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For decades, Jewish leaders have said the main fight against anti-Semitism should be a fight against unfair criticism of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League, which was started after the lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia in 1913, spends increasing amounts of time on dubious projects to defend the Israel state. Other Jewish organizations use their political capital trying to ban Americans from boycotting Israeli institutions that are assisting in Israeli government repression.

All the while anti-Jewish racists in this country are coming out of their holes and striking, They started using triple parenthesis to mean Jew on Twitter and their messages were retweeted literally billions of times. They marched in Charlottesville screaming, Jews will not replace us. An immigrant-hating man massacred 11 Jews at a temple in Pittsburgh. Anti-Jew hate appeared in QAnon and from the Proud Boys. Trump flirted with them, retweeting their venom, and at the same time pretending not to know them.

Yet whats the burning issue for our Jewish establishment leaders? Its a campaign to force a definition of anti-Semitism onto world governments to protect Israels government from criticism. It came from an organization representing governments and Holocaust scholars called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA. The group was created to expose those who would disguise their hatred of Jews by doubting the reality or the extent of the Holocaust. That effort is undoubtedly worthwhile.

But in 2016 the group came out with a Working Definition of anti-Semitism complete with examples, and many of the examples had to do with Israel. Supposedly anti-Semitism included targeting the state of Israel, saying that Israel was a racist endeavor, applying double standards to Israel, and comparing things the Israeli state has done with things German Nazis had done. Human rights supporters including organizations like the (120-year-old Jewish group) the Workmens Circle, and Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now took exception. Nevertheless, the definition/examples were adopted by the British government and it became the subject of one of Trumps executive orders.

All the while the far right was organizing. On Jan. 6, its followers exploded in attempted insurrection. That one of the rioters wore a Camp Auschwitz shirt seemed to bother none of them.

Something is really wrong with the conventional wisdom on how to oppose anti-Semitism. Even some establishment figures are realizing it. The Israeli paper Haaretz on Feb. 21 interviewed leading Holocaust scholar Professor Deborah Lipstadt who said if you look at the IHRA definition, You wont find right-wing anti-Semitism there; you wont find Pittsburgh there; you wont find Poway there; you wont find Halle, Germany, there; you wont find what we saw from some of the groups on January 6 at the Capitol there.

Yet the establishment continues on as if nothing was happening. There is a post in the State Department called Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Anti-Semitism. The media is speculating that the Biden administration will give it to Abraham Foxman, who led the ADL for decades. What a mistake!

In 1993 it came out that the ADL had run for years a vast spying operation on Arab-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans and left-wing groups. Foxman defended the program vehemently. Ten years ago Foxman had the ADL oppose the building of the Park-51 Islamic Center in Manhattan because it supposedly was too close to the site where al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center. Worse than all this is the ongoing ADL-sponsored police exchange programs with Israel. Through it police, ICE, border patrol and FBI from the U.S. mix with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace which opposes the program, says worst practices are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries. The police exchange is another Foxman program.

A new approach is needed, one that realizes what our grandparents knew, that hatred of Jews mostly comes from the far right, from fascists, white nationalists, alt-right or whatever they call themselves. We need leaders who realize that the fight against anti-Semitism is a fight against all racism and not an effort to advance Jewish nationalism. We need a special envoy, a Jew or non-Jew, whose record reflects that understanding.

Stanley Heller is executive director of the Middle East Crisis Committee and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. He can be reached at mail@thestruggle.org.

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Opinion: We're fighting anti-Semitism the wrong way - The Wilton Bulletin

Gianluca Stringhini practically saw this coming. His lab had been studying hate speech and other malicious activity on social media platforms for several years, when they detected a spike last March in the use of words like Chinese and virus.

Stringhini, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Chen Ling (ENG24), a PhD candidate in his lab who came to BU from her native Shanghai in 2019, and an international team of researchers from the United States, China, Italy, Germany, Cyprus, and Iran, sifted large-scale data sets from Twitter and the alt-right fringe network 4chans Politically Incorrect board, called /pol/, from November 1, 2019, through March 22, 2020. They reported an explosion of Sinophobiaanti-Chinese slurs, threats, and conspiracy theoriesas the pandemic spread from China to other countries.

Researchers tracked a shift on Twitter to posts blaming China for the pandemic, while on /pol/, known for polarizing hate speech and where people can post anonymously, the shift was toward the use of more and new Sinophobic slurs.

