The Connection Between Autocracy And Antisemitism
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Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm V Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News, where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience.

Today, we are thrilled to be joined by Samantha Vinograd, who served in the Biden administration as senior national security counselor and as acting secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security. Not a stressful job at all. She was also recently appointed by President Biden as a member of the White House Holocaust Memorial Council. Also not a stressful job at this time. Welcome, Samantha.

Thanks so much for having me. We are thrilled to talk to you at this moment as we're seeing headlines of everything that's going on at Columbia and across college campuses nationwide. So this is obviously, you know, such a fraught conversation and we are excited to talk to you. So tell us about your new role on the Holocaust Memorial Council and how is it starting such a role at this time?

Sammy, I really don't think there could be a more important time to be joining the Holocaust Memorial Council. I'm the daughter of a survivor. And so anti-Semitism and hate-fueled violence have been top of mind for me for as long as I can remember. I grew up in rural Connecticut.

And I remember being one of two, three Jewish families in rural Connecticut and experiencing anti-Semitism at a really early age. Whether kids were just ignorant or whether they were actually anti-Semitic, I don't know. But we were the Jewish family and no one quite knew what to do with us. They didn't understand that we literally did not celebrate Christmas, things like that. And that actually escalated into, I remember, a playground incident in which a kid, I still remember his name, held Hitler.

And I was shocked and didn't know what to do and went home crying. And my dad went to the school and started speaking to young kids about the impact of hate. And I watched my dad deliver talks throughout Connecticut in various settings on his experience as a child during the Holocaust. He was a young boy who went into hiding, then went to work on a work farm and

and then joined the French resistance. And most of his family was murdered in Auschwitz. So the lessons of the Holocaust have been top of mind for me, as I said, from such an early age. What I've realized as a grownup is that is just not the case for the majority of Americans. And especially now I'm 41, we know factually that most majority of young people today don't know what the Holocaust is, but even millennials, it's not something that they're aware of

factually or just in any real fashion. And so when I was a DHS, my personal and professional lives converged. I was the assistant secretary for counterterrorism threat prevention and led all of our work to address hate fueled violence. Remember, this was 2021 after the insurrection when we had seen an explosion of

in racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism, in particular white supremacy. And I got to DHS, Explosion and Anti-Semitism, did a lot of outreach to not just Jewish communities, but communities generally to educate them on how hateful rhetoric, while protected by the First Amendment, may escalate into hate-fueled violence. Charlottesville,

Pittsburgh, so many examples. And then when I left DHS, I was really intent on finding a way to stay engaged on these issues. And that's why being a member of the Holocaust Memorial Council is so important to me. I want to continue the work to educate the American people, which is the mission of the museum, about the horrors of the Holocaust, how it happened, and why it's so important to prevent it from happening again.

So how are you approaching Holocaust denialism and minimization now that it's worse than ever? And can you sort of elaborate on the relationship between Holocaust denialism in particular and how that sort of fits into the overall landscape of anti-Semitism and the history of it? Well, we have thousands of years of anti-Semitism that predated the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a historic genocide, but did not happen in a vacuum. As I said, there were 2000 years of buildup to that. And what we have seen is that as anti-Semitic rhetoric has picked up over the course of our country's history, we have seen anti-Semitic tropes omnipresent.

over time. But in addition to that, Holocaust distortion, Holocaust denialism oftentimes make their way into anti-Semitic narratives. So for example, the Holocaust Memorial Council issued a really relatively unusual statement a week or two ago about what was happening at Columbia, and in particular, individuals shouting, "Go back to Poland," at Jews. And I take a step back and I say, "Do they actually know what that means?"

Do they know how what this evokes amongst Jews that it literally conjures up images of our family members being tortured and gassed to death?

And then you wonder, is it ignorance or do they literally want us all to die? And the Holocaust minimization has been growing. So there have been a series of disinformation campaigns and rhetoric from people saying either the Holocaust didn't happen or it wasn't as bad as they say it is.

