The ADL: Thuggery Under Cover of Fighting Anti-Semitism
The attempt to rehabilitate and whitewash the ADL as a conservative ally against anti-Semitism is a farce. The ADL has been a major advocate of leftist, even far-leftist, causes for decades.
On Sept. 10, just hours after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was felled by a bullet in front of hundreds of college students, leftists began gloating over his death. President Trump blamed the rise in leftist violence on the demonization of conservatives as “Nazis.”
Two days after the assassination, it was reported that the ammunition used by Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson, was inscribed with the words, “Hey Fascist! Catch!” After the murder, Robinson texted his paramour, a man “transitioning” to a woman, that he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” Robinson’s bullet hit Kirk’s neck just as he was talking about violence done in the name of “transgender” ideology.
At the same time, social media posts began appearing that mentioned the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) inclusion of Turning Point in their “Glossary of Extremism and Hate.” The ADL claimed that TPUSA had “a history of bigoted statements about the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and specifically transgender people.”
I personally experienced ADL’s retribution in 2010, when I wrote an op-ed criticizing one of their trademarked educational programs, “No Place for Hate.” They falsely accused me of advocating that young people should be free to “unleash” their “hatred.” I immediately lost a teaching job at a college in Atlanta. On the same day Robinson’s motivations in Kirk’s murder were revealed, the ADL was still alleging “problematic comments by TPUSA spokespeople or activists” and that the organization’s members were “appearing alongside extremists at events or on their shows.”
ADL has a long history of patrolling speech through such guilt-by-association tactics. In 2020, they joined left-wing groups to censor Facebook, trained their employees to edit Wikipedia, and worked with Google in 2021 to censor “extremists” on the Internet by directing search results away from their sites. Elon Musk, who in 2023 had fought off ADL’s attempts to censor X, called the ADL a “hate group” that “hates Christians.” Musk implied that the ADL was partly responsible for Kirk’s death, writing on X that their “false and defamatory labels about people and organizations encourages murder.” Musk wrote that he believed that the FBI under James Comey “was taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL” and therefore “investigating Charlie Kirk & Turning Point, instead of his murderers.”
On Oct. 1, FBI Director Kash Patel, citing the “extremist” designation for TPUSA, announced that the FBI would cut ties with the ADL. Under Comey, the FBI had acted like a “terrorist organization” against Americans, Patel said.
The ADL quickly deleted its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” explaining that though it was a source of “high-level information,” some entries were “outdated”—and that there had been “a number of entries intentionally misrepresented and misused.”
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit expressed the consensus opinion of the conservative commentariat:
In its early days the Anti-Defamation League was a respected civil rights group. Today, the ADL, under the leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt, has morphed into a toxic far-left mouthpiece that maliciously targets and smears any person or entity on the right side of the political spectrum.
In response to the backlash after Kirk’s death, the ADL took down its defenses of woke politics and replaced them with references to fighting anti-Semitism. In October, its website focused on left-wing anti-Semitism and celebrated the freeing of Hamas’s Israeli hostages. Remarkably, the conservative media that had condemned the ADL weeks before immediately embraced it. The neoconservative New York Post welcomed back ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt as a guest columnist and expert on (you guessed it!) anti-Semitism.
When Patel announced that the FBI was also cutting ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Tyler O’Neill of the Daily Signal encouraged focusing on the SPLC rather than the ADL. Coincidentally, or not, O’Neill has written a book on the SPLC.
Other journalists followed suit, presumably viewing the SPLC as the biggest fish in the left’s ocean of activism. But that may be wrong. In 2024, ADL’s revenue was $163 million, exceeding the $129 million raised by the SPLC. Jonathan Greenblatt’s yearly compensation of $1.3 million is more than twice that of the SPLC’s chief executive. The ADL’s fundraising tops $170 million in annual donations, a $65 million increase over last year.
The SPLC often acts like a sister group to the ADL. The two organizations mirror each other, and have similar agendas and strategies. Perhaps the SPLC, which was only formed in 1971, copied the ADL, which is 112 years old. The ADL’s literature sometimes lists the SPLC as a “resource,” and the two organizations occasionally work together. Critics who focus on the SPLC point to their notoriously biased “hate map” of so-called right-wing extremists, but ADL has plenty of “hate maps” as well.