In April 2020, Stringhini and the other researchers issued their findings in a preliminary e-preprint as a call to action, warning that the online anti-Asian rhetoric evolving around the pandemic could possibly lead to hate attacks in the real world and most certainly harm international relations.

Its now a year later, and with the Asian community grieving and fearful over the March 16 shooting deaths of six Asian women in Atlanta, Stringhinis and Lings study appears prescient. They are preparing to present their teams findings at Aprils annual Web Conference, the top academic conference for web-related research.

Hate crimes increased 149 percent for people in the US Asian community from 2019 to 2020, according to preliminary data gathered from 16 major cities by the California State University Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, in a study released this month. The first spike occurred in March and April 2020 amid a rise in COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians. The number of Anti-Asian hate crimes reported in Boston went from 6 in 2019 to 14 last year. Hate crimes in the United States decreased 7 percent overall, a decline that could likely be attributed to the pandemic-imposed drop in social interaction in public spaces, according to the study.

BU Today talked in separate conversations with Stringhini and Ling, who brings a background in psychology to her research, about the rise of Sinophobia online.

Q&AWith Gianluca Stringhini and Chen Ling

Gianluca Stringhini: Our results indicate that the explosion of the pandemic corresponded to a rise in Sinophobia on social media. We not only observe an increase in the use of anti-Asian slurs on Twitter and /pol/, but we also see the emergence of new, COVID-inspired slurs. We also find that the word Chinese started being used in similar contexts to the word virus as lockdowns started.

We focused on Twitter and /pol/ to be able to draw comparisons between a general purpose social network and a more polarized and hateful one. We find a clear increase in the occurrence of Sinophobic slurs on /pol/ after the beginning of the pandemic, when the lockdown was announced in Wuhan on January 23, 2020, and it kept increasing as the pandemic started hitting homefor example, when Lombardy started their lockdown in March. We also observe spikes in the use of certain Sinophobic slurs both on /pol/ and Twitter right after notable events, like President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the China virus. Although we didnt measure this, I expect similar trends to hold for other social media services.

Trumps actions definitely had an impact on anti-Asian rhetoric online. Anecdotally, we saw something similar after the Muslim ban. The issue with Trumps account was kind of unique, because Twitter hesitated to enforce its code of conduct on that account until after the Capitol insurrection, and this allowed some of Trumps behaviors that would have not been tolerated in the accounts of other Twitter users to go uncensored.

Generally speaking, the trends on the two platforms show similarities: at first they were considering COVID as a Chinese problem that did not affect the Western world and later shifted to blaming China for the pandemic. However, /pol/ is quite a different community than Twitter, and it is not surprising that they started creating new slurs as time went by.

Stringhini: Online hate emerges in various contexts. One project we are working on is related to COVID misinformation, and as part of that project we are observing several misinformation narratives that we may consider racist, blaming Chinese people for the pandemic and speculating that the virus is an actual bioweapon designed to attack the Western world.I think the online racism that we observe is a symptom of broader problems in our society which manifest with physical violence. The online and offline world are linked. Although it might look like online racism is more widespread because we are more likely to stumble upon it when reading the comment section of news articles, for example, it is actually a problem affecting people in their in-person interactions.

Stringhini: My biggest concern is the rise in physical violence against Asian people. It is unclear how much online hate results in physical violence, but racist rhetoric online for sure helps set the climate for escalations. The killings in Atlanta are a sad example of this escalation.

Stringhini: The two kinds of hate go together: while our study focused on measuring Sinophobic rhetoric in general, it is reasonable to expect that many individuals have been targeted by anti-Asian racism as well. The racist activity that we observed is filled with stereotypes, and while focused on China, it ended up affecting Asian people in general.

Stringhini: I think its a mixture; /pol/ is generally a racist place and casual slurs are commonplace. At the same time, this emergence of Sinophobic rhetoric can be explained by the theory of defensive denial, in which the virus was seen as a problem of China at first, and did not affect the United States. Later, the emerging pandemic was blamed on China, which fueled more racist rhetoric.

I think that conspiracy theories on the fact that the virus was engineered in China go hand in hand with blaming Chinese people for the pandemic.

Chen Ling: When people are anonymous online, theyll say things more emotionally. They use it to express their anger, the fear of the pandemic. In psychology, its called scapegoating. People need to find a scapegoat. They did this to the Chinese even before the pandemic. But COVID-19 was like a trigger. It allows people to express their fear and anger in wordslike a swordand put them online. I think deep down they feel quite vulnerable.

