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At age 18, Aimee Allen climbed behind the wheel of her Pontiac Grand Am and left her home in Montana for the last time. Leaving behind a broken home, an abusive stepfather, and a spell in foster care, she trained her sights on the bright lights of Los Angeles. Parking her car in sight of the Hollywood sign, like thousands of others before her she plotted her course to the summit of the music industry.

The Interrupters are the fruits not of her success, but of her failure. Formed in 2011, the Angelino quartet came together at the point at which Allens career as a solo artist had rendered her lonely and broke. Her dream was to become the new Joan Jett, to whom she presented a bouquet of flowers at a concert in New York City my whole body was shaking, and I was sobbing, she said of the experience but after a decade spent wilting on the vine, it turned out that there was more power, and greater happiness, in a union.

I kind of feel that I was alone my whole life until I found The Interrupters, she says. But when I did, I finally felt like I was home. I was an orphan before, and now Ive got a family. And weve got each other. If a show goes badly, its on all of us; but if its great, then we all get to share that.

The Interrupters play a fluent and seamless mixture of modern ska and American punk rock. Prior to taking to the stages of increasingly large venues this month the quartet performed for 4000-people over two nights in London the band watch Dance Craze, a concert film from 1980 featuring performances from The Specials, The Beat, and The Selecter. On record and in concert, this 2-Tone template has been recalibrated by the Americans and dispatched across the Atlantic as if brand-new.

The curious thing about this is that a proportion of the groups audience is old enough to have bought singles such as Too Much Too Young and Mirror In The Bathroom on their days of release. As well as this, alongside the Fred Perry shirts and Harrington jackets are a sizeable contingent of young teenagers for whom The Specials are unknown history in the way that Van Halen are for Billie Eilish. With only three albums to their name, the range of ages on display at concerts by The Interrupters is the widest I have ever seen for an emerging act.

I take it as the highest compliment that in England we have people coming up to us after our shows saying I saw the Specials, I saw The Clash, and I love your band, says Kevin Bivona, the groups guitarist. The fact that they could even put us in the same sentence as those people is hard to wrap my head around.

On a cold and sunny February lunchtime, Kevin Bivona sits with Aimee Allen these days known as Aimee Interrupter in the downstairs lounge of The Interrupters double-decker tour bus. Parked outside the BBCs Maida Vale Studios, the band find themselves in Northwest London to record a five-song session for 6music. When the sound engineer in a soundproof booth isolates Bivonas Fender Telecaster guitar on the superior breakup song Gave You Everything I dont know why youre gone, I walk these floors like a country song its throttled precision sounds like something that could saw a car in half.

The pair are friendly, thoughtful, and, it seems to me, tight. When the singer requires new eyelash-extensions, so as to save time it is her band mate that buys them for her. Theyre also uncommonly wholesome; answers are peppered with words such as like and awesome you can take the band out of California, and all that - but are entirely free of swearing. This U-certificate approach even extends to the concert stage.

We make unity music, says the singer. We want everyone to feel like theyre part of a big family.

Its been 20-years since Aimee Allen arrived in Hollywood equipped with little more than a capacity to carry a tune. A waitress by day, each night she would stand outside clubs such as the Whisky A Go Go, The Viper Room, and the Roxy Theatre, on the Sunset Strip, and ask perfect strangers if theyd like to form a band. She survived these encounters unmolested, but admits today that I got really lucky.

She joined forces with an act called No Motiv with whom she played a concert that was seen by Randy Jackson, one of the judges on American Idol. Jackson promised to secure the group a recording contract. After a fashion, he did; Allen signed as a solo artist with Elektra Records in 2002.

It was at this point that her problems began. Despite working with producer Mark Ronson, Aimee Allen did not appear to be a high-priority for her new label. When Elektra was subsumed in a merger with Atlantic Records, her debut album, the fabulously titled Id Start A Revolution (If I Could Get Up In The Morning), was viewed by her new paymasters as surplus stock. 17-years on, it remains unreleased.

I wouldnt wish being a solo artist on anybody, she says. You have people on your payroll, and you dont know if theyre saying that youre amazing because they feel like they have to, or because its genuine Its really lonely because its just you. Theres nowhere to hide. I was just part of the major label machine [and] I felt like I was floating.

In 2008, Aimee Allen recorded the Ron Paul Revolution Theme Song we dont want big government, or the Bilderberg Group that pays for it - in support of Texan libertarian Congressman Ron Pauls independent bid for president. In the same year, she made the first of several appearances on Alex Jones deeply controversial InfoWars radio programme.

Ten years later, the show was removed from all online mainstream media platforms for, among other things, claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings were fake, and that the parents of the 20-children murdered by gunman Alan Lanza were actors hired by the US government.

At the mention of Alex Jones and InfoWars, the temperature on The Interrupters tour bus seems to drop by about 15-degrees. A 10-second silence ensues, punctuated only by a gravid sigh of deep displeasure.

I just want to be very careful about how I answer [this], she says. Okay, yes, I regret it [appearing on the show]. But at the time, he [Alex Jones] wasnt what he became. Would I go on his show now? Hell no, obviously [But] I couldnt see the future. And, honestly, [at the time] he was just an underground conspiracy theorist. It was entertainment; it wasnt that big of a deal. I had no idea he was going to become a controversial hate-speaker. Do you know what I mean? I one hundred-percent disavow what he stands for.

One of the worst things as a musician is when you are just trying to get your music heard and somebody co-opts you to their agenda, says Kevin Bivona. It happens quite often and its something youve got to be careful of.

At this point, my interview with The Interrupters appears to be holed below the waterline. The singer says that she wants to set the record straight [but] in a way that isnt going to create more trouble for me, a response, surely, to an online article from 2014 that accused Aimee Allen of being a stooge of the alt-right, and of supporting racist positions such as Ron Pauls opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a thoughtful and respectful response to the piece, Bivona wrote in reply that he failed to see how you can use a young persons [sic] 2008 political songs and a few interviews she did six years ago and apply them to a creative project they are involved with [today], when you dont even know them personally.

Its perhaps worth mentioning that other performers have also appeared on InfoWars, including Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins (more than once, as it goes). Its also worth noting that The Interrupters and I do recover the ground lost during our awkward moment. But if the band display a certain skittishness about being interviewed it is almost unheard of for the singer to be questioned alone this is probably the reason why.

In the days that follow, I receive two calls from the bands organisation, one of which asks if it might be possible for Aimee to expand on her position via email.

It was a traumatic time and I deeply regret going on that show, she writes. It became a vehicle for the type of hateful rhetoric that I stand vehemently against. I would never knowingly be associated with anyone expressing racist, homophobic or any other bigoted ideals. I spend all my energy spreading love and making unity music.

The singers 11-year career as a solo artist wasnt entirely shrouded in failure. Her debut album, A Little Happiness, released in 2009, clawed its way to the lower reaches of the US Billboard Heatseekers Chart. She also collaborated with Linda Perry on the song Save Me (Wake Up Call), recorded by the punk group Unwritten Law, and scored a top-10 hit on the alternative chart. But after a decade of struggle, these relatively modest returns were not what she envisaged when she left her Northwestern broken-home.

[When I left Montana] I was just so nave and so hopeful, she says. Where I had come from was bad; anything was better than where I was from. I had a tough upbringing [and] I never felt like I fitted in. I never felt like there was a home for me. Everything just felt so alien and I felt so unconnected to things. But when I listened to [punk rock] I realised that there were people out there who were like me. I just had to find them.

This happened when Aimee Allen met Kevin Bivona while on tour supporting Sugar Ray in 2009. A studio engineer, occasional roadie, and sideman for such acts as The Transplants and Travis Barker, the pair began writing songs together for the singers solo career. But the Montanan was tired of being out in the cold, and from this the idea of a band was born. The groups rhythm section arrived in the form of the guitarists younger twin-brothers, Jesse and Justin Bivona, on drums and bass respectively.

From the start, The Interrupters were an independent concern in the classic mode of Southern Californian punk rock. The band signed to Hellcat Records, founded by Tim Armstrong, the vocalist and guitarist with Rancid, who also serves as their producer. In turn, this imprint operates under the umbrella of Epitaph Records, the most successful and influential punk label of the past 35-years, owned by Brett Gurewitz, the guitarist with Bad Religion.

For anyone who believes that punk rock has endured beyond its initial 1970s heyday and clearly it has then, here, The Interrupters are rubbing shoulders with royalty. Both men are among the finest songwriters in the movements history I had a paperback crime running straight down my spine, wrote Gurewitz in The Devil In Stitches but, just as importantly, both are happy to let their artists run riot.

In 1994, with the genre finally part of the mainstream, Mr. Brett sided with the Epitaph band NOFX in their decision not to permit MTV access to any of their videos, at the likely cost of hundreds of thousands of album sales.

The access we have to punk legends is just crazy, says Kevin Bivona.

Along with Tim Armstrong and Brett Gurewitz, The Interrupters have also met with the approval of Green Day, who they will support on the Oakland trios forthcoming North American stadium tour.

But as with most punk rock groups of their kind, the success of The Interrupters has blossomed without anyone really noticing. Despite the groups last album being the finest ska-themed outing of its kind for more than 20-years, outside of the pages of the rock press this is the first time the band have been interviewed by a mainstream publication.

Being completely honest, where we are at right now is far beyond what I could ever have imagined when I picked up a guitar when I was a kid, Kevin Bivona has told me. I am so happy and grateful for all the success that weve had. I definitely dont want to put a ceiling on how big I want the band to get. I just want to be able to keep making the music and writing the songs, and doing exactly what we do. I want us to be as big as the universe will allow us to get.

Fight the Good Fight by The Interrupters is available now on Hellcat Records

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Pardon the Interrupters: meet the ska-punks with an InfoWars problem - Telegraph.co.uk

Last year was the first year in recent memory with credible reports of white supremacist groups spreading propaganda around the Lehigh Valley and Warren County, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL this month announced that distribution of white supremacist literature including racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ fliers, stickers and posters increased across the nation in 2019 with 2,713 cases, up from 1,214 the year before.

There were five documented instances of such literature locally from so-called alt-right groups.

The group Patriot Front was reportedly behind two instances last October in Allentown, including one reported on the Muhlenberg College campus. Two other occurrences in Bethlehem and Mansfield Township were from the New Jersey European Heritage Association, which the ADL says is trying to expand beyond the Garden State. Fliers with the logo of Identity Evropa, now known as the American Identity Movement or AIM, were seen in Hackettstown.

The ADL began tracking such propaganda in 2016. Similar fliers may have appeared in the Lehigh Valley before 2019 but the ADL may not have received a credible report before, according to spokesman Jake Hyman.

The organization tracks propaganda and other extremist activity on its HEAT Map, which stands for hate, extremism, anti-Semitism and terrorism. The map also documents anti-Semitic incidents in the Lehigh Valley since 2016 there were four reported in 2019, even with the two prior years and down from five in 2017.

NOTE: If you do not see the map and charts above, try opening this post in your Internet browser.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveNovakLVL and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.

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White supremacists spread propaganda in the Lehigh Valley in 2019, ADL reports - lehighvalleylive.com

Right-wing social media personality and trollKaitlin Bennett was the focus of a protest on Feb. 17, 2020, when students gathered and demanded she leave the Ohio University, Athens campus, where she and her entourage said they were attempting to film a video.

Bennett, who has served as a contributor to the Alex Jones conspiracy-peddling network InfoWars, is also the face of the far-right Liberty Hangout, which brands itself as the official home of Kaitlin Bennett and as a libertarian media outlet intent on promoting Austrian economics and property rights, although a recent tweet from the group promoted monarchy over democracy.

Bennett, who has previously stirred controversy by posting images of herself on social media posing with large guns, often on college campuses such as her alma mater Kent State in Ohio, is the founder of Kent States Liberty Hangout chapter, according to a university spokesperson.

Bennett is more recently known for conducting interviews for both Liberty Hangout and InfoWars in places where she is likely to encounter liberal-minded people in the hopes of instigating responses that entertain her right-wing audience. The results could be described as mixed at best, for her purposes, however. In January 2020, she was criticized for commentary that was viewed as hateful toward the transgender community.

Following a spate of news stories and social media posts about the Feb. 17 incident at Ohio University, several Snopes readers inquired about Bennett and one asked specifically, Did Kaitlin Bennetts group Liberty Hangout really tweet then delete these Nazi tweets?