The ADL’s website refers to their amicus brief in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges on behalf of “marriage equality.” The entry stresses the fact that “ADL has long worked for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) rights, opposing discrimination laws and criminalizing and exposing hate crimes.” An ADL program for high school students, “The Supreme Court and the Right to Marry,” features a photograph of two newly married men standing with large pink hearts in front of the Supreme Court.
In a 2019 appeals case, Parents for Privacy v. Dallas School District No. 2, the ADL filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the school district and against parents who opposed boys in their daughters’ bathrooms or on their sports teams. In the 2021 Supreme Court case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the ADL filed an amicus brief supporting the city against a foster care agency that excluded gay couples. In fact, as its 2021 yearly report on Supreme Court cases revealed, the ADL has repeatedly opposed religious and traditionalist Christian positions and advocated for keeping churches closed during COVID.
The ADL has often had a relationship with government agencies and the White House just as close as the one enjoyed by the SPLC. But conservative organizations like America First Legal have not tried to sue the ADL to obtain its records. My emails and phone calls to the ADL asking for information have been ignored. I called ADL Southeast Regional Director Bill Nigut in 2010 asking for information. “I don’t have to answer your questions!” he shouted.
In 2023 and 2024, the ADL finally began to draw the attention of conservative researchers. On Jan. 24, 2024, Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan broke the story that the ADL “flags ‘online amplifiers of LGBTQ+ hate’ as extremists to be examined by law enforcement.” ADL’s latest targets included such “extremists” as The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, Blaze Media, Gays Against Groomers, and Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok.
Conservatives who had been targeted blasted the ADL as “an activist arm of the Democrat Party” (Walsh), playing an “intimidation game” (Rufo), and heading down a “really dangerous road” (Raichik). Raichik, an orthodox Jew, had published an article exposing the ADL’s attempt to pressure Elon Musk to shut down her X account. The ADL placed Raichik in the “Glossary of Extremism” for posting the Boston Children’s Hospital’s promotional video for “gender-affirming” procedures. The ADL offered a far-fetched justification for such outrageous smears, saying there is an “overlap” between the organization’s agenda to fight anti-Semitism and its fight against the “indoctrination and sexualization of children” in neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles.
In 2023, O’Neill at the Daily Signal reported how the ADL had smeared Raichik for her speech at that year’s Conservative Political Action Committee. The ADL’s article, “At CPAC 2023, Anti-Transgender Hate Took Center Stage,” railed against Raichik’s talk. Another speaker, Heather Wilson, co-founded GiveSendGo, an alternative crowdfunding platform for those banned from traditional ones. She spoke about how ADL was working with PayPal to determine which “extremists” should be denied services.
Back in February 2024, Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, called for ending the “ADL-FBI Partnership.” He learned that FBI agents-in-training receive ADL “propaganda,” which begins with a trip to the Holocaust Museum.
Indeed, the Holocaust is widely used by the ADL to smear its political targets. Their educational materials center on a “Pyramid of Hate” that has at its base “biased attitudes” (“seeking out like-minded people” and “lack of self-reflection or awareness of privilege”), leading upward to “Acts of Bias” (“non-inclusive language,” “microaggressions,” “social avoidance”), to “Systemic Discrimination,” then “Bias-Motivated Violence,” and, finally, at the top, “Genocide.” The pyramid is reproduced in Greenblatt’s 2022 book, It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable—and How We Can Stop It, in the chapter titled “From Microaggressions to Genocide.”
Do Greenblatt’s recent moves to highlight anti-Semitism in Hamas and its allies indicate ADL’s departure from left-wing activism to a more centrist mission of fighting anti-Semitism?
Critics of the ADL believe that Greenblatt abandoned the organization’s original mission when he took over from Abe Foxman in 2015. Neoconservative journalist Jonathan Tobin in 2022 alleged that Greenblatt helped to “shift the ADL from its former stance as the nonpartisan gold standard for monitoring hate to being just another liberal activist group.” In Tobin’s judgment, Greenblatt had “to go.”
In 2022, Tablet editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz said Greenblatt had abandoned Jews who were being attacked on campuses, at their homes, and in synagogues in exchange for large donations from anti-Semitic celebrities and corporations. Greenblatt, who had come from the Obama-created federal Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, was ill-suited to combat anti-Semitism in its present leftist form, Leibovitz wrote.
