20 minute read
Jonathan Greenblatt
JONATHAN GREENBLATT Fighting Hate Now
WITH A SIGNIFICANT
increase in hate crimes, America finds itself on a terrifying path. AntiDefamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s current mission is making sure that what has happened in our lifetimes in Europe, the Middle East and Asia does not happen here. JONATHAN GREENBLATT, CEO, Anti-Defamation League; Author, It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable—And How We Can Stop It ROGER MCNAMEE, Silicon Valley Investor, Author, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe—Moderator
ROGER MCNAMEE: One of the reasons I have become so passionate to reform technology is that social media has become quite honestly a cesspool of hate, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and more. These companies have allowed hateful content to permeate the mainstream in a way that those of us who are involved could never have imagined in the early years. It’s our guest Jonathan Greenblatt’s job to fight this hatred from his position as the head of the ADL. This is what he does every day. Jonathan, welcome to The Commonwealth Club for today’s conversation.
Your book [It Could Happen Here] has the most provocative title. Tell me what you’re talking about and how we got here. JONATHAN GREENBLATT: Over the past six years we’ve seen kind of not just a decay, but a rapid deterioration in civic society. [The Anti-Defamation League] is the oldest anti-hate group in America. We’ve been fighting these battles against bigotry
for well over 100 years, but my colleagues at ADL have really never quite seen a moment like this. We’re at a precarious point, and we ignore it at our own peril. Based on what I’ve seen in the last six years, that prompted me to write the book.
The book’s also very personal. I’m the grandson of a Holocaust survivor from Germany. He and his Jewish family—Germany was the only country they had ever known. My great grandfather fought in World War I for Germany. And he never could have imagined when he was a young man that his homeland would literally turn on him, regard him as an enemy of the state, destroy everything that he ever loved, and slaughter almost his entire family and friends.
I also come to this work as the husband of a woman who came to the United States as a political refugee from Iran. My wife— also Jewish—and her family trace their lineage back, they would tell you thousands of years to the Babylonian exile, and when my wife was a young person, she never would have imagined that the only country she had ever known would one day turn on her, regard her as an enemy of the state, destroy everything that she ever loved and force her and her family to flee.
My grandfather came to this country
in 1938-39, my wife came to this country in 1988-89, so there’s 50 years between them, and they both face the reality where pluralistic, sophisticated westernized countries that believed in science, that respected democratic traditions, both unraveled. one because of the rise of the third Reich. one because of the advent of the Islamic Revolution [in Iran].
The cultural and socio-political circumstances were different, but the end result was the same: the unraveling of society as they knew it. The total unmooring of that country from the norms that had governed it for so long.
America has always been an imperfect country. Hate didn’t start with Donald Trump. It’s a country that was founded in many ways by the extermination of the Indigenous people who once occupied this land. And the enslavement of African people, a painful legacy of racism that remains today. MCNAMEE: Part of what makes the current U.S. situation so difficult is that so many people, so many groups are being targeted at the same time. Tell us about that. GREENBLATT: Today in America, we’ve seen the process of otherization happen to different communities. I mean, it’s interesting, Roger. For me, the timing when I started at ADL in the summer of 2015 was the same week that Donald Trump announced his candidacy.
He descended down that gilded escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan and immediately started talking about Muslims and Mexicans. The Mexicans coming across the border were rapists and murderers or criminals, whatever lunatic thing that he said.
What Donald Trump did really shouldn’t surprise us. He had spent years not only finding his place in the public eye around the celebrity of The Apprentice and faux real estate success, but also around his embrace of this idea that President Barack Obama was a Muslim person originally born in Kenya. Obviously, not a shred of truth to it whatsoever.
But Donald Trump used that and preyed upon people’s uncertainty and really used the megaphone of his own celebrity to magnify that dramatically. So he used that otherization around Barack Obama to suggest again that we should be afraid of foreigners and Muslims.
He took that to the next level as a candidate. And then he made it law as president with his effort to enshrine the Muslim ban into a literal [law], he did that through executive order or his effort to build a wall at the border.
It’s racist at the core, and it’s evocative of the white supremacist tenet of the great replacement theory. This is fundamental to understanding the white nationalism that seems to be exploding across the United States, which is founded in large part on this idea that somehow the white race, as if that were such a thing, is being undermined with intention by some plot, put together by the Jews, to flood the country with non-whites, particularly Mexicans and Muslims, let alone other people who they consider subhuman. So this is this really dangerous idea that had been pinging around white supremacist circles for a long time, and we’re all still dealing with the consequences of that today. So as I think about the rise of extremism, this dangerous force, there’s no question that it was welcomed and given the kind of license by President Trump it didn’t have before.
