WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
V
iolent white-supremacist groups
have formed a connected global
movement that rose before Don-
ald Trump’s presidency and
threatens to continue long after he leaves
office.
These white-supremacist groups have
used the Internet to recruit and train
followers, much as Islamist extremists did
a decade ago, argues a major new study by
Jigsaw, a research arm of Google. The
study, described here for the first time, is
being published Tuesday by Jigsaw’s digi-
tal journal, the Current.
The study shatters the image that many
analysts have of white supremacist attack-
ers as “lone wolf” extremists. Jared Co-
hen, the chief executive of Jigsaw, argues
that “this myth obscures the vast underly-
ing infrastructure of white supremacist
online communities around the world.”
These groups “move fluidly between
mainstream and fringe platforms,” Cohen
warns. They recruit followers on Face-
book or YouTube, among other venues,
and then direct them to protected “alt-
tech” sites where they can privately share
propaganda and boast about operations.
The challenge as Trump’s presidency
ends is how to reduce the spread of this
toxic movement and deradicalize its fol-
lowers. The Jigsaw study offers some use-
ful case studies in interviews conducted
over the past two years with 36 former
members of white-supremacist groups.
But it’s clear there’s no silver bullet for
deprogramming hate.
Former members told Jigsaw research-
ers that their escapes began with basic
things — a life-changing event such as a
birth or death in the family; disgust with
violent acts perpetrated by other follow-
ers; or doubts raised by exposure to “mi-
norities... they had vilified,” the study
explains.
The movement is far larger and more
violent than many people realize. Num-
bers collected by the University of Mary-
land’s Global Terrorism Database depict a
network that has been growing globally
since 2010 and has expanded in tandem
with Islamist extremism, its twin in using
online media to spread hate.
Consider these comparisons: In 2009,
white supremacists were responsible for
six deaths in 19 incidents, while Islamist
extremists were responsible for 14 deaths
in 12 incidents. Those numbers kept
climbing steadily through the decade. By
2019, white supremacists were linked to
165 deaths in 336 incidents, while Islamist
extremists were tied to 193 deaths in
82 incidents.
In three “hot spots” for white suprema-
cists — Germany, Britain and the United
States — the number of incidents seemed
to spike because of special factors: in
Germany, the influx of Syrian migrants in
2015; in Britain, the angry debate over
Brexit in 2016; in the United States,
Trump’s presidency in 2017. But in each
case, the problem pre-dated these events.
The Jigsaw researchers found that
f ormer group members had been attract-
ed by the combination of solidarity and
anonymity of the online community. One
former member of several white-
s upremacist groups explained: “Every
time I went online, it was like putting on a
mask, one where you’re shielded from
empathy, from consequences.... I’d say
all sorts of horrible things. And then I’d
get offline and hang my mask up and go
back to my family.”
Another former member told Jigsaw
researcher Beth Goldberg about her path
from a curious 16-year-old browsing
o nline forums to membership in the
n eo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. As re-
cruiters sensed her initial interest, the
discussions moved to private channels
where she was cultivated as a “prospect,”
gaining status and “hidden knowledge”
from the group. Eventually, before finally
breaking away, she became an Atom-
waffen recruiter herself.
The concealment tactics of these or-
ganizations were described by a former
member of a group that helped organize
the August 2017 Charlottesville rally. The
group urged people to celebrate “white
pride” in postings on mainstream plat-
forms, this organizer said. “Yet in private
chats she was part of,” Jigsaw reported,
“they talked openly about what weapons
they planned to bring and what violent
acts they hoped to see in Charlottesville.”
How can the United States and the
world step back from hatred? The Jigsaw
report offers some suggestions. Facebook,
YouTube and other platforms are making
it harder for extremists to spread their
ideas and hook followers. Counter-
r adicalism networks (the Jigsaw study
mentions five in the United States and
Europe) are disrupting the radicalization
process and helping people break from
the violent subculture.
What can President-elect Joe Biden do
against white supremacists? He says his
candidacy was motivated by horror over
the Charlottesville attacks and Trump’s
encouragement of extremist violence
there. Biden says his presidency will be
about healing. But in this angry country,
combating hatred won’t be quick or easy.
The Jigsaw study reminds us that the
Internet is a rage accelerator. Good
l eaders can discourage extremism rather
than feed it; they can encourage norms of
good behavior. But tolerance needs to
become a mass movement, more powerful
than hatred.