Leibovitz called for Jews to get a “divorce” from the ADL, which under Greenblatt’s leadership was “no longer a Jewish organization.” It had gone far astray from the days of Abe Foxman, who had kept “the organization’s focus … on its 26 regional chapters staffed by hardworking and dedicated men and women who … diligently collected data about antisemitism … reporting their findings to law enforcement,” and educated “to make sure future generations wouldn’t be inflamed with antisemitism’s feverish appeal.”
The idea that the ADL was better under Foxman is false. It was under his tenure in 2010 that I had my run-in with Bill Nigut because of my opposition to the ADL’s anti-hate campaign—and then learned about my cancellation as a college instructor. In hindsight, the ADL’s anti-hate campaign was a prototype for all the emotionally manipulative “woke” ideologies that would dominate the country a decade later: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
Simply put, the characterization of the ADL as a once-venerable organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism is a glaring misrepresentation. ADL has been a major advocate of leftist, even far-left, causes for decades. It has, among other ideologically driven activities, slandered early critics of globalism and post-war anti-Communists. The organization has played a gigantic role in transforming our legal system from one of blind justice to one that favors “victim groups.” It has also called for punishing those who speak harshly about protected groups. Indeed, the ADL brags that its staff “drafted the nation’s first model hate crimes legislation.” For 80 years, the ADL has been teaching local, state, and federal law enforcement how to spot “hate,” “White Supremacy,” and “Anti-Government Extremism,” as our streets deteriorate into lawless hellholes.
The story of ADL’s history in Greenblatt’s It Could Happen Here and on the ADL website often deviates noticeably from reality. This book describes, as the catalyst for its 1913 founding, “a brutal episode of anti-Jewish hate, the infamous Leo Frank affair.” Frank, a 29-year-old superintendent at a pencil factory and a member of Atlanta’s rising German-Jewish elite, was convicted of the murder of 13-year-old worker Mary Phagan in 1913 and, two years later, torn from his jail cell and lynched while waiting for an appeal.
No court ever established that Frank was wrongfully convicted, but Greenblatt writes that Frank “was accused and, despite exculpatory evidence, wrongly convicted of the crime.”
After a second attempt by the ADL and other Jewish organizations, Frank received a pardon (of sorts) in 1986, stemming from the fact that the state failed to protect him from the lynching. The negotiations were conducted behind the scenes, without informing the public or the Phagan family.
According to Greenblatt, “Stopping the defamation of Jews was the ADL’s ‘immediate object,’ but the organization’s larger purpose was to ‘secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.’” In the 1930s, the ADL began “fact-finding” and educating Americans about homegrown movements sympathetic to European fascism, and which were “scapegoating” Jews “for causing the Great Depression.” The ADL made a special example of Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin, Greenblatt wrote, for radio broadcasts “that spew anti-Semitic diatribes and pro-German propaganda over the airwaves.”
Historian Alan Brinkley, who is hardly a right-wing source, has contested this stereotypical view of Coughlin. According to Brinkley, Coughlin “said very little about Jews … before 1938,” after which Brinkley faults Coughlin mainly for failing to police anti-Semitic articles in his journal Social Justice that were written by others. In fact, Coughlin’s alleged anti-Semitism “has, of necessity, rested on a very few, usually passing remarks,” Brinkley wrote, such as referring briefly to Wall Street bankers as “modern Shylocks … grown fat and wealthy.” Coughlin even defended Jews against the charge of avariciousness, blaming “our Christian ancestors who forced the Jew to hoard gold’” by prohibiting them from owning land.
In 1933, Coughlin had for the first time attacked his enemies in the world of Big Business by name, and in 1934, some observers noticed “that a disproportionate number of the names were Jewish.” But Coughlin’s sermons referenced Christian (usually Protestant) bankers and financial establishments almost 50 percent more frequently than Jewish men or firms. By 1935, the proportion of Jews named increased, but “never very much more than half the total, and never did Coughlin draw any special attention to their Jewishness,” Brinkley wrote.
“More importantly,” Coughlin’s statements “seemed not to evoke any serious expressions of anti-Semitism from his followers,” Brinkley wrote. “There were carping references to Bernard Baruch and a few other Jewish financiers, but not nearly as often as there were attacks upon [J. P.] Morgan or [Andrew] Mellon or any number of other prominent Protestant bankers.”