There are other forces that concern me as well. There’s a kind of illiberalism from the far left. But it has been far less militant, far less murderous. MCNAMEE: One of the things that I found absolutely fantastic about the book is the way you take the 100-plus year history of the ADL and the timeline of the struggle to provide security and rights to everyone. Can you walk our audience through the timeline of the current predicament? GREENBLATT: So ADL is indeed the oldest anti-hate group in America, and was founded in 1913 after a Jewish man was lynched outside of Atlanta, the Leo Frank case. And at the time, there was systemic discrimination facing Jews in this country.
There was widespread defamation of Jews in the media. So in this environment, Leo Frank went down to Georgia to manage the family business. A young girl was found sexually assaulted and strangled to death at the pencil factory that he managed, and immediately they blamed the Jew. Even though there was exculpatory evidence [that] he had not committed the crime, he was wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death. The governor intervened and commuted his sentence from execution to life imprisonment, because he hadn’t had due process.
The mob was so enraged by that act of leniency, they tore Leo Frank from his jail cell and they hung him from a tree. And while his body was still swinging from the rope, they barbecued underneath the tree.
The whole town came together and did a big public event. They took photographs of the corpse and turned those into postcards to give them out as souvenirs. It was an ugly, ugly moment in American history.
And yet, while many, unfortunately, Black boys and men were murdered this way over the years, it was the first time a Jewish person had been publicly executed in this manner. It prompted a set of Jewish individuals to say we need to do something about this.
So they came together and created this organization, the Anti-Defamation League, and they wrote a charter for their new organization. We would probably call it a manifesto in today’s vernacular; and in it are the words that we still use 100-plus
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years later as our mission statement.
The ADL fought for the Civil Rights Movement, fought to open up America’s doors to immigrants, was part of marching in Selma and fighting for Black equality, to fight for LGBTQ equality, and the list goes on. We’ve been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in America since 1970, before there were even hate crime laws. The ADL helped to write the hate crimes laws, get them passed in these United States. We were on a decline of anti-Semitic incidents from 2001 to 2015.
After a 15-year decline, it went up 34 percent in 2016. In 2017, the number spiked 57 percent. That’s the highest increase we’ve seen year over year. In 2018, the number dipped slightly 5 percent. But that was the year of the massacre in Pittsburgh, the most violent anti-Semitic attack in American history.
In 2019, the number leapt up again 12 percent. That was the highest total we’ve ever recorded. And then in 2020, the year when everything closed because of COVID, when businesses were shuttered and people were socially distancing, the number dipped just 4 percent. It was still the third-highest total we’ve ever seen. We’re still tabulating the 2021 numbers. But the increase in antisemitism, it’s the indicator of a problem.
Then if you say, “Well, why is it going up?” I think there are a couple factors that are really driving it.
First, I think, is the weaponization of hate as a political tool. We’ve seen law after law try to chip away at the effort to provide civil and voting rights, and I think one of the strategies that’s been used very effectively is to demonize not just Black people, but the government itself that bestowed upon them rights, calling into question the legitimacy of all their decisions.
Number two has been the normalization of extremism. Now again, the John Birch Society, the KKK—these pro-white militia types have always been out there, but they gained even greater legitimacy after the return of veterans from the Vietnam War and then the first Gulf War.
Number three, you’ve had a hardening of the haves-and-have-nots gap that has really calcified. Many have written about the effect of globalization, expanding the gap between the 1 percent and the rest of the population, and the sense that those jobs are going away and the federal government and other elected officials weren’t really listening to the needs of so many.
That created a fertile ground for the kind of scapegoating that people like Alex Jones and others capitalized on.
And then finally, the rise of social media. With the advent of Facebook, and the subsequent availability of the iPhone, the extremists capitalized on this dramatically and they exploited the loopholes in the system created by bad laws like Section 230 to literally go at the jugular of our society and infect the public conversation with the poison of their prejudice. MCNAMEE: One of your four points is that we’ve now entered a period where it has become politically possible to take rights away from people. And that, to me, is in some ways the most astonishing and frightening aspect of what’s going on. GREENBLATT: This country has been struggling with how to create a more perfect union since its inception. But fundamental to that view was the notion that we would continue to provide more access to the most valuable resource of all, some would say, which is engagement in our democratic process.
It’s giving women [and] African Americans the right to vote, making it easier for immigrants to become citizens.
Neither side of the political spectrum is exempt from ignorance or intolerance.
You saw it in 2020 with [an attempt] to reduce the access to the polls by reducing the hours, or the availability of mail-in ballots, or even the availability of drop off points for ballots. We saw that in places like Texas. The ADL, along with the NAACP, sued Governor Abbott in Texas multiple times because of his very public efforts to restrict the vote. But what’s really disturbing is that we didn’t see a broad groundswell of popular discontent with these decisions on his part.
I make the point because, again, Governor Abbott happens to be a Republican, but 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, it was Democrats doing things like that. So I don’t think this is about politics, Roger. I think this is about principles. And that’s why it’s so damning when people line up in lockstep against what seem like basic
human principles of accepting your fellow man as they are and people who claim to be Christian or Jewish, forgetting some of the most basic tenets of the Old and New Testaments, which is about loving your fellow man.
It’s disturbing that the administration hasn’t done more to prioritize some of these policies. I think we’ve got to see efforts to make a renewal of the Voting Rights Act— that should be a number one priority for this administration. I’m not trying to say they don’t think it’s important, but fundamental to so much of the change we need is simply ensuring that certain parties don’t restrict the ability of people to vote because of the way they might identify.
Making it harder for people to vote has a demonstrable impact on their ability to turn out, and the ability for our elections to actually fairly represent all segments of the populace. MCNAMEE: Talk a little bit about how violence has become mainstreamed in American politics and the role that internet platforms have played, both in doing that and in effect also providing cover to the politicians who advocate for extreme positions. GREENBLATT: There is so much to talk about with regards to the role of the platforms in perpetuating not just this kind of bigotry and intolerance, but normalizing both rhetorical violence and real world violence.
The reality is that Americans today, particularly young people, they’re not getting their news from cable television, let alone The New York Times. They’re getting it from Twitter and TikTok. I mean, that should frighten all of us. The reality is that Facebook is intravenously plugged into the veins of scores of millions of Americans. So [Facebook’s] unwillingness to challenge the fictions that flow on their network, and the lack of any liability for what they do, has put us in this really precarious position today.
At the ADL, we track all this stuff. We do an annual survey of online hate and harassment, and the data is damning. In our last survey in 2021, 41 percent of users of social media platforms report being victims of harassment at least once over the past twelve months, having a serious experience with hate and harassment; 28 percent self-reported experiencing serious sustained harassment on these platforms.
If we knew that one in four people on the subway were being harassed in public every time they got on public transportation, or if one in four people crossing the street in midtown Manhattan were being screamed at and harassed by their fellow pedestrians, you better believe there would be an outcry.
Seventy-seven percent of Facebook users report receiving hate and harassment on that platform versus something like 27 percent on Twitter, which was the platform where the second-most number of people said they were having issues. That isn’t because Facebook is just the largest platform, it’s because it is the wild, wild, west in the worst possible way.
The only sector of our economy that is entirely shielded from the repercussions of their actions are these social media giants. And I think it is long overdue for the government finally to engage.
We should hold the platforms to a higher modicum of moral leadership. There should be no freedom of speech for algorithms. You should be liable if you’re going to promote it. If you’re going to use your technological capital to serve something up, then you better be ready to use your own financial capital if you are to defend yourself in court.
Number two, I deeply believe we need to revisit these issues of anonymity. There’s no question that anonymity has done so much good for the alienated teen or the LGBTQ person who feels like they can’t come out. I believe in that, and I appreciate that, but the cloak of anonymity has shielded some of the worst possible actors, and that has got to go. So I believe in [Section] 230 in principle, but in practice, it doesn’t work.
Number three, we need to slow it down. Where is the natural law that says that when I post something to my phone, it should be immediately broadcast for the whole world to see? Broadcast has a seven-second delay. Talk radio has a delay. The internet needs a delay as well. I should not be able to live stream while I’m walking to a mosque, gunning people down to their death.
These companies are now simply too big to fail, but they’re not too big to be regulated. And until we rein them in, we’re all going to be sorting through the wreckage that they leave behind.
We’ve seen this model with Big Tobacco. The companies offer a kind of moral hazard. They’re leaving so much wreckage in their wake, we should force them to pay for the public health damage they’re doing. Imagine like the Big Tech fund, if Facebook and Google and these other companies gave 1 percent of their top line, that would make it easier to help the victims of harassment, that would fund public education campaigns. MCNAMEE: So I want to take a question here from the audience, because I think this is a really core thing. What can each and every person who’s listening to you do now? GREENBLATT: We’ve all got a call out hate when it happens. This is really important. I think for too long, we’ve thought, Ignore that crazy uncle; ignore that guy at the water cooler; ignore that person in the locker room.
