key things Seattle Jews need to know?

Kendall Kosai: The first thing that the community should know is that hate is on the rise. We’ve talked about it for years. What happened at the Capitol in many ways was not surprising for the ADL. We have seen the rise of hate and bigotry and vitriol being cultivated online for many years. People are now starting to wake up and say: This is a threat to our democracy. Anti-Semitism is more prevalent than ever. People dismiss it when it happens online, but it has manifested itself in a real way. It’s not siphoned off to what we saw last week. It happens here in the Pacific Northwest more than many people know. We saw more incidents last year than ever at least in my time at the ADL. There are hate groups here that many people don’t know about. And to be honest, some elected officials have amplified their messaging and their rhetoric in some of the work that they’ve done.

What’s at stake in Washington?

Washington has the second highest rate of hate crimes in the nation. We are severely concerned with the rise of hate. Every year the FBI comes out with the report of hate crimes that have happened in the previous year. So, the 2019 report was just released in November of 2020, and it breaks it down by how many hate crimes per state. While we often think of Washington as a liberal, progressive bastion of values, it actually has the second highest number of hate crimes per capita in the entire country. It’s the third highest [total number of hate crimes] in the country. That number is really shocking to people. There were 542 incidents in 2019. It’s an 8 percent increase from 2018. These aren’t numbers. These are people that were directly targeted for their identity.

These aren’t numbers. These are people that were directly targeted for their identity.

We are concerned for the community in particular, because nationally reported hate crimes directly against Jews increased from 2018 to 2019 by 14 percent. Of all religion-based crimes, Jews actually made up 63 percent of those. While, you know, they only make up 2 percent of the country’s population. It really paints a disturbing picture. This isn’t just popping up recently; it’s been happening for a long time.

A recent ADL blog post outlined some of the past attacks on government buildings, including violent incidents in the US Capitol. So, this wasn’t the first attack at the Capitol, but the outrage has been fierce. What makes this incident different?

To me, what makes this different is that this was one of the most predictable terrorist attacks in modern US history. They were planning in broad daylight an insurrection on the US Capitol. ADL was sounding the alarm, and these warnings were not heeded. This threat of extremism was not taken seriously. It was also really unique, because an elected leader in the highest office of the country was inciting unrest and violence, and this was essentially an attempted coup with the claim that this was a fraudulent election. Elected leaders were openly calling for people to rise up in this moment. It’s truly irresponsible and inflammatory for any elected leader to do that.

Right, so what about the average Trump supporter who doesn’t support violence or extremism, who doesn’t believe Trump incited this riot? And conversely, what does it mean for our country if it’s the president who is involved in the coup?

It’s difficult. I hate to use this phrase, but with great power comes great responsibility.

There were hate groups present, like the Proud Boys and QAnon and the Boogaloo Boys. There were literal white supremacists and people flying swastika flags. These people are not being subtle about who they are and what they stand for. To me, it is incumbent upon our elected officials to understand the real-world consequences. After the cultivation of years and years of conspiracy theories and baseless reality, it’s just really out of control. To that end, whether someone believes in the baseless claims about a fraudulent election, violence and attempted coups are not how we operate in an elected democracy.

The guy in the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt got a lot of attention. But that seems like it could be optics — this guy really went viral more than most of the other rioters. What else do we need to know about the anti-Semitic nature of the crowd?

To us, and to ADL, the siege was a bookend to Charlottesville. Then, there were individuals with tiki torches saying “Jews will not replace us.” They all converged at once after years of threats and rhetoric. And in a lot of ways, Jews are the canary in the coalmine. A lot of these conspiracy theories start with anti-Semitism: that Jews control the media, that they’re that they’re part of this larger plan. QAnon believes that world governments are being controlled by pedophiles, and Jews are behind things. We see the George Soros memes. People are saying that this unrest is part of this larger plan, these shadowy figures are behind the plan. Anti-Semitism is at the root. These are rooted in this idea that Jews are a threat to society, and they have manifested themselves in these extremist kinds of ways that create a very real consequence. It is truly disturbing that a lot of these groups have been given a platform by our elected officials, and they continue to exist on social media platforms. It’s becoming more and more of an issue with these baseless conspiracy theories that people have fallen into. It’s going to take all of us to figure out how to combat it on this individual and societal and policy level. Anti-Semitism has pervaded these groups and serves as a fundamental ideology for these movements.

So much of this has to do with how tech has allowed these voices to find each other and proliferate and mutate. Can you go through the basics of how we should be thinking about tech, especially free speech versus hate speech and conspiracy theories?