Twitter: @IgnatiusPost
DAVID IGNATIUS
Inside the
global network
of white
supremacists
BY 25 FORMER PRESIDENTS AND
A FORMER CEO OF THE D.C. BART
he period since the election has
seen a destructive and unwar-
ranted series of abusive law-
suits filed by some members of
the American legal profession. While
lawyers must represent their clients
with determination and zeal, no lawyer
may seek, on behalf of any client, to
subvert democratic institutions or bur-
den the courts with claims that the
lawyer knows are frivolous. As former
presidents and a former CEO of the
District of Columbia Bar, which has
more than 100,000 members from ev-
ery state, we think it is important to
explain that it did not have to be this
way, and it should not have been.
The law protects our democratic
institutions and embodies our commit-
ment to a civil society. It is through
lawyers in their dual role as “officers of
the court” and as advocates for specific
clients that the law achieves these
goals. But as one of the country’s most
celebrated lawyers, Elihu Root, suppos-
edly said a century ago: “About half the
practice of a decent lawyer consists in
telling would-be clients that they are
damned fools and should stop.”
Since the election, instead of telling
their client to stop, some lawyers — too
many — have leveled attacks on the
integrity of the electoral process, bas-
ing their assertions on unfounded
allegations of “voter fraud” or “ballot
tampering.” Lawyers for President
Trump have filed at least three dozen
lawsuits in various states, charging
grave abuses of the electoral process.
Their goal has been to scuttle the
process for counting and certifying the
vote, thereby expunging millions of
votes. If any legitimate evidence to
support the challenges existed, we
would defend the lawyers in raising
the pertinent legal issues. But in the
absence of any meaningful evidence,
we must condemn the abuse of the
judicial system to subvert the demo-
cratic process.
Fortunately, federal and state judges,regardless of prior political affiliation,
have quickly and courageously re-
buffed these groundless lawsuits. But it
is deeply troubling that so many law-
yers and law firms have been willing to
sign their names to these filings, letting
themselves be used in this corrosive
undermining of confidence in the dem-
ocratic process. Members of the bar
have an obligation to refrain from
undertaking a matter for a client when
the lawyer knows that the purpose of
the lawsuit is purely political and lacks
concrete factual support or plausible
legal merit.
Sadly, the past few weeks have dem-
onstrated serious disregard for these
professional duties of lawyer-citizens.
Perhaps most notorious was the law-
suit filed in Pennsylvania that tried to
salvage the failing litigation campaign
of the incumbent president by assem-
bling a grab-bag of unsupported asser-
tions about the integrity of the vote
count.
In ruling against Trump on Friday,
the federal appeals court — in an
opinion written by a Trump appointee
and joined by two other Republican-
nominated judges — was unsparing in
its assessment of the weakness of the
claim. “Free, fair elections are the
lifeblood of our democracy,” wrote
Judge Stephanos Bibas. “Charges of
unfairness are serious. But calling an
election unfair does not make it so.
Charges require specific allegations
and then proof. We have neither here.”
It is no excuse that the “client” — the
unsuccessful presidential candidate’s
reelection committee or local political
allies — wanted to assert these conten-
tions. A lawyer may not advance such
contentions in court without having
genuine factual grounds for them. Poli-
ticians may make outlandish claims or
invent “alternative facts.” But lawyers
may not ethically repeat in a lawsuit an
assertion of fraud, unless they have first
assured themselves that there is a
sound factual basis for such a serious
charge.
Core principles of professional eth-
ics prohibit lawyers from becominginstruments in a campaign to use the
courts to foment unfounded attacks on
the integrity of the most basic institu-
tion of our democracy, the right of the
people to select their leaders. Nor is it
permissible to start a lawsuit pro-
pounding the client’s thesis, simply
hoping that some support for the claim
may turn up. The ABA Model Rules of
Professional Conduct direct lawyers to
refrain from bringing a proceeding
“unless there is a basis in law or fact for
doing so that is not frivolous.”
Most basically, the binding rules of
professional behavior declare that it is
“professional misconduct” to “engage
in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud,
deceit or misrepresentation” or to “en-
gage in conduct that is prejudicial to
the administration of justice.” The ar-
ray of lawsuits filed in efforts to under-
mine the 2020 presidential election
presented a veritable checklist of disre-
gard for these professional standards.
The fact that these lawsuits were
filed on behalf of the incumbent presi-
dent, not private clients in a commer-
cial dispute, makes matters even worse.
Here, lawyers have willingly agreed to
become the instruments of a wholesale
attack on the integrity of the democrat-
ic process, which is the framework for
binding together a peaceful, civil soci-
ety under law. The harmful conse-
quences of this campaign will survive
long after the courts have formally
dismissed the lawsuits.
Our country deserved better from
members of the bar.The authors are listed in the order of their
service: Charles R. Work; Robert L.
Weinberg; Stephen J. Pollak; Marna S.