The reality is that we have to interrupt intolerance when it happens and help the other side realize it’s not OK. And that may
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seem small, but it actually looms large, especially when you’re an ally to others. So I think calling out hate when that happens, whether it’s flagging that post on Facebook or again interrupting someone when they’re making a kind of offensive joke or an offensive comment, I think that’s really important. All of us have the power to find a little bit of courage to call it out.
Number two: Accept people for who they are and understand their fallibility. Number three, democracy is not something you can watch from the cheap seats in the bleachers with popcorn. Democracy is a contact sport, and you’ve got to get on the field and play. That might mean volunteering, that might mean voting, that might mean running for office.
This is so important. Civil society didn’t come together through spontaneous combustion. If we don’t participate, if we are so anesthetized by our Facebook feed that we fail to realize that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, then we risk all of this falling apart. MCNAMEE: What is the role of government in all this? GREENBLATT: I don’t think government is our savior. I don’t think government is our enemy. I think government falls in the middle.
But government, we should all remember, is us, right? It is We the People by the People, for the People. We are the government. So we need to get involved. That doesn’t mean you need to run for Congress, for goodness sakes. But at the local level, everybody has a part to play.
It’s these little things that come together that make us whole. So what’s the government’s role? You’re really asking, what’s our role? We’ve got to take an active role in shaping our own future. MCNAMEE: So does that require each and every one of us to get more engaged in the political process? What are some of the possible paths? I think people need some options. GREENBLATT: If you want to get involved with the GOP or the Democratic Party or your local Green Party, or whatnot, get involved. Volunteer, show up, and register people to vote. Participate in local democracy. Civic society, it’s not all politics; it’s Girl Scouts, it’s Rotary clubs, and it’s groups like the ADL. Get involved and volunteer again. It’s these little interactions, these micro moments that taken together make up the stuff of our societies, and we should not lose sight of that.
If you don’t want to volunteer and you don’t want to show up, you can be involved other ways, too. You can donate to groups that you care about. You can make phone calls to your member of Congress, your local city council.
You can show up at meetings without having to volunteer and just be there and be present and protect your democracy that way. You can sign petitions. I don’t believe in slacktivism as an alternative to activism, but everybody needs to get involved and calibrate in a way that makes sense for them as an individual. Hopefully, democracy should be a gateway drug that will stimulate you to want to do more and more.
Bob Putnam wrote this really important book in the nineties called Bowling Alone, which is about how we were seeing civic life disintegrate. And I think in many ways, like the twin vectors of Amazon helping to accelerate Wal-Mart’s killing of local retail, plus Google and Facebook decimating local media have destroyed the kind of the local core that held our communities together, we are in this place where we do not have a sense of community, a sense of shared value. MCNAMEE: As we come to our last few minutes here, I wonder if you could distill all of that in your own thoughts about what the path is for, because the stakes that you’re describing [have to deal with the fact that] people don’t seem to internalize how dangerous this is for all of us. GREENBLATT: I think at the local level again, all of us have the power to participate, have an ability to engage, and you have to find the way that works for you. Whether it’s stopping hate when it happens or showing up at that school board meeting, all of us need to get engaged. Then at the macro level, I think we need reform as it relates to social media, which continues to pump this poison into our collective consciousness without any abatement.
We need voting reform. We need to think about filibuster reform. And you can even look at SCOTUS reform: term limits and maybe even expanding the number of justices, I think, to get to a more perfect union.
We need more dynamism and less status in our political system. Constructive dynamism. And I think it’s certainly possible. And again, today, Democrats may feel like they’re being marginalized. Down the road, it could be Republicans. All of us as citizens benefit from a system that is open and fair and decent. MCNAMEE: We are in a pandemic that has killed more than 800,000 Americans. By all historical precedent, that should have been an element that brought us together and gave us a shared enemy and a shared ambition and shared goal. And yet we have missed that. In the context of your book, I find that terrifying, because there’s only one other thing besides a pandemic that generally brings people together, and that’s war. GREENBLATT: Roger, I don’t know how we get this right unless we tackle the threat of social media once and for all, we engage in some political reform, and every person accepts and recognizes their individual responsibility to do better.
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