What's even more worrisome, though, is just hearing the kinds of narratives, tropes, even the images that appeared in the run up to the Holocaust and Nazi propaganda reenter the mainstream. I mean,

Guys, this used to be the kind of stuff that was said in like encrypted chat rooms and secret spaces and now is literally on posters and Twitter and everywhere. And while most of it is protected by the First Amendment, we should not underestimate how dangerous it is and how just on a personal level,

how nauseating and scary it is as a Jew. I fear for my daughter. I don't want her experiencing stuff like this. And we know that when this rhetoric percolates, that there's a nexus to violence. It's not like it just happens and it falls flat. It literally has led to violent incidents. You said that there's been a rise in Holocaust denialism and that folks, even the millennials, don't really understand what the Holocaust is. As a millennial myself, but as an older millennial,

I feel like all I learned was about the Holocaust and German history. And every day on the History Channel, my dad was watching a documentary about Hitler. And then the movie Life is Beautiful came out and we went and saw that. I was in the play Cabaret and we went and saw that. I feel like I've culturally, at least the elder millennials, had a Schindler's List movie, had a glut of Hollywood attention when it came to telling the story of the Holocaust and what happened in Germany at that time. Do you think that this is...

there's maybe some, where is the knowledge gap between what I would consider, I'm 41, my generation seeing these movies and seeing these plays and hearing about these things from our teachers in school, and maybe what younger millennials or a post social media education experience is like, do you think there were, where was the switch for people? Well, I think we have a couple of things. We have the fact that

the level of mandatory Holocaust education in this country varies, right? So we have what folks are learning in the classroom and that's variable across the country. And that's something that the Holocaust Museum focuses very intently on. So as I'm watching these campus protests,

take place. Part of what I'm hoping for is that these universities and campuses double down on Holocaust education. So as these tropes and distortions may be occurring on certain campuses, that everyone takes a step back and says, we really do need to educate students more on just what factually happened. The gas chambers, the death squads, the propaganda that led up to the Holocaust. You know, my dad always says the Holocaust didn't happen overnight.

It's not like one day Hitler woke up and said, I'm going to murder six million Jews. And it happened in the blink of an eye. There was a massive lead up to that. There was like fertilization of the field to get people really indoctrinated.

with false information and to make the Jews the enemies, the enemy of the state. And so I think that we've had a shift in Holocaust education. I think that today,

Where people get their information is also so variable. So I'm also 41. As a child of the 80s and 90s, we didn't have social media. So even just from a movie's perspective, I mean, today between Netflix and Hulu and Netflix,

all these other streaming services, there's endless content. So when a movie comes out, I remember we used to go to the movie theater and there were like five movies you could pick from for like two months or like blockbuster only had so many things. The content overload means there's so many different options for folks to digest that it's not a given that when a movie comes out or a show is made about the Holocaust that people are going to experience it. And I think that this is a teachable moment for this country because it's

You can be appalled at what is happening in Gaza and be doing everything to push for greater humanitarian access and for greater protection of civilian life in Gaza by the Israeli government while simultaneously being appalled and nauseated by the anti-Semitism percolating globally, domestically, and the

Holocaust denialism and distortion. And we've just, we live in an era now where there's no nuance. It's just so black and white. And the content overload, I think, contributes to that because again, folks can get their information from so many different places. It's not even just the overload. It's like your content is algorithmically fed. So you're living in your echo chamber and you don't even know what's in the other people's echo chambers necessarily. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

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I think one of the common misconceptions just about the pre-Holocaust time is that, you know, these Jews were living in Poland in shtetls and they had no, like, political power or protections.

But actually in Germany right before the Holocaust, Jews were, you know, mainstream cultural drivers. They had, you know, legitimate political and economic power in many cases. And yet this still happened. So can you talk a little bit about how like society slides into that so quickly and especially how anti-Semitism and racism

often go hand in hand and almost can be looked at as like one can be looked at as a harbinger of the other. Well, I think that the history has shown us that autocrats come to power by finding people

enemies, and by mobilizing everybody else against somebody else so that they are viewed as the only thing that will guarantee peace, stability. And to do that, you need to shift attention onto yourself and all the blame onto others. And that's where Jews have very often been the scapegoats for any number of things.

Whether it's, you know, in this country, the tropes about controlling the media, controlling the financial system. In Nazi Europe, Jews were literally responsible for everything wrong in society. That approach is a core tenet of an autocrat's playbook.

And Jews have been the favored target for that, the favored scapegoat over the course of history. And we still are by a variety of actors. And that where that really leads back to is just the need, again, for like fact based approaches.

to content and to discourse. And in addition to Holocaust education, one of the things that I'm really struck by is just the overall lack of critical thinking in media literacy that is pervasive in our country. And when I was at DHS, we worked on this and it became viewed as when you talk about media literacy and critical thinking, you'd have folks say that you were trying to control thought.

and tell people what to read and what was good and what was bad. And the reality is media literacy and critical thinking is not about that. It's not saying what source is right or what source is wrong. It's about teaching particularly young people how to fact check,

how to consider their source, whether it's a foreign government, whether it's an individual with a history of conspiracy theories, but how to do that kind of fact-checking work is something that seems to be lost right now. And I'm quite hopeful that as a country, we figure out how to instill a culture of media literacy here. I don't have an answer to that yet, but I'm hoping that we get there.

there. It has been a frustration that anything can be true, right? The alternative facts that Kellyanne Conway has talked about have become a very valid way that people interact in the world. And if we go back to the 80s and 90s childhood, as much as I saw movies and were taught about the Holocaust, I also watched

Jerry Springer, who would have on white supremacists and everybody would kind of make fun of them. But it turns out that that really started to normalize that kind of rhetoric where people were Holocaust deniers on that show or white supremacists on that show. And while they were the butt of the joke, it really seems to have given brain worms to a lot of the world right now who don't

started to hear terrible messages over and over and over. And the more you hear it, the less shocking it becomes, the more accepted it becomes. And that's how we have, you know, half of the NFL thinking that the earth is flat. I will say also, I think the reality is that in today's communications era,

individuals with any form of thinking can rapidly connect and communicate with each other. Whatever your thought processes are, your political leanings, your conspiracy theory of choice, you can literally instantaneously connect with not just one other person who shares your views. That's

a whole host of others. And so that's a good thing when you're working on various things or if you support, I don't know, you know, the environment or addressing climate change or what have you. But if you're a white supremacist, you can find your...

your comrades in arms instantaneously. You can communicate instantaneously. You can trade tactics and techniques instantaneously. And so just that rapid communication, I think, unfortunately allows things to go viral in a way that just didn't exist before.

And also from an operational perspective, allows folks to mobilize to violence that much more quickly. You can plan an insurrection instantaneously. Instead of being the butt of the joke on the Jerry Springer show, now you're a Twitter power user and you have a whole army of wannabe soldiers behind you doing terrible things.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the glorification of any individual that has broken the law is incredibly dangerous. And that's where we get back to in us versus them mentality. That kind of rhetoric is another key takeaway from an autocrat's playbook. It's all us versus them. I'm the only one that can keep you safe.

The laws exist for me to interpret. And so when we hear rhetoric about, you know, January 6th defendants being hostages that deserve to be freed, that sends a message again, I think, about what is or isn't not just acceptable behavior, but legal behavior and who ultimately is the arbiter of the law.

And that's where, again, we see autocratic tendencies coming into play. And autocracies have not been kind to the Jews. And I've talked to my father a lot about what we're seeing right now and where we were, where the world was in the early 30s and where we are today. And

I don't want to make comparisons necessarily between where we are today versus, you know, right before Hitler really took over. But it is a fact that the ongoing normalization of anti-Semitic violence and Holocaust distortion and denial is a very slippery slope. And unless it's called out, it becomes again, it becomes normalized. It becomes part of popular culture.

Yeah. And to Sammy's point, you know, I'm not a Jewish person, but I am a gay person. And there are a lot of parallels between what anti-Semitic activity happens and what anti-queer activity happens and how we all sort of end up in the same horrible place together. And I think Sammy made a great point to say it's not just people who had no power and were sort of like living in poverty that are affected by this. There's a very real possibility that, and we're seeing it now, the disenfranchisement of

Jewish and queer voices as white supremacy continues to rise. And the fact is it affects one, it affects all. And it is the slippery slope towards, towards autocracy and towards, you know,

just damage to the overall democracy we enjoy. Autocracies are famously not kind to any minority group. So I think part of the problem and why antisemitism is used as such a cudgel is because in a functioning society, you would have a mindset like we're all in this together and we can solve these problems together and we do not glorify discrimination against any group.

We're not in that situation right now. We are finding ourselves in a democracy that experts agree is is weaker than it used to be and is, you know, in jeopardy in a lot of ways. And I will just say that if the Jews control the media, we would be doing a way better job.

