FEATURE STORY
TRAVEL
FIGHTING EXTREMISTS AT THE CAPITOL & BEYOND BY TAMMY GILLES
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ike most Americans, I could not take my eyes away from live coverage of insurrectionists attacking our Capitol on January 6. While I vacillated between sadness and anger, one thing I was not was surprised. ADL has been monitoring the extremism, conspiracy theories, and white supremacy that fueled the violent uprising for years. January 6 was the predictable outcome of these growing threats to American security and democracy. In fact, ADL’s Center on Extremism’s (COE) recently released their report “Murder and Extremism in 2020” which highlighted that over the past 10 years, 75 percent of extremist-related murders were perpetrated by far-right extremists. In the immediate hours and days following the attack on the Capitol, COE began providing law enforcement with our resources and information to aid in their investigation of the day’s events. Ultimately, ADL’s information exchange aided in the arrest of over 100 insurrectionists. We then released our new national initiative, the PROTECT Plan, which is a comprehensive approach to addressing the ongoing threat of domestic terrorism in the US. The PROTECT Plan’s priorities include: Adopting a whole-of-government and whole24
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of-society approach to prevent and counter domestic terrorism while protecting civil liberties; passing the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to authorize offices to address domestic terrorism and ensure those offices have resources proportionate to the threats; taking steps to ensure that individuals associated with violent extremist movements or engaged in violent extremist activity are deemed unsuitable for employment at the federal, state, and local levels – including law enforcement and military – and not given security clearances; funding civil society programs to address violent extremist radicalization and recruitment, while ensuring these programs do not stigmatize communities; investigate any complicity between social media companies and extremists, and make social media platforms more transparent and accountable for dangerous content. Locally, we continue our efforts to ensure our community’s safety, which is supported through our communal security partnership with the Jewish Federation of San Diego County. On March 2, ADL’s Associate Director for Law Enforcement Initiatives and Community Security, Matt Brown, hosted the quarterly meeting of the Jewish Community Security Committee (JCSC)
for over 50 attendees. The March meeting focused on reports around extremism and antisemitism by our Center on Extremism, along with updates from the District Attorney’s office on the ongoing state and federal prosecution of the Chabad of Poway shooter, and from local law enforcement on recent hate crimes and incidents. Additionally, we remain committed to indepth outreach to local Jewish institutions around planning and security for their communal spaces, and to coordinating timely information sharing between all of our local partners to enhance safety. Our local website, sandiego.adl.org, also provides resources and links for reporting hate incidents in San Diego, which we respond to around the clock. Local incidents like the man grocery shopping in Santee with a Klan mask on, or the truck driving through East County with a swastika flag flying boldly in the back remind us that our community is not impervious to the kind of extremism seen at the Capitol. As the foremost authority on extremism in the country, ADL is uniquely poised to make an impact in the fight against those seeking to harm our country through violence and chaos, and we will continue to double-down on our efforts to thwart this growing threat.