We want to know why people are doing thistheir motivations. People have different coping methods when they are under pressure. There is content moderation on some mainstream platforms, like Twitter, to lead people to a healthier coping method. But on the fringe communities, especially 4chan, people say whatever they want. I believe there are a lot of people who are having a hard time in their lives because of the pandemic, and they transfer it into hate speech, to scapegoating Asians for losing their jobs, maybe, or for not being able to see their families because of social distancing. They find people online to share their fears and anger with.

Stringhini: I think that the administration having a clear anti-racist stance is good, but I doubt that this will have a positive effect on communities that are already hateful and polarized. Online moderation could help.

Stringhini: I think it is important for institutions to take a clear stance against Sinophobia and show support to their members of Asian descent. The goal of our work is mainly to raise awareness about the problem, but more effective online moderation could help curb the problem.I think that each and every one of us must work towards making every member of the BU community welcome. Local support by peers can help in putting casual hate received online into context, and help people deal with it. We also must denounce any sign of racism that we may spot in our community.

Stringhini: My research has always been focused on protecting people online. After witnessing a rise of hate speech in the past years, I decided to focus on ways we can make the Web a safer place for everyone.

I think there is a serious risk for researchers in this space to feel overwhelmed and fall into rabbit holes, and this can have serious effects on their mental health. I think that people working on these kinds of projects should constantly check on each other and talk about particularly disturbing content that they might encounter. Taking breaks is also very important. With my collaborators, we joke that we should take a break every couple of hours to go watch videos of kittens on YouTube, but thats actually very good advice.

I am always concerned about the mental well-being of students working on these topics. We are trying to develop best practices about thisbeing open about problems and talking about it and taking breaks.

Ling: Professor Stringhini makes sure we feel comfortable. I am prepared for this because this is the research I do. I want to know how people think this way instead of that way and what makes them think this way or that way.

There is a social psychology book, The Nature of Prejudice [published in 1954 by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, translated by Ling into Mandarin], which was developed from the fact of the victimization of Jews during World War II. It emphasizes the importance of such hate speech research. If we pay no attention to such behavior online, the situation will get worse quickly. And there will be physical attacks in real life.

If we do not prevent this kind of hate speech, things will escalate.

When I was reading those posts on 4chan and Twitter, it was like PTSD. I was in Manhattan in December, 2019, before the pandemic and I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was cold and windy. There were not many people on the street. This young boy shouted something at me. I dont remember what he said, it was something about I should go back to my country. I was so afraid. I kept walking to the museum.

I still remember that feeling. I never think I will be unwelcome by any people. In Shanghai, I can go anywhere I want. In America, people are always so nice to me. I heard about racism in America, but this was the first time I was confronted by this thing.

Nothing like that has happened to me since then, or in Boston. I dont go out much because of the pandemic. Im afraid of the cold. My parents tell me not to go outside around the time of the presidential election. It was chaotic. And I know these days there are attacks against Asian people. I see it on the news. I know that other minorities in the U.S. have more or less experienced this feeling that I do.

I feel sad about the attacks in Atlanta. I read President Browns letter about it. It is inspiring. Things will get better if we keep working to make our world a better place.

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BU Researchers Warned of Online Surge of Anti-Asian Attacks a Year Ago - BU Today

From 2019 to 2020, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 193 incidents of hate, extremism and anti-Semitism in Connecticut, ranging from a July 2020 murder in Hartford in which the accused, Jerry David Thompson, claimed to belong toan extremist movement thatbelieves the government has no authority, to putting up fliers and disseminating propaganda.

Last year, ADL reported the highest level of white supremacist propagandacirculated in the U.S. in at least a decade, and reader Gary Trahan asked ifthere are active white supremacist or domestic extremist groups in the region and Connecticut. That question received the most votes in the latest round ofThe Day's CuriousCT feature.

The "biggest perpetrator" of propaganda distribution in Connecticut is the alt-right group Patriot Front,said Steve Ginsburg, director of the ADL's Connecticut office. In one incident reported by ADL on Dec. 31, 2020, Patriot Front distributed propaganda in Jewett City that read: "One nation against invasion," "America is not for sale," "Not stolen conquered" and "Life of our nation. Liberty of our people. Victory of the American spirit."

Ginsburg said the ADL also has reported activities by Connecticut members of the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, both anti-government extremist groups thatare part of the militia movement.

Earlier this year, a group that identified itself as the far-right, male-only extremist group the Proud Boys attempted to donate more than 500 pounds of food to the nonprofit Hands On Hartford.

Related story: Sub base hits pause to talk about extremism in the ranks

ADL determines someone as "actively" involved in a hate group if they spread the group's ideology or help recruit new members, among other actions. While historically these groups convened in person, "now we are at a point where they can be sitting in basements and identifying themselves as part of these groups," Ginsburg said.

That makes it difficult"to know real total numbers," he said.

The actions taken by these groups and their members are not always violent, Ginsburg said, though those are the incidents ADL is most concerned about. Being active could mean planning a "banner drop" over a highway or a peaceful protest, he said.

"Our main point of concern is violence across the spectrum," Ginsburg said. "Most of the violence comes from white supremacist and what is called right-wing ideology."

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported last year.

The FBI also has seen a rise in domestic extremism nationwide in recent years, said Supervisory Special Agent Marcus Clark with the agency's New Haven division.

"On the domestic terrorism side, there's been anevolution away from the large group conspiracies that people often think of toward more of a lone offender attack without any clear affiliation to a group," Clark said."That makes it more difficult for us toidentifyand disrupt."

The agency relies on its partners, including state and local law enforcement agencies, and even nongovernment organizations and community groups, to help share information about suspected domestic extremists.

The internet and social media have helped to radicalize domestic terrorists, Clark said, given the speed and reach with which their messages and ideology can be disseminated online.

In Connecticut, Senate Democrats are seeking to create a new department within the state police focused on combating hate crimes and violent right-wing extremism.

Some of the perpetrators, but not all,involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and antigovernment militias.

Ginsburg contrasted those involved in the Jan. 6 attack with participants in the "Unite the Right" rally that occurred in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., which was "almost purely a convening of extremists."

"That's what it was marketed as. That's who it appealed to," he said. "Even before they started marching, ADL shared with law enforcement half the people who were coming because we knew them because we follow these extremist groups."

ADL's investigators knew only a "small portion" of those involved in the Capitol attack, he said.

"A lot of them are not extremists. The question is: Did January 6 start a new type of extremist ideology called 'I'm just going to believe in Donald Trump'?" Ginsburg said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

j.bergman@theday.com

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Are there active hate groups in Connecticut? - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

