It’s all fine and great that Elon Musk is toying with the leftist Anti-Defamation League by threatening to sue it for (ironically) defamation. The scammy nonprofit has pushed advertisers to stay away from his social media company X. But the ADL should have been prosecuted a long time ago for defrauding the American public. And its co-conspirators in the media should have been, too.
Musk this week said it was the ADL’s fault that X, formerly known as Twitter, is hemorrhaging dollars after the shakedown outfit called on corporations to halt ad buys on Musk’s platform. “Since the acquisition, The @ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic,” he wrote. Musk also claimed that ad revenue was down 60 percent, “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL.”
Whether the 60 percent figure is true doesn’t matter. It’s illegal in this country to lie in ways that falsely besmirch a person or private business in ways that cause them harm, including the financial kind. That’s precisely what the ADL does all day long, and it’s never in the name of “anti-hate” or whatever saccharine term the left is using at the moment.
The ADL systematically targets people and businesses that either fail to advance or actively oppose the primary goals of the Democratic Party. No goal is currently more primary than the suppression of oppositional political speech and information. Your opponents can talk, but if no one hears them, did they really make a sound?
It was when Musk purchased Twitter at a premium last year with a vow to rein in its over-paid censorship zealots — who giddily and exclusively focus their energies on posts from right-wingers — that the ADL aimed its artillery directly at Musk.
The New York Times in December published the headline, “Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find.” That frightful claim was backed up, predictably, by none other than the ADL.
Examples of “hate speech” that had supposedly seen an increase under Twitter’s new ownership included “slurs against Black Americans,” “slurs against gay men,” and “antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism.” The Times attributed the findings to the ADL, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, “and other groups that study online platforms.” The report conceded that the alleged incidents of hate speech were “relatively small” but nonetheless cited the claim by the “researchers” that “the increases were atypically high.”
There was no public information on the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s website to correspond with what was asserted in the Times article, and I don’t know what “other groups” the paper was referring to, so that left the ADL.
On the same day as the Times story, the ADL published a page on its website called “Extremists, Far Right Figures Exploit Recent Changes to Twitter,” claiming that “In the past few weeks, the ADL noted both an increase in antisemitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of antisemitic posts, a troubling situation that will likely get worse.”
How did the ADL know that? Why, because the ADL itself said so! The citations for those assertions came in the form of two hyperlinks, both of which directed to a pair of tweets from the ADL. One said that in the two weeks after Musk formally became the owner of Twitter, there was a 61.3 percent increase in the “volume” of tweets “with an antisemitic sentiment.” The actual number of such tweets allegedly came in at a grand total of 163 mean, anti-Jewish tweets. To put that into perspective, there are roughly 500 million tweets posted each day.
To find 163 out of hundreds of millions is apparently what it means to be “atypically high” in volume.
The second tweet by the ADL claimed that under Musk, there has been a decline in the amount of action taken by Twitter against tweets that are “flagged” for hateful content. “In two weeks,” it said, “Twitter went from taking action on 60% of antisemitic tweets to taking action on only 30%.”
Setting aside that the whole point of Musk buying Twitter (supposedly) was to end the aggressive and unfair censorship that it had become infamous for, the ADL had only reported 60 tweets. Out of that, 40 of them were untouched.
If it alarms you that 40 mean tweets are floating in the ether at any given time, try stepping away from your phone and counting to ten. It should be okay.
The ADL does this routinely. It makes a sweeping accusation about bigotry, racism, antisemitism, white supremacy, or some other fiction, accompanied by a laughably thin “study,” and then hands it over to The New York Times, CNN, or The Washington Post to repeat verbatim, no questions asked. And it’s all for the purpose of shutting up and shutting down its political opponents. Namely, anyone to the right of Ilhan Omar (except when she says anything mildly critical of Israel as a welfare state of the U.S., then the ADL gets mad).
Back in 2021, the ADL published another one of its cheat studies, purporting that “White Supremacist Propaganda Spikes in 2020.”
“ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) tracked a near-doubling of white supremacist propaganda efforts in 2020,” the report said, “which included the distribution of racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ fliers, stickers, banners and posters.”
The report stated that a group called “Patriot Front,” which the ADL considers to be white supremacist (a category leftists often confuse with freedom-loving motorboat owners), “continues to avoid using traditional white supremacist language and symbols in its messaging, instead using ambiguous phrases such as ‘America First,’ ‘United we stand,’ ‘Better Dead Than Red,’ ‘Two Parties. One Tyranny,’ [and] ‘Reclaim America.'”
Hilarious. “Better dead than red,” a longtime anti-communist catchphrase, is now supposedly white supremacy.
Another example included in the report was the slogan “Open Borders Spread Disease.” That one was particularly interesting since, at the time, we were in the middle of a pandemic. President Biden would even use an executive order to quickly expel migrants crossing the Southern border under the explicit rationale that it prevented the spread of disease. The ADL never called that white supremacy.
To be sure, the report did identify some printed slogans by certain groups that normal people would consider to be hateful. But when they include “United we stand” as an example of bigotry, you might begin to wonder why the ADL felt the need to pad the numbers.
Not that it’s a problem for the ADL. They can count on the media to bark the same line on command, no matter the particulars, no matter the year.
CNN: “Distribution of White supremacist propaganda surged in 2020, ADL says”
Washington Post: “White-supremacist propaganda remained high in the United States in 2021, new ADL report says”
ABC News: “White supremacist propaganda in US reaches record high in 2022, ADL reports”
Tell me you’re engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the American public without telling me you’re engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the American public.