Tucker; Philip Allen Lacovara; Sara-Ann
Determan; Jamie S. Gorelick; Mark H.
Tuohey III; Pauline A. Schneider; Robert
Weiner; Carolyn B. Lamm; Andrew H. Marks;
Joan H. Strand; John W. Nields Jr.; George
W. Jones Jr.; Shirley Ann Higuchi; John C.
Keeney Jr.; John C. Cruden; James J.
Sandman; Melvin White; Kim M. Keenan;
Andrea C. Ferster; Annamaria Steward;
Patrick McGlone; Esther H. Lim; Katherine
A. Mazzaferri (former CEO).Lawyers should not be complicit
in Trump’s attack on democracy
JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jenna Ellis, a member of President Trump’s legal team, speaks in Washington on Nov. 19. At left is the president’s personal
lawyer, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Behind Ellis are lawyers Sidney Powell, left, and Joe diGenova.ated allegations tossed around by Presi-
dent Trump and his allies are true —
Trump’s so-called elite strike force might
not have all the goods by now, but there
would at least be a fresh item or two on
the shelves.
Second, the paltriness of the legal
effort is a dead giveaway of the real game.
Why pretend to pursue a case that you
are not actually pursuing? Money. The
phony legal effort is a tool cynically
employed to separate Trump supporters
from their cash.
It’s working beautifully. According to
published reports, Trump’s personal po-
litical action committee raised $170 mil-
lion in November by squeezing donors to
stop the (non)steal. That’s a lot of lettuce
— more money than Trump was raising
in recent months for his actual cam-
paign. And here’s the beauty part for a
man on the make: Most of those millions
are Trump’s to spend essentially without
limits. Too bad Trump University closed
down. As ex-president, Trump could have
offered a seminar titled “Tearing Down
Democracy for Fun and Profit.”
And the president’s personal PAC is
only the tip of the iceberg. True the Vote
is a Texas-based nonprofit that purports
to train election observers to spot fraud.
A recent initiative from the group en-
courages Americans to pray for election
integrity. But having never raised as
much as $2 million in a single year — and
far less in recent years — True the Vote
allegedly pitched a $7.3 million legal
strategy to overturn the election results
to wealthy pharmaceutical investor Fred
Eshelman. Now, with the legal strategyI
read Trump-inspired election law-
suits so you don’t have to. Unlike
some observers, I read them with an
open mind. If the 2020 election was
— as our commander in chief alleges — a
massive fraud, or a conspiracy of Ameri-
ca’s enemies abetted by elected officials
from both parties, then I want to know.
As a citizen, I would be outraged. As a
journalist, I would be adrenalized by the
biggest scandal in our nation’s history.
What I see is that these lawsuits have
not turned up a single new provable
allegation in three-plus weeks. The new-
est filings are mere regurgitations of the
first, but longer and sloppier because no
one is bothering to proofread them
anymore. This tells me two things:
First, there is no there there. Harold
Hill is not a musician, Al Capone’s vault
holds no treasures, and O.J. Simpson isn’t
hunting the real killer. There’s only so
much dirt that can be swept under a rug.
If the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo
Chávez actually created a vote-stealing
machine that was later exported to the
United States so that a bipartisan con-
spiracy could “elect” Joe Biden, while
tipping the rest of the election to the
Republicans; and if, for good measure,
urban Democrats manufactured truck-
loads of phony ballots in pursuit of the
same mixed results; and if, to be extra-
sure of the outcome, the U.S. Postal
Service engaged in wholesale theft of
ballots to sell them to equally corrupt
buyers; and if, to protect this vast crimi-
nal enterprise, the Justice Department
and FBI turned a blind eye to the entire
scheme; and if all the other unsubstanti-kaput, Eshelman wants the $2.5 million
he kicked in to be repaid. True the Vote
insists they made good use of it.
The American Conservative Union
wasted no time in rattling its tin cup. On
Nov. 7, chairman Matt Schlapp blasted an
appeal for donations, promising vaguely
to “#StopTheSteal.” Then he followed up
with another call for cash on Nov. 16. The
second time, Schlapp promised “a mas-
sive project” in support of a “team of
lawyers.” The group’s website includes a
shameful display of what it purports to
be “cancelled” votes; they almost certain-
ly are no such thing. Conveniently, all
names are obscured so that the voters in
question cannot be interviewed — if they,
in fact, exist.
Of course, the globe-trotting oppor-
tunist Stephen K. Bannon is in the mix.
The former Trump strategist and his
sometime partner in grift, Brian Kolfage,
built a potentially lucrative network of
“StopTheSteal” pages on Facebook —
even as Bannon awaited trial on charges
(for which he pleaded not guilty) that he
took cash illegally from a charity promis-
ing to build a border wall. Facebook took
down the pages.