As the U.S. grapples with domestic extremism in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, warnings about more violence are coming from the FBI Director Chris Wray and others. The Conversation asked Matthew Valasik, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, and Shannon E. Reid, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, to explain what right-wing extremist groups in the U.S. are doing. The scholars are co-authors of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White, published in September 2020; they track the activities of far-right groups like the Proud Boys.What are U.S. extremist groups doing since the Jan. 6 riot?Local chapters of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Groypers and others are breaking away from their groups national figureheads. For instance, some local Proud Boys chapters have been explicitly cutting ties with national leader Enrique Tarrio, the groups chairman.Tarrio was arrested on federal weapons charges in the days before the insurrection, but he has also been revealed as a longtime FBI informant. He reportedly aided authorities in a variety of criminal cases, including those involving drug sales, gambling and human smuggling though he has not yet been connected with cases against Proud Boys members.When a leader of a far-right group or street gang leaves, regardless of the reason, it is common for a struggle to emerge among remaining members who seek to consolidate power. That can result in violence spilling over into the community as groups attempt to reshape themselves.While some of the splinter Proud Boys chapters will likely maintain the Proud Boys brand, at least for the time being, others may evolve and become more radicalized. The Base, a neo-Nazi terror group, has recruited from among the ranks of Proud Boys. As the Proud Boys sheds affiliates, it would not be surprising for those with more enthusiasm about hateful activism to seek out more extreme groups. Less committed groups will wither away.How does that response compare with what happened after 2017s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville?Neither the Capitol insurrection nor the Charlottesville rally produced the response from mainstream America that far-right groups had hoped for. Rather than rising up in a groundswell of support, most Americans were appalled some so much that they have abandoned the Republican Party.Additionally, right-wingers have been hit hard by the post-insurrection actions by large technology companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon. They took down far-right group members accounts and removed right-wing social media platforms, including permanently blacklisting Donald Trumps Twitter account and temporarily blocking all traffic to Parler, a conservative social media platform. Those steps are more significant than earlier moderation and algorithm changes those companies had undertaken in previous efforts to curb online extremism.Another major difference is the lack of regret. Nobody on the right wanted to be associated with Charlottesville after it happened. Figureheads of the far right who had initially promoted that rally saw the negative public reaction and distanced themselves, even condemning the Unite the Right rally.After the insurrection at the Capitol, their response was different. They did not split and blame other right-wing groups. Instead, conservative and extreme-right circles have united behind a false claim that they did nothing wrong, and alleged, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that left-wing activists assaulted the Capitol while disguised as right-wingers.Are extremist groups attracting new members?Some members have left extremist groups in the wake of the Jan. 6 violence. The members who remain, and the new members they are attracting, are increasing the radicalization of far-right groups. As the less committed members abandon these far-right groups, only the more devout remain. Such a shift is going to alter the subculture of these groups, driving them farther to the right. We expect this polarization will only accelerate the reactionary behaviors and extremist tendencies of these far-right groups.Right-wing pundits and conservative media are continuing to stoke fears about the Biden administration. We and other observers of right-wing groups expect that extremists will come to see the events of Jan. 6 as just the opening skirmish in a modern civil war. We anticipate they will continue to seek an end to American democracy and the beginning of a new society free or even purged of groups the right wing fears, including immigrants, Jewish people, nonwhites, LGBTQ people and those who value multiculturalism.We expect that these groups will continue to shift more and more to the extreme right, posing risks for acts of violence both large and small.Have far-right extremists views toward the police changed?With a Democratic administration and attorney general, the far right will no longer view federal law enforcement agencies as friendly, the way they did under the Trump administration. Rather, they view the police as the enemy.Even before Joe Biden took office and the Republicans officially lost control of the U.S. Senate, the Capitol riot showed this divide between right-wing extremists and police. A Capitol Police officer was assaulted with a flagpole bearing an American flag, and some members of the mob were police officers and military personnel. Many more were military veterans.Its not clear what this different view of law enforcement means for police officers, active-duty military and veterans who are members of right-wing groups. But we anticipate that only those who are most zealously committed to far-right causes will remain active. That, in turn, will push those groups even farther to the extreme right.Has anything changed for militias since Biden has become president?In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about the growing membership in far-right groups, including their active recruitment of military veterans. Shortly after the report was released, Republicans in Congress pushed for the report to be retracted and for dramatically reducing the federal effort to monitor far-right groups in the U.S. This permissive atmosphere allowed far-right groups to grow and spread nationwide.The Trump administration further served far-right groups by failing to pay out federal grants for grassroots counterviolence programs, by refusing to help local law enforcement agencies with equipment or training to deal with these groups, and by routinely downplaying the violence perpetrated by these white power groups. Essentially, far-right groups were unpoliced for the past decade or more.But that approach has ended. Merrick Garlands appointment as Bidens attorney general is a big signal: In his career at the Department of Justice before becoming a federal judge, Garland supervised the investigations of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.These were two of the most noteworthy acts of far-right domestic terrorism in the nations history. Garland has said that he will make fighting right-wing violence and attacks on democracy major priorities of his tenure at the head of the Justice Department.In January, Canada designated the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups as terrorist organizations, which puts pressure on U.S. law enforcement to reconsider how they evaluate, investigate and prosecute these extremist groups. Beyond law enforcements treating these far-right groups like street gangs, there are also laws in place to combat violence associated with domestic terrorism.It appears that U.S. prosecutors may finally begin to take seriously the violent actions of Proud Boys, especially as more and more members are being charged with coordinating the breach of the U.S. Capitol Building.But as police power comes to bear on these violent right-wing groups, many of their members remain at least as radicalized as they were on Jan. 6 if not more so. Some may feel that more extreme measures are needed to resist the Biden administration.The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Commentary: After the insurrection, America's far-right groups get more extreme - pressherald.com

Footage of the January 6 Capitol insurrection revealed hundreds of references to 1776in signs and in speeches, on t-shirts and hats and stickers. 1776 was chanted in the Capitol halls by leading figures within the so-called alt-right, including some who had also participated in the racist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and by those who believed themselves participants in the dawn of the next American revolution. The Proud Boys, too, cite this date; they sell their merch through a store called 1776.

We are researchers of media manipulation and disinformation at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Shorenstein Center, and we wanted to know more about how 1776 became the battle cry of the insurrection. Our research reveals that the popularity of 1776 owes in part to keyword squattinga tactic by which right-wing media have dominated the keywords 1619 and critical race theory and enabled a racialized disinformation campaign, waged by Trump and his acolytes, against Black civil rights gains.

1776 on Google Trends. Screenshot via authors.

According to Google trends data for the past five years, 1776 showed an annual spike around July 4. But after the publication of The 1619 Project, the New York Times journalistic series that tells the history of Black Americans role in creating the nation, 1776 became a popular conservative rejoinder. In September 2020, Trump formed the 1776 Commission to support what he termed patriotic education. (The commission was part of a series of racist retaliations against Black civil rights organizing and educators pledging to teach a more comprehensive, diverse, and inclusive US history; Trump later signed an executive order banning critical race theory from federally funded organizations.) When he announced the commission, Trump explicitly targeted critical race theory and the 1619 Project, calling both toxic propagandaideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.

On January 18, 2021Martin Luther King Jr. DayTrump released The 1776 Report, a long screed meant to wipe away academic and journalistic efforts to reconcile Americans history of violence, displacement, and racial and ethnic trauma. The report recast the racist roots of American education; for instance, in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan promoted a public-school curriculum that emphasized Americanizing all foreignersan effort, in part, to prevent Catholics and immigrant groups from establishing their own schools and curricula in non-English languages. Klan members ran successfully for school board positions across the country, popularizing the slogan of America Firsta phrase which, coincidentally, featured prominently at this years Conservative Political Action Conference, and appears in the name of a far-right political action conference. The report fizzled in the wake of the Capitol riot; still, its an exemplary piece of racialized disinformation that claims to identify problems with contemporary American education, but often espouses color-blind racism by minimizing how racial inequalities shape educational outcomes in the US.

So, why was Trump so invested in retaliating against the 1619 Project? The project unsettled the education systems dominant narratives. It pieced together the history of slavery in the US from the perspective of those who were enslaved. It brought into the present day the continuing consequences of slavery as well as the contributions of Black Americans over a 400-year period. It also offered a damning critique of whiteness as a social constructone whose scope, over time, has broadened to include Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, and Spaniards to maintain structural barriers that keep power concentrated in the hands of a few. Teachers became excited about using materials from the project in their classrooms and began sharing curriculum online; recently, the Pulitzer Center announced a program called the 1619 Project Education Network to train educators in media literacy and racial justice.

For the right-wing, criticizing the project became a cause clbre, taken up by figures like New York Times Opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who termed 1619 a failed project, and Newt Gingrich, who remarked, during a Fox and Friends interview, The whole project is a lie. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times journalist who conceived of the project, endured racist harassment and death threats across social media.

As researchers, we wanted to assess the pervasiveness and tactics of racialized disinformation. Using Media Cloud, a tool created by MIT and Harvard for analyzing news, we compared coverage of 1619 by right-wing media (including The Federalist, Fox News, Daily Wire, and the National Review, among others) and left-wing media (including The Root, Daily Kos, Salon, and The Grio, among others) in the US. According to our analysis, right-wing media wrote nearly three times as frequently about 1619 than the left-wing media did. Similarly, between September 2020 and February 2021, right-wing media covered critical race theory twice as frequently as left-wing media. This asymmetrical coverage is indicative of keyword squatting, a networked propaganda strategy that ensures the counter viewpoint is steadfastly tethered to these keywords across a range of platformsincluding Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and especially on the front page of Google Search.

Keyword squattingdefined by the Media Manipulation Casebook as the practice of creating online contentaround a specific search-engine-optimized term so as to dominate the search results of that termhas been leveraged by right-wing media to extend the duration of attention to propaganda campaigns, including those linked to controversial keywords like antifa or the caravan. And it works: Googles top news stories on critical race theory reflect ongoing bombastic headlines, like Chinese Americans mobilize against critical race theory, from Fox News, or Critical Race Theory is Indoctrination, not History, from Real Clear Politics. Likewise, searching for 1619 on YouTube returns a video from conservative outlet PragerU titled, Whats wrong with the 1619 project?

Media Cloud analysis of 1619 coverage. Screenshot via authors.

Media Cloud analysis of Critical Race Theory coverage. Screenshot via authors.

Had Trump won reelection, his 1776 Report would have been called up by conservatives as an authoritative source on Americas foundingas if the thousands of history books, written from the perspectives of white people, were not enough. Instead, Trump lost the election. Within hours of taking office, Bidens team removed the 1776 Report from the active White House website. (It remains on the archived site of the Trump administration.) In search engines, the report has been buried by the American Historical Associations statement of condemnation.

Count this as a temporary win. It is not possible for our nation to move forward without repairing the damage of a history erased by slavery and denied by those who seek to rewrite US history. What makes a nation strong is not its ability to tell a unified story of its founding, but rather its efforts to grapple with the sum of us, so that we may forge our collective identity through self-determinationand so that we may realize our highest moral duty to fix this divided house.

ICYMI: What the pandemic means for paywalls

TOP IMAGE: Outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

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How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project - Columbia Journalism Review