So, even back in the 1930s, the ADL vastly exaggerated the supposed anti-Semitism of one of its original targets. Brinkley concluded that, “At worst, [Coughlin’s] rhetoric—with its excoriation of ‘international bankers’ and its references to ‘money changers’ and the ‘sin of usury’—may have worked in a diffuse way to evoke images and produce stereotypes.”
Ironically, Franklin Roosevelt, in his first presidential inaugural address, also went after “money changers,” declaring that with his election, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” The notoriously left-wing president promised restrictions on “banking and credits and investments” and an “end to speculation with other people’s money.” But the ADL, rather than attacking FDR as an anti-Semite, attacked his political enemies.
In its numerous postwar-era books, the ADL also charged conservatives with anti-Semitism for merely calling attention to the fact that most Jews backed the Democratic Party. But it would be quite natural for a political opponent of FDR to oppose his financial supporters, and it is hardly a secret that Democrats since the New Deal have relied heavily on Jewish donors. As Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman explain in their 2014 book, FDR and the Jews, “Catholics and Jews accounted for about a quarter of [New York State] voters … and a much larger percentage of Democrats.” FDR had inherited anti-Jewish prejudices from his parents, who were members of the Hudson River Valley gentry. Still, he recognized that, as Breitman and Lichtman wrote, “The Democratic Party relied considerably on Jewish money.” In 1912, contributions from nine Jewish donors from New York State—including Bernard Baruch and Henry Morgenthau Sr.—to the National Democratic Campaign Fund amounted to 24 percent of the funds collected from New York State and “7.5 percent of funds raised nationwide.” At the time, Jews constituted just 0.59 percent of the American population.
“Jewish money for Democratic coffers would continue to pour in during FDR’s years in national politics,” Breitman and Lichtman wrote, and it would continue for subsequent Democrats like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Carter learned from a June 1977 memo written by his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, that more than 70 of the 125 members of the Democratic Finance Council were Jewish, and that in 1976, “over 60% of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish.” FDR rewarded such contributors as Baruch (known on Wall Street as “The Speculator”) and Morgenthau’s son Henry with important positions in his administration.
In discussing the 1940s, the ADL’s online history lists the launch of “massive research operations to uncover Nazi supporters and hate groups in the U.S., making its findings available to government agencies in Washington, D.C. and to the press.” The FBI and the media increasingly “turn to ADL for its expertise,” it brags. This “expertise” often involved intelligence-gathering through unlawful spying and wiretapping, and it targeted Americans who didn’t happen to share ADL’s and Roosevelt’s war fervor. As Lynne Olson reveals in her 2014 history of the lead-up to American involvement in World War II, Those Angry Days, in the 1930s and early 1940s, the ADL “penetrated such organizations as the German-American Bund, America First, the so-called mothers’ organizations, and the offices of a number of isolationist members of Congress.”
In other words, the ADL spied not only on noninterventionist groups opposed to an alliance with Soviet Russia, and more offensive German-American groups holding Nazi-like rallies, but also on the offices of members of Congress! Arnold Forster, ADL’s general counsel and coauthor of numerous diatribes against “the Right,” characterized such activity in his memoirs as needed fact-finding. The ADL needed to engage in espionage, he argued, in order to learn who “were giving aid and comfort, wittingly or otherwise, to the anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi cabal within our borders.” The ADL’s spying on Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan could only be justified by Roosevelt’s labeling of all his anti-war critics as Nazi-abetting “Fifth Columnists.”
Later in the 1940s, the ADL’s timeline recounts how it filed “its first amicus curiae … brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1947,” in Shelley v. Kraemer, challenging restrictive housing covenants. In 1948, the ADL advocated in McCollum v. Board of Education (“a church-state separation case”) against releasing students from classrooms to attend religious instruction in public classrooms. That was the same year the ADL timeline notes that it “rejoices in the establishment of the [Jewish] State of Israel.”
In the 1950s, the ADL published books that defamed conservatives as “troublemakers” for criticizing the country’s global commitments, its subservience to the United Nations, and its deviation from what had once been understood as constitutional principles. This is the thrust of such tirades as The Troublemakers and Cross-Currents, published by the ADL in 1956 and advertised as “exposing hate mongers ranging from the KKK to Nazi sympathizers to extremists abroad.” Cross-Currents by Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, ADL’s national director, attacked McCarthyism in a way that suggested fear about Soviet Communism was only disguised anti-Semitism.
