ADL Never Is Now
Post-2022 Midterms and Fighting Conspiracies

I woke up on the day of the ADL conference extremely excited, inspired and tired. My alarm went off just shy of 3:30 a.m to make sure I had enough time to get ready for the 5:20 am departure time from school to New York. This day had been marked in my calendar months before. It would be fair to say that I had high expectations for the conference to live up to. We arrived at the Javits Center around 9:00 am ready to get our bags checked and catch the end of the opening remarks from JuJu Chang and Jonathan Greenblatt. I looked forward to hearing words from Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, David Schwimmer, Friends actor, Liz Cheney, a House representative from Wyoming and prominent figure on the January 6th committee, and Albert Boula, the CEO of Pfizer.

My first conference of the day was “After the Midterms: Elections, Extremism and Disinformation.” I was particularly excited for this because just days before the 2022 Midterms took place and I followed them very closely. The protection of our democracy is the most important thing in keeping our country together and I think that staying up to date and educated with current events such as this is an important way of keeping the relevance of this issue in daily life. It's something I talk about with people I am close with and a way of understanding our country in different ways. Regardless of party affiliation, I believe that if you can, you must vote. Fulfilling your civic duty in this way allows for your voice to be heard and your thoughts to influence the country, state and town you are living in.

I walked into the conference room and sat three rows from the front. There were around four-hundred seats in the room. Some of the first things that the four panelists talked about were the current stats about the past election. They stated that there had been fifteen newly elected officials into the House of Representatives that were election deniers, 13.4 million who voted for extremists and thirteen million who say that violence is needed to reinstate Donald Trump as president. These numbers were very worrisome to me. According to these metrics, if you were to choose at random twenty-five people in America, one of them would believe that violence is required to hijack a presidency and replace a leader they don’t approve of with the one that they would prefer, regardless of rules, order, or a maintained standard of respect among fairly elected officials. This ties into another point that they made through their talk: Political figures have a responsibility to denounce acts of political violence which has become much more common within recent years. When figures like Kari Lake and Donald Trump laugh and joke about the attack made to Nancy Pelosi when her house was broken into, and her husband attacked, sets a standard where those actions are accepted. That causes and contributes to countless other violent attacks that may take place in the future -- it encourages poor ways of responding to the other side.

The information I learned from the first session related heavily to the topic issue regarding the last session of the day. This one, “How QAnon and Other Conspiracy Theories Fuel Antisemitism and Hate,” would give teach me how the Right uses conspiracy theories to influence voters and change the outcomes of elections as well as on how necessary conspiracies are for those who align with them and the survival of the far right. Misinformation can only be countered effectively if those intaking the false information can identify it as so. This takes a certain amount of education and exposure to the matter to really be able to effectively recognize the falsehoods. Unfortunately, the communities that suffer the most because of this are poorer communities that don't have the access to this education. These groups that are more easily convinced of untrue claims, as mentioned before, have a shared civic duty to vote, many of which exercise this right. They are voting under the influence of erroneous claims about left-leaning political figures and the democratic party. It is clear that misinformation threatens our democracy in that it causes voters to cast their ballot in accordance with views they may not actually agree with — they have just been lied to about the other side. This made me start to think about why and how these conspiracies get spread so often, this is what they explained next. Many of those who have spread these false claims do so because they rely on it economically. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many were forced to stay home without answers for why. This allowed a gap for people to insert their own thoughts on the new circumstances. Additionally, with the lockdown in effect they all had more time on their hands to spend on forms of social media and creating podcasts, spreading these conspiracies. With more people participating in this form of information exchange, it created environments where people could believe information without hearing concrete facts first. Their communities grew to a point where creators were making a sustainable wage off of spreading these lies and many quit or were fired from their jobs to pursue this full time. This means that people have become reliant on false information to make a living. Regardless of political figures or influence from others, people need to be spreading falsehoods so they can provide for themselves and their families. This made me start to understand why people like Alex Jones intentionally spread the false and hurtful information he does — because he needs to in order to survive.

I walk away from that day with more tools and information on the fight against misinformation and conspiracy theories than I did going into it. Both of the sessions I went to discussed the long thought of question: how can you help someone who has fallen victim to believing false information. Many people have family or friends who have been influenced by these fake facts and want to know how to best counter the information. The thing that the speakers cautioned against is trying to logic with facts. This is because the conspiracies they believe directly contradict or discredit those sources of information: it wont help to try to quote Covid-19 numbers if the person you're talking with doesn't believe in the virus itself. The only true way to attempt to rescue someone from this is keeping a real human connection with them. Being able to reach out and check in with someone who is close to you and believes these false facts is the only way to make them aware of the fallacies. People who get involved in conspiracy groups often lose connection with people who they used to be close with and replace that lost connection with members of whichever group they've subscribed to. Being the person that keeps them tied to the real world may be enough to pull them back before the conspiracies overtake their whole life.