I could go on. The Internet is a souk of
cheap-jack merchandise — banners,
flags, hats, bumper stickers, T-shirts —
aimed at poor saps suckered into Trump’s
phony war. This cynical commerce is a
fitting end to an unseemly presidency:
one more grand con, another monetized
lie. There’s a massive fraud going on here,
for sure. But not the one Trump is ranting
about.
[email protected]DAVID VON DREHLEThere is a fraud going on. Just not the one
Trump keeps talking about.
A
mericans have a hard truth to
face, and the sooner we do it the
better: We must cancel travel
over the winter holidays and find
different ways to celebrate Christmas and
Hanukkah.
It’s clear what lies ahead. In November,
the United States added 4 million new
coronavirus infections, while hospitaliza-
tions broke records daily for more than
two weeks in a row. All projections indi-
cate that December will be worse than
November.
So there’s no reason to wait to issue a
warning. Before Thanksgiving, covid-19
infections were already spreading explo-
sively. One in five hospitals reported that
they were facing a critical shortage of
workers. The coronavirus surged after
Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and
Labor Day, and after an estimated 50 mil-
lion people traveled for the holiday, the
same will certainly be true of Thanksgiv-
ing. With most of the country engulfed in
coronavirus infections, chances are high
that many of those who participated in
indoor get-togethers will contract covid-
19 and return home to seed it in their
communities.
Health-care systems are stretched to
their limits, with beds becoming scarce
and some hospitals beginning to ration
care. Deaths nationally could reach more
than 4,000 a day. We have no option but to
take drastic steps to “flatten the curve”
once again.
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention waited until one week before
Thanksgiving to warn against travel. By
then, however, many people had already
booked flights. Now is the time for a clear
directive: No one should travel for nones-
sential reasons. People should not gather
indoors over the winter holidays. If we
want to see extended family or friends, we
must see them outdoors only, with house-
holds spaced at least six feet apart.Because Christmas and Hanukkah are
religious holidays, pastors and rabbis are
key messengers. I spoke with two Balti-
more leaders who are both holding
v irtual-only services this winter. “We in
the faith community have to tell the story
in the biblical language so that people
don’t see a conflict between science and
religion,” said the Rev. Al Hathaway of
Union Baptist Church. He talks about
how the Egyptians used physical distanc-
ing to hold off the plague as he urges his
congregants not to gather with anyone
outside their households.
Rabbi Daniel Burg of Beth Am Syna-
gogue explained to me that Hanukkah is
about human ingenuity, grit and the
d ivine-human partnership. A central
practice of Hanukkah is to “publicize the
miracle” by placing menorahs in windows
for all to see. “This year, we can invite one
another into our computer windows by
posting photos of households lighting the
menorah on social media,” Burg said. “We
can invite families from other homes to
join us each night on Zoom.”
And, of course, President Trump and
President-elect Joe Biden have major
roles to play. Trump can help make up for
his poor messaging to date by keeping
quiet and not contradicting public health
experts. Biden delivered an inspiring
Thanksgiving message that emphasized
how Americans must unite to get through
this difficult period; now, he can ask
Americans to commit to the same shared
sacrifice for Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and
Christmas. He can guide families through
difficult conversations by sharing the
hope of vaccines and reiterating why we
must hold off seeing one another for a few
more months.
Many governors are already imposing
restrictions on high-risk activities to
avoid overwhelming hospitals. They can
go further by implementing mandatory
quarantines for out-of-state visitors and
returning residents. In the absence of
statewide mandates, local officials can
issue orders of their own: Santa Clara
County in Northern California is requir-
ing quarantine for those traveling from
more than 150 miles away. Officials
should prohibit indoor gatherings for
those in different households. Enforce-
ment will be challenging, of course, but
the presence of these restrictions alone
will help convey the gravity of the crisis.
Congressional leadership matters, too.
People will not heed public health guid-
ance to stay home if their jobs are at risk.
It’s long past time for Congress to pass a
package to assist workers and small busi-
nesses. In addition, local and state health
departments urgently need funding to
implement the vaccination programs
that are essential to ending the pandemic.
Other entities — including schools —
must take aggressive action also, such as
requiring quarantine and testing after
the holidays before returning to in-
p erson instruction.
Americans still have a small window of
opportunity to avoid the total collapse of
our health-care system. We need to wait
just a little longer to be with our loved
ones. Let’s plan for quiet celebrations in
our own homes this winter. Spring is not
far away.
Twitter: @DrLeanaWenLEANA S. WENCancel your
holiday travel
plans now
We have no option but
to take drastic steps to
‘flatten the curve’ once again.