And they would not be hosting White House Correspondents Weekend on Passover. Just it's it's insane. But there is this question of why Jews, because I think predominantly we do appear white, often are in positions of wealth and affluence and influence. But, you know, we are in many cases excluded from sort of the American concept of a minority group.

And that is in many ways understandable. But in order to rectify that, Congress has introduced the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which they're slated to vote on this week. It has faced some level of opposition because of how it defines anti-Semitism, which mirrors the definition that was set by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. So can you, Samantha, help us understand a basic breakdown of this legislation and the practical implications of

what it would prohibit that are facing opposition.

If we take a step back and look at national strategy to counter anti-Semitism that President Biden released, first strategy of its kind by any U.S. president, there was a big controversy among Jewish groups. It is a misconception that Jews are a monolithic body that agree on everything. If you've ever been to a Passover Seder or any Jewish meal, you know that there's always myriad views represented there.

But there is a lot of controversy over what constitutes the definition of anti-Semitism and a lot of different views. For example, the National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism cites the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism that was adopted in 2016 by the 31 member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which the United States, according to the strategy, has embraced.

There are many other iterations of this that do or do not recognize the right to self-determination in other matters. So there is not a one size fits all definition that will satisfy all Jews involved. I think what's really important is just that.

What do you make of the wide gulf between some very clear examples of anti-Semitism in and around some of the college campuses?

including numerous accounts of Jews who say they don't feel welcome in these spaces. And then the accounts from some of the pro-Palestine protesters who are saying that they're being peaceful and there is no antisemitism in any part of their movement. Yeah, I think that points to a really important nuance that we all have to keep in mind, which is these protests are not monolithic. And so we do have in certain instances, right?

First Amendment protected activity authorized by campus officials. In other instances, we have First Amendment protected activity that violates campus codes, does not have permits, uses rhetoric that is viewed as unacceptable on that particular campus. We have certain instances in which Jews are participating in

in these scenarios and calling for an end to the war in Gaza, more humanitarian aid. So there's not one protest movement that is defining even the encampments. At the same time, we know that there have been instances in which Jews have felt unsafe

in which there's anti-Semitic rhetoric, like at Columbia, where there was the go back to Poland. Shouting words like intifada or glory to the martyrs. A friend of mine was at Columbia and saw individuals holding up posters of designated terrorists. There are instances in which individuals are expressing solidarity with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

I had a scenario the other day where someone asked me why I didn't speak more about, for example, Israel's assassination of IRGC officials in Syria. And I pointed out that the IRGC is a designated, without commenting on the assassination, a designated terrorist group. So there's no like one protest. There's no one encampment. They're all very different. I think each of them need to be treated that way. What I do want to remind our audience is,

of is from a Holocaust perspective and anti-Semitism perspective. Again, I'm going to go back to the president's national strategy to counter anti-Semitism. There was a survey that was done in 2020 amongst millennials and Gen Zers, which found that most Americans lack basic knowledge of the Holocaust. 63% of respondents didn't know that 6 million Jews were murdered.

60% did not know what Auschwitz was. And 11% believe that Jews caused the Holocaust. How? Samantha, how? How is that possible? I don't know, but that points back to the need for Holocaust education. Now, when it comes to the protests, I just wanted our audience to know that when it comes to the protests, I in no way want to discount, again, the horror that's unfolding in Gaza.

But these protests, you have individuals expressing that hard, but then you do have individuals espousing anti-Semitism and Holocaust era rhetoric. And every college campus that is federally funded legally under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act legally has a requirement to ensure that no student feels discriminated against based on national origin, color, ethnicity, or some other factors.

And so as we think about the anti-Semitism that has been pervasive on college campuses post-October 7th, as well as anti-Muslim rhetoric and activities as well, the Department of Education has already opened a series of Title VI-related investigations on these matters and coming out of these campus protests.

I'm not a betting woman, but I would bet that there would be more either independent litigation by students and faculty about the environments on campuses because students do not feel safe, as well as potentially additional actions by the Department of Education. But these protests are all so different. And that's where it really is incumbent on university and college officials to make determinations on how to keep their college and university campuses safe.

It's a really hard issue to square, especially given that colleges have such a history of protest and that college is supposed to be a place on some level where you can sort of safely explore the boundaries of speech, of ideology. And it's not really supposed to go viral to the entire world. And this is a situation where we now have

You know, people who have nothing, who don't understand anything about higher education or about the psychology of a college student who are weighing in on this and making it a national issue. It's tempting to say, you know, leave it up to the educators and to obviously legislation against anti-discrimination and protections for students. But it's hard in practicality when it becoming a real national issue.

But that's where it gets back to. And that's why I don't want to imply that it is just a responsibility of one sector of society to address this. I do think in the campus context, every campus administrator, college president, university president has a responsibility to provide a safe learning environment for their students.

And that includes codes of conduct. It includes calling law enforcement when necessary, doing whatever is necessary to provide a safe learning environment. That's not going to solve the anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial or distortion problem in this country. There's no one approach to address all that. What we each need to do is use our voice here. And when I used to travel the country,

to talk about hate-fueled violence. I would often talk to my team afterwards and say, "We're talking to Jewish community members about anti-Semitism," or, "We're talking to Black community members about hate-fueled violence against Black people." They all know that. Of course they want to be heard, but we have to talk to everybody else.

about the impact of what's happening. And that's a national conversation, but more than anything, ladies, that is a community conversation because community members know their communities best and we need to have localized, nuanced conversations at that level. And we need ambassadors on that. It's not the federal government that's gonna do it. It's not, you know, a new appointee. Like sure, that's important, but every community needs to take a step back and think about how this impacts them. The last thing I'll say is, you know,

whenever there is a mass shooting or an attack on a synagogue or a mosque, at the federal level, we'd go out to...

you know, other states and say, hey, can we help you think about how to prevent something like this happening in your state or your city or town? They say, we're okay. We don't really have that here. And it's like, you need to pay attention to this stuff before it actually happens because these individuals are there. I will guarantee you that there is someone with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism in every state in this country. We actually know that to be true legally. So

Everybody needs to take it upon themselves to point out this kind of activity when they see it, because we don't want to risk it escalating into something more violent. And would you say that it does escalate into something more violent when we don't stop it? Anti-Semitism leads to anti-queer rhetoric, leads to anti-Arab rhetoric, leads to hatred of women, because these are all things that are based in white supremacy, which creates victims of all of us.

analytically speaking right now, I'm a couple months out from the federal government, but for the individuals motivated by some form of hate,

We've seen a shift. It used to be that individuals would historically have, you know, one one target. I hated Jews. I hated black people. I hated queer people. I hated this. We are seeing a commingling of hateful ideologies right now where anyone that is different is viewed as a target. And that's where we know hate breeds hate.

We know hate breeds hate. I think that's often founded in conspiracy theories, is often founded in a lack of critical thinking. And so you just start hating everything because you're consuming this information that tells you everybody but you is bad and responsible for all the bad things impacting you. And so there's a poem, I don't know if either of you are familiar with it, by Martin Knoller that says, first they came for the Jews. I didn't speak up. I wasn't a Jew. First they came for the communists.

And it gets to the point where they said it's he writes, and then they came for me and there was no one left to speak up. Like we hate breeds hate. Thank you so much, Samantha, for your incredible insights. You know, we'd love to have you back to talk about all manners of these issues, because as you said, hate breeds hate. They're all interrelated. So thank you so much. And can you let everyone know where they can find the amazing work you're doing through the Holocaust Memorial Council? I would encourage everybody to either plan a visit to the museum itself or

or to visit the website, ushm.org. There is a ton of digital content online. And coming to the museum itself just for an hour and walking through some of the exhibits,

will really give you a historical background on why the Jews, why the focus on the Jews, as well as how you can confront anti-Semitism and hate-fueled violence generally. And I really, really hope that everybody listening takes a moment to absorb that content and to share it in their communities.

And I promise you guys, I've been. It's not all sad. There are great stories of resilience and hope that will inspire you to also bring forth this work in a really incredible way. I remember seeing sheet music that had been found at Auschwitz that is now being played around the country in these memorial concerts. So there's a lot there to learn and inspire you. And I truly do hope that you all take the time to visit the memorial. Thank you.

Until next time, I'm Vitus Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream. American Fever Dream is hosted by Vitus Spear and Sammy Sage. The show is produced by Rebecca Sous-McCatt, Jorge Morales-Picot, and Rebecca Steinberg. Editing by Rebecca Sous-McCatt. Social media by Bridget Schwartz. And be sure to follow Betches News on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Betches.