Disrupting Hate: Cultural Intelligence, The Missing Superpower

Farah Pandith, Senior Advisor, Anti-Defamation League?

Robb Henzi, Partner + Head of Policy & Philanthropy Practice, sparks & honey?

Terry Young, Founder & CEO, sparks & honey?

?

Torches in the night dotted a mob of radicalized young men; chants of “Jews will not replace us” echoed through the streets; daytime rallies littered with Nazi flags, iron crosses and weapons: Antisemitism was the hateful glue that bound extremists on the streets of Charlottesville in the late summer of 2017, crystallizing a five-year, dramatic upswing in antisemitism that began in earnest in 2016. Since then, we’ve had shootings and hostage-taking at synagogues, acts of deadly violence at Jewish grocery stores ; and acts of arson at other community hubs; and celebrities using their cultural influence to call for hostility against Jewish people. We see the proliferation of antisemitism in less expected places, such as top universities and workplaces, with a recent study noted that half of its Jewish respondents experienced discrimination at work.???

Antisemitism in America is hardly new, but it has certainly reached a new level of urgency. A recent Anti-Defamation League survey noted a spike in the number of Americans believing in antisemitic tropes, and the ADL’s new Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2022 report documented a 36% increase in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2022 vs. 2021, including surges in organized white supremacist propaganda activity (102% increase) and incidents at both K-12 schools (49% increase) and college campuses (41% increase).? This new research, packed with tangible examples from across the U.S., is startling to digest.?

In the wake of 1/6, a day with a deep antisemitic presence, Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted that images from 1/6 of a radicalized far right are just a snapshot of the new iconography of domestic terrorism in the United States, likening these visual markers as akin to “military fanfiction,” a startling image brought to life over the last several years.?

New Anti-Radicalization Models?

The rise in hate and hate-fueled violence is compelling governments to explore models that can both snuff out existing hate and, increasingly, identify it before it can even catch fire. Some may think that fighting and predicting this activity requires extreme surveillance practices, police states, and an utter loss of privacy as governments expand the ways they track constituents’ activities online and in real life.?

However, the direction extremist movements are taking can be analyzed through shifting the focus of surveillance from people to culture itself with Cultural Intelligence, the practice of tracking patterns in society to predict their potential impact and identify its movements into the future. Cultural Intelligence threads together both human and AI intelligence, quantifying both fast culture (such as social media, videos, memes) and slow culture (academic research, patents, VC investing) and augmenting this data with expert analysis and interpretation. This model has been a tool for the Fortune 100 companies looking to stay ahead of the trends and movements in society — such as extremism — and their effects on industries, people and society at large.?

But more can be done with Cultural Intelligence as it’s deployed in organizations like DARPA and across the public sector, as the U.S. Government is fundamentally unprepared to get to the root reasons responsible for the evolution of domestic terrorism. In applying this type of model to the subject of violent extremism, nations can develop a new approach to combating — and even preventing — future violent actors. A co-author of this piece, Farah Pandith is a pioneer in a soft power approach called “countering violent extremism” (CVE), and she has been working with sparks & honey to examine how we use predictive technological tools to examine what is happening within a society to uncover new paths to build resilience to hate and extremism in communities.?

The new extremist blurs the line of their own identity, as we’ve seen in the ways that the conspiracy theory group QAnon – a movement also visibly intertwined with antisemitism and Nazism - spread amongst mommy blogger groups and other unexpected communities . Signals like this show that while extremism is a complex problem, the greater challenge for those wishing to fight it is understanding the human response to the conditions of the world that lead to its rise: tribalism, migration, climate change, and economic stratification. For many “new extremists,” the simple desire to find belonging and be part of an in-group is enough to knock over the first domino that leads to their eventual radicalization, seeking out increasingly extreme ideology as a way of ordering a disorderly world.?

While the U.S. Government is unparalleled in gathering traditional intelligence, it lags when it comes to gathering emotional intelligence. Cultural Intelligence, meanwhile, allows human analysts to work alongside AI-powered systems to work together to understand how societal conditions and human behavior work together in giving rise to extremism, rather than looking at these issues in siloes. It allows analysts to look across horizontal, zeitgeist-shaping trends rather than restricting analysis to disjointed verticals, industries, and focus areas, and to use Big Data and human intelligence, together, to get thorough assess changes in culture. And by focusing on culture, not just people or institutions or discreet societal conditions, Cultural Intelligence allows us to form a three-dimensional view on massive shifts like the proliferation of antisemitism and the rise in extremism, with culture being the connective tissue.?

?

Identifying Extremist Communities?

When it comes to extremism, Cultural Intelligence allows for more active identification of the communities where extremism can fester, and it empowers counter-terrorism experts to intervene at the top of the funnel. By the time a group like ISIS or the Proud Boys or the Goyim Defense League has been identified as a threat, it is too late. The emotional pull of extremist ideology has scaled and gained momentum. It is a much harder problem to solve—often a stage beyond where a government can eradicate it. Waiting for this stage does not provide an opportunity to stop it before forming or taking root --? and, ultimately, inflicting violence. Cultural Intelligence may allow analysts and experts to go deeper in those interventions by understanding not just the communities in question, but also their worldview and beliefs, pushing analysis and action beyond mere strategic communications.??

The imperative for to approach antisemitism and violent extremism at this culture-wide, zeitgeist-spanning level, is incredibly serious.? While there are dozens of practical things that have been tested and have promise to impact the rise of antisemitism and other forms of hate, there has been no effort to utilize the power of Cultural Intelligence and invest in predictive strategic assessment and planning. The world is waiting to see how we respond to extremism’s rise. And if the U.S. allows its own tribalism and polarization to continue to move along its current trajectory, our global credibility and moral authority will crumble, and the conflicts and violence that we have seen play out at events like Charlottesville, January 6 and the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre will scale globally.??

The time is now for the U.S. to step up and lead the way in this fight and pave a path forward for Cultural Intelligence to help eradicate extremism before its new iterations can gain a foothold. It is not enough for the government to identify new extremist groups or designate it as a threat. It must get out ahead of these movements and predict where, when, and how they will surface. ?