Liberty Hangouts past social media statements have included homophobic commentary, asserting only the economically-privileged should be allowed to vote, and comparing themselves to Jesus.

A search of internet archiving tools confirmed that on Jan. 30, 2016, the Liberty Hangout Twitter account posted a poll asking other Twitter users to answer the question, Do you believe the Holocaust happened as weve been told? In response to that post, one user asked, What do you think and Liberty Hangout replied, It doesnt seem possible that 6 million were killed.

We contacted Liberty Hangout to ask who wrote and deleted the posts about the Holocaust, but received no response. We also reached out to Bennett via Facebook and received no response.

Holocaust denial is a key element in white supremacist ideology. It is defined by the Anti-Defamation League as:

A type of anti-Semitic propaganda that emerged after World War II and which uses pseudo-history to deny the reality of the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II. Holocaust deniers generally claim that the Holocaust never happened, or that some much smaller number of Jews did die, but primarily to diseases like typhus. They also claim that legitimate accounts of the Holocaust are merely propaganda or lies generated by Jews for their own benefit.

Although no exact figure has been ascertained, there is no historical doubt that millions of Jews were targeted for genocide during the Holocaust. An estimated 6 million European Jews were mass murdered. Other groups were also targeted and killed over what the Nazis perceived as racial and biological inferiority, including Roma and Slavic people, members of the LGBT community, as well as the Nazis political opponents.

Liberty Hangout was co-founded in 2015 by Bennetts now-fiance Justin Moldow. It has long featured extreme commentary, including a number of pro-Confederacy posts. In 2018, Liberty Hangout published an article asserting that Its Time to Admit that Martin Luther King, Jr. Really Sucked. In February 2016, the group tweeted a meme depicting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform attached to the words Make Reich Great Again.

In 2015, Moldow interviewed Chris Cantwell, who gained notoriety as the Crying Nazi for his role in the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Cantwell as of this writing is in custody awaiting trial on charges that he made violent threats.

In September 2018, Bennett organized a rally at Kent State featuring Joey Gibson, the founder of the far-right, anti-Muslim group Patriot Prayer, best known for its provocation of violent skirmishes at rallies in the Pacific Northwest.

Provoking students on college campuses is not a new tactic. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the tactic has in recent years been favored by the far-right as a means of recruitment. Alt-right personalities know their cause is helped by news footage of large jeering crowds, heated confrontations and outright violence at their events. It allows them to play the victim and gives them a larger platform for their racist message. Denying an alt-right speaker of such a spectacle is the worst insult they can endure.

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Who Is Kaitlin Bennett, And Why Did Her Liberty Hangout Promote Holocaust Denial? - Snopes.com

2019 will not be remembered as the year when the world finally united to save the planet. Despite massive worldwide demonstrations and increasing global awareness and anxiety, the December 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (a.k.a., COP25) in Madrid failed spectacularly.

The reason? A handful of countries blocked significant action, in particular the United States, Brazil, Australia and Saudi Arabia, while China and India conveniently used the pretext of the historical responsibility of rich nations as an excuse for doing nothing.

A month before the COP25, President Trump formally confirmed the exit of the United States from the Paris climate agreement just one policy change among more than 90 others aimed at rolling back environmental regulations. Because the United States is still the most powerful country in the world whose president has the most media coverage, this has created a toxic Trump effect that has weakened the credibility of international commitments and emboldened others, especially populists and nationalists, to shirk their responsibilities.

But how much do the aggressively anti-environmental actions of a minority president actually reflect American public opinion?

The US versus the rest of the world?

Even though Americans are less likely to be concerned about climate change than the rest of the world (by at least about 10 to 20 percentage points), a majority (59%) still see it as a serious threat a 17-point increase in six years (Pew Research). But the devil is in the details. Only about 27% of Republicans say climate change is a major threat, compared with 83% of Democrats, a 56-percentage point difference!

Global concerns about climate change. Pew Research CenterGlobal Threats. Pew Research Center

Climate skepticism/denial exists in other Western democracies, mostly among right-wing populists, but even by comparison, the American Republicans are the least likely to see it as a major threat.

This in turn raises another question: why are American Republicans more skeptical about climate change than right-wing voters in other countries? The first reason has to do with polarization in politics and identity.