ADL is a strong defender of free speech. We believe that free speech should be available. But it does not give people the right to incite violence. These are very clear lines in the sand that people need to take responsibility for. Tech, in particular, has a moral responsibility to think about how their platforms are being used to incite violence, to create conspiracy theories, to build these groups of people who hold these bigoted and violent and baseless claims. We are happy with Facebook and Twitter for banning Trump. It’s an excellent first step and it should have happened much sooner than it did. To allow that hate to exist and to reach such a wide audience is truly irresponsible. They have built this algorithm that feeds into people’s conspiracy theories, and it makes us more divisive and further apart than ever. They have to continue to show moral leadership.

Facebook just last year banned Holocaust denial. In 2020! Since when does Holocaust denial get the chance to live on Facebook, a platform that has billions of users and has significant influence upon people’s opinions?

And so, while they banned it, other kinds of harmful stuff live on their platform. And people are starting to migrate to these alternative sites, like Parler, which was shut down [last week], but there are rumors of Parler moving over to another hosting server, which is actually based in Snohomish County here in Washington. That’s the platform Gab also lives on. Gab was used by the Pittsburgh shooter, who posted his manifesto there before he went and committed the massacre. People move from one platform to another. I think there is a major responsibility for these companies to get it right. Because literally people’s lives are taken.

It seems like the right thing to do, to de-platform people who incite such hatred, but I also came across an idea that such actions could result in liberals and conservatives on their own separate internets, which I think would be pretty catastrophic. Do you worry about that, or do you have ideas about how to deal with that? I remember a few years ago, Facebook put out these commercials that were like, “We just want to be the place where you post your baby pictures.” How do we get back to that? How could we put Pandora back in the box?

Yeah. I mean, it’s a hard question. We are at a time where we’re more divided than ever on so many things in so many different ways. And I think, again, I think social media is on a certain level to be blamed for that, because of the algorithm that has essentially cultivated a timeline of information that we want to see, not necessarily that we need to see. And the other thing is, these extremists and these people who have gone into these fringe ideologies continue to move platforms. And there are a lot of platforms on the internet that people can go to find it.

Remember this? Even though Facebook “cracked down” on extremism, it is still a major platform for right-wing organizers.

There’s this theory out there that before the internet, they had to meet in person and couldn’t find each other. Nowadays, in a couple clicks and searches on Google, you can find these groups pretty active pretty easily. Is there a way where we can get back to a productive democracy where we operate on the same set of facts and reality? It’s to be seen. The place we’re at now, there is not a lot of thoughtful policy. We’re just starting to see the tip of the iceberg.

Many people are making an equivalency between this and the past nine months of protests and riots for racial justice. How do you explain the difference, and are there similarities we need to deal with?

To be clear, ADL supports the Black Lives Matter movement. This summer’s protests are part of our democracy. We stand for things that we believe in, in a nonviolent way based on the reality that so many people live with every day — police violence and racism and systems and institutions that have excluded people for generations. This is truly America. What happened [on January 6th] is not American at all. These people are operating off of baseless conspiracy theories rooted in extremism and anti-Semitism.

It was a nondemocratic, insurrection, attempted coup, domestic terrorist attack on our US Capitol. That is certainly not the same. How do we even compare the two? Because, again, the summer protests in so many ways demonstrated what America can be and should be in a moment of racial reckoning. We firmly believe that they are two separate, completely different things, to be 100 percent clear.

Well here we are in 2021, the year of golden opportunity where everything is going to get better! Any predictions?

We are living in extraordinary times. Here’s what I’ll say. After Biden is inaugurated, there will continue to be extremism. There will still be extremists online. These people won’t go away. We are hoping our elected leaders will be more responsible in their rhetoric and we hope tech companies will take responsibility for their for their content, moderation and platforms and thoughtful policy will be made by our elected leaders to help deter domestic terrorism. We are hopeful that 2021 will be a time that we can address the serious underlying issues in our country and on the state level. Police reform, protecting marginalized communities, thinking about how to be more inclusive. We’re coming out of a crazy pandemic that has revealed inequalities. If there is any silver lining, it’s that some of these realities that have been revealed to us can be addressed.

Shoutouts and Announcements*

I’m dedicating this first shoutout to my girl Sefira Ross, who donated her time and talent to creating The Cholent’s logo and banner! Buy her art!

Shoutouts to my first Cholent subscribers! You are awesome and I’m so appreciative of your support!

Lastly, late edition addition: Bernie Sanders for the absolute win this week.