In the 1960s, the ADL published books such as Danger on the Right, Report on the Ku Klux Klan, and Report on the John Birch Society, 1966. The Forster-Epstein team’s book Danger on the Right (1964) portrays the American right as a veritable rogues’ gallery of raging anti-Semites. Among these rogues were Robert Welch of the John Birch Society (JBS); Frederick Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade; Christian ministers Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire; law professor Charles Manion; journalist Dan Smoot; anti-New Deal and anti-communist educator George Benson; anti-communist ministers of the Church League of America; Conservative Society of America; the political action and educational organization, Americans for Constitutional Action; the anti-income tax Liberty Amendment Committee; editors of conservative magazines, including James L. Wick of Human Events and William F. Buckley, Jr. of National Review; and the conservative youth organizations Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (now the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and Young Americans for Freedom.
The fact that Buckley had publicly reprimanded the JBS in 1962 was not enough for Forster and Epstein. In 1965, Buckley came closer to accommodating these leftist critics by entirely excommunicating the anti-communist organization.
The JBS was one of ADL’s most persistent targets in the 1960s and 1970s. One ADL-admiring historian, Matthew Dallek, who disapproved of spying on or otherwise stymieing radical civil rights groups, expresses glee in his 2023 book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right at the success of the ADL “Birch Watchers” who had spied on the JBS. From around 1959 to the early 1970s, Birch Watchers compiled thousands of dossiers on JBS members. Dallek recounts how on March 28, 1964, an ADL spy, codenamed Bos #4, knocked on the door of the JBS headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts. Bos #4 misrepresented himself as a JBS chapter leader, and was greeted and invited in by founder Robert Welch himself. Bos #4 had been sent after Forster had received a tip that Welch had rejected an article for the JBS magazine American Opinion by columnist Westbrook Pegler, a popular rabble-rousing anti-Roosevelt populist.
“Forster wanted to know why,” Dallek wrote, so that he could get “dirt that the ADL could exploit to embarrass the society.” Bos #4 learned that Pegler’s article had been rejected because of his harsh criticism of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. Warren was Norwegian-born and criticized by conservatives for his liberal rulings. But the ADL worked energetically to link criticism of the Warren Court to (you guessed it!) anti-Semitism.
But, as Dallek notes, ADL had problems that looked even worse than what it could pin on the JBS. “Some of ADL’s financial investigations, from using third parties for credit checks to fishing for data about individuals’ trusts, may even have been illegal.” Nevertheless, that didn’t keep ADL from broadcasting private financial and employment information about individual JBS members through its newsletters, press releases, and communications with the FBI.
For all its excitement about a widespread communist conspiracy, JBS went to some lengths to keep racists and anti-Semites out of its organization. Pegler, although a gifted polemicist, was eventually dropped for some bad-taste remarks that could be seen as anti-Semitic. And, according to ADL’s Report on the John Birch Society, JBS Founder Welch had written “several pieces that could be described as anti-anti-Semitic, manifestly in an effort to keep his organization free of anti-Jewish taint.” Welch had dropped from JBS membership rolls James Oviatt, “a Los Angeles haberdasher,” after the ADL exposed his activities, like sending The Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zion to his customers.
JBS Public Relations Director John Rousselot’s statement that JBS had been “concerned with the problem of anti-Semitic infiltrators” was interpreted by Epstein and Forster to mean avoiding “what is actually an inherent problem of the Society and to dodge its implications.” Epstein and Forster note that in the JBS’s November 1965 Bulletin, Welch complained that the “ADL stirs up the problem ‘by unjustly accusing people of anti-Semitism.’”
Welch was right 60 years ago, and the ADL hasn’t changed its character since. In its Oct. 26 article, “The ADL’s Medicine Is Causing the Disease,” Tablet writer Joel Finkelstein makes essentially the same argument Welch made decades ago: that the ADL’s baseless hectoring actually does create real anti-Semitism as a reaction. The ADL’s attacks did not account for the experiences of those like Jewish philosopher Walter Kaufman, who, Dallek writes, had “heard rumors of antisemitism in the society, but who after six months of membership, three of them as a chapter leader … called it ‘the greatest organization ever.’”
The ADL typically treated the JBS’s black members as moronic dupes. According to Forster and Epstein: “While waging war against the civil rights movement, the John Birch Society has, at the same time, diligently sought to create a public image of itself as friendly to Negroes.” One of their recruits and a prominent member of the Society, George Schuyler, supposedly provided evidence of how “Birch spokesmen go out of