Polarization

American polarization has deep roots in racial, religious and ideological divisions and can be traced back to the reaction of conservatives to the cultural, social and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. This polarization eventually made its way into politics in the 1980s and, even more so, in the 1990s when it became a culture war. As global warming emerged on the US national agenda, it became one of those divisive hot-button issues in the culture war, along with abortion, gun control, health care, race, women and LGBTQs rights.

The fact that progressive Democrats took on the issue of global warming early on former vice president Al Gore was a leading voice on the issue and that the solutions they offered had to do with statist measure such as carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, or energy rationing resulted in further politicization of the issue.

In 2001, then-president George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto protocol asserting that it would be too costly for the US economy. And in 2010, the Tea Party movement solidified Republican hostility toward the climate-change issue, preventing Congress from passing a cap-and-trade bill. It came as no surprise then when Donald Trumps comment that climate change was a concept created by the Chinese to make US manufacturing non-competitive did little to damage his 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter.

Indeed, his criticism of the Paris accord as being very, very expensive, unfair, job killing and income-killing clearly resonated with his electorate.

As much as Donald Trumps political strategy has been to intensify polarization and to appeal to his base, he is more the symptom than the deeper cause of this polarization. Undeniably, the measures needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions imply government intervention and internationally binding treaties that go against the conservatives ideals of individual freedom, limited government and free markets.

Trust and mistrust

More than most other issues, our acceptance of the human impact on climate change is contingent on our trust in science and environmental scientists. For most of us, It is a matter of trust and not intelligence since we cannot do the science ourselves. Americans of all stripes generally trust scientists (86%), except for environmental research where there is a 30-point gap between Republicans and Democrats, a gap more surprisingly that is persistent among those with high science knowledge.

Pew Research Center

Trust in government is also highly partisan, but Republicans have tended to be more specifically wary of international institutions. For instance, only 43% of Republicans have a favorable view of the United Nations compared to 80% of Democrats. There are fringe conservatives, like Alex Jones or members of the John Birch Society the alt-right who want to get out of the UN.

In many ways, Donald Trumps America first nationalist slogan is a rejection of international institutions, internationalism and cosmopolitanism something he made clear at the the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2018.

Anti-intellectualism and anti-science

Americans have always tended to distrust the government, the elite and expertise. This is nothing new. In his 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter identified two sources of American anti-intellectual sentiment: business, which he depicted as unreflective, and religion, particularly evangelicalism. With its market-oriented, pro-business, and pro-religious agenda, the Republican party is naturally more distrustful of intellectuals and academics, including scientists.

This is fertile ground for right-wing think-tanks and lobbyists to sow doubt in the minds of conservatives who have a cognitive bias against climate change. And there has been no shortage of those, from the Global Climate Coalition, the Koch brothers to the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the fossil-fuel industry or the Heartland Institute. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have shown how these groups use a strategy questioning scientific research similar to that used by the tobacco industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

For a long time, these pressure groups allies in the American press that more often portrayed climate science as uncertain than the press in other developed nations. More significantly, Fox News has been the true echo chamber of climate-change deniers. The result is that Fox News viewers are less likely to accept the science of global warming and climate change. And now, the social media have only made the situation worse. A recent study found that videos challenging the scientific consensus on climate change were outnumbered by those that supported it. Then there is Donald Trump who has, since becoming president, attacked the scientists in his own administration by censoring their findings, shutting down government studies and pressuring scientists (full report available here) to reflect his own thinking on the issue.

Confronted with the reality of natural disasters and rising temperatures, most Republicans no longer deny climate change, rather they deny that humans are responsible, and warn that it will affect the economy.

The Frontier myth of an endless economic bonanza

When confronted by journalists about climate change, President Trump diverts the questions by focusing on the immediate benefits are more concrete than potential, vague, long-term gains, as he did during his news conference with President Macron of France in Biarritz, in August 2019.

This idea that nature offers vast untapped reserves that will yield perpetual and painless growth is evocative of what historian Richard Slotkin called the Frontiers bonanza economics. It is an old American story that back to the Puritans: that the wilderness had to be conquered and transformed, that the Anglo-Saxon race was defined by its ability to exploit it, which also justified the displacement of indigenous people who did not work the land.

In this story, the president becomes the Frontier hero who ventures into the wilderness (of nature and politics) to transform it. His professed love for beautiful clean coal not only pleases his voters in coal-mining states, it also taps into the belief that nature is first and foremost an infinite provider of wealth that will contribute to the prosperity of all Americans. From Alaska to Minnesota, the Trump administration is all about easing restrictions on drilling, logging and mining at the expense of the protection of the land.

Yet there is another quintessentially American approach to nature. One that sees the presence of the divine in nature and has acknowledged the exhaustability of land and resources. One that is reflected in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, in the paintings of the Hudson River School, and in the activism of John Muir. It is also ingrained in the politics of Theodore Roosevelt, who used the ethos of the Frontier for his conservationist policies. If values trump facts, maybe this is the American story that todays conservatives should embrace.

Jrme Viala-Gaudefroy, Assistant lecturer, Universit Paris Nanterre Universit Paris Lumires

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

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Why Do Donald Trump and Millions of Americans Think Climate Change is a Lie? - The National Interest Online

A new documentary explores the rising rates of anti-Semitism in recent years, both in the U.S. and across the globe, comparing the hate to a virus that can have different forms and spread anywhere.

Viral: Antisemitism In Four Mutations, directed by filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, opens in New York City on Feb. 21 at Village East Cinema, 181-189 Second Ave.

The film opens with a narration by actress Julianna Margulies, saying that anti-Semitism started a long time ago, and is based on lies about Jews being evil, conspiring and enemies of God. The lie evolved and spread like a virus, and still does, Margulies says.

The first section focuses on the far right in America, including the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people. The film takes a quick look at the history of anti-Semitism in America, before discussing the recent rise of incidents since the 2016 presidential campaign and Donald Trumps rise to power.

Survivors of the Tree of Life shooting are interviewed, and describe the horror of that day. A former white supremacist says that people frustrated with their lives can be the best targets for recruitment.

Former president Bill Clinton is also interviewed, noting that hate can spread on the internet and economic stagnation and a feeling of powerlessness can make people vulnerable to hateful ideologies. When a group is needed to be blamed, it often falls on the Jewish people, noted several people interviewed, including journalist Fareed Zakaria and commentator George Will.

The rise of Donald Trump and nationalism was important for the alt-right, who were previously in the distance and without encouragement, according to Jonathan Weisman, author of (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.

They saw in the rise of American nationalism and in the rise of Donald trump a kindred spirit, says Weisman in the film.

The films other sections look at anti-Semitism in Hungary, with the nationalist government waging a campaign of blame and hate against investor and philanthropist George Soros; the far left in the United Kingdom, where there were widespread charges of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn; and Islamic radicalism in France, which has a high rate of anti-Semitic incidents, including a shooting at a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015 where four victims were killed.

Despite different circumstances in each location, director Andrew Goldberg said they all shared some common themes of conspiracies such as Jewish people being in power behind the scenes. We had these four very specific examples where we felt it worked well, theyre so different yet they share so many of the same ideas, Goldberg told amNewYork Metro.

Goldberg said that some of the anti-Semitic movements can seem like abstract ideas, but it had an impact when he went to Hungary and saw all of the signs against George Soros and the extent of the propaganda campaign against him. You realize how enormous it is, Goldberg said. That was really eye-opening for us.

He said the situation in France, including the supermarket shooting, was entirely heartbreaking, and that everyone in the crew was upset during the interview with Valerie Braham, who walked through the ongoing pain of her husband Philippe Braham being killed in the supermarket attack. That was a very emotional interview, Goldberg said.

In terms of the global waves of anti-Semitism, Goldberg said, It has to get worse before it gets better.

He said he was asked if he would include recent waves of anti-Semitic attacks in New York City, where he lives, but the film had already been completed. Thats another example of the mutation of this virus, Goldberg said, and added that the film could have included 400 mutations but chose to focus on four.

When first putting the film together, Goldberg said he thought that ideas might emerge about how to combat the rise of anti-Semitism, but he quickly realized, thats beyond our capabilities to come up with something usable, he said. We like to think an informed population is the best first step.

More information about the documentary can be found at viralthefilm.com.

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Documentary that examines recent rise of anti-Semitism in U.S. and globally will open in NYC on Friday - amNY