“The issue I think with the ADL is not a question of hate speech,” Elon Musk said told the All-In conference this week. “It’s not a question of antisemitism, obviously. It’s that the ADL and a lot of other organizations have become activist organizations, which are acting far beyond their stated mandate or their original mandate.”
Musk largely attributes the decline in X’s U.S. revenue to the Anti-Defamation League’s pressuring corporations and organizations to not advertise there.
“The ADL was instrumental in getting Donald Trump deplatformed,” he explained via video link to the Los Angeles gathering. “And then when we restored the account, they made it super clear that they regarded simply restoring his account on Twitter and X, that constituted hate speech. Well, he hasn’t even said anything.”
Musk portrayed the organization as “captured by the woke agenda” and generally betraying its mission. This ignores the fact that the group has long confused fighting the Right with fighting the defamation of Jews.
In Birchers, historian Matthew Dallek unveils the ADL’s counterintelligence operation against the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist group that aerated numerous conspiracy theories but never partook in any violence, that launched 64 years ago. Eccentric or, as its anti-free speech campaign involving Twitter now indicates, unapproved views demanded an un-American campaign of suppression, the ADL concluded.
Dallek quotes one of the leaders of the ADL’s sub rosa incursion upon the civil liberties of other Americans as instructing underlings to find a “friendly source in a large department store” to “run a credit check” on a man they merely suspected of Birch membership. “We secured the license number of the car in which [the priests and nuns] left the scene of the meeting and we hope to identify them later on,” explains a report on attendees of a Bircher lecture secretly monitored by ADL agents at a junior high in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Elsewhere, Dallek relays how ADL members posed as Birchers and joined white supremacist organizations.
“They obtained chapter membership lists, ran credit reports on individual Birchers, ferreted out their employment records, traced their financial transactions, wrote down their license plate numbers, obtained a codicil to a Bircher donor’s will, stumped them with tough questions during call-in radio shows, set-up a Birch chapter meeting on false pretenses so an ADL target could be ‘interviewed,’ and studied their personal and professional associations,” Dallek writes. “Some of the scariest or most unflattering bits ended up in the press.”
Did not the Anti-Defamation League become a Defamation League here?
The ADL could at least point all those years ago to their targets pushing the rather preposterous idea of President Eisenhower’s secret allegiance to the Communist Party. Now they seek to muzzle people who object to adults mutilating the genitals of children. Musk restoring accounts to Twittericans banned under the previous regime for speech as innocuous, and undisputed until a decade or so ago, as “men aren’t women.”
Musk meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in San Francsico next week. As the longest-tenured prime minister in the history of Israel, he speaks for Jews in a more credible way than does the ADL. In other words, Jews voted for him. Who elected the intolerant left-wingers running the ADL to proclaims what constitutes hatred and bigotry and what does not?
Their behavior, in the early 1960s and today, strikes as profoundly creepy. Why did they do license-plate tracking of nuns who attended anti-Communist speeches? Why must they lobby companies to boycott advertising on a platform just because it permits users to air ideas that the ADL dislikes?
Creepy people necessarily become mission creepy. Their compulsion overcomes purpose. While Musk’s statement on the ADL’s diverging from its mission excludes the fact that this started even before his birth, it does not misunderstand the disconnect between ostensible purpose and actual efforts. As shown by unfunny comedians using the microphone to proselytize for their political faith, athletes fixating on causes rather than winning, or beer companies marketing ideology rather than alcoholic beverages, world-saving progressivism consumes its adherents and reorients any mission toward political ends.
“And what’s this got to do with antisemitism?” Musk asks of the ADL’s preoccupation with X allowing the former president to tweet. “Donald Trump’s son-in-law is Jewish, he has Jewish grandkids. I’m pretty sure he’s not antisemitic, okay. I mean, he was at their wedding!”
Perusing ADL documents abjuring the “toxic” and “transphobic” sexual identity “super straight” — one who exclusively dates those biologically of the opposite sex — one begins to wonder what’s the ADL got to do with antisemitism?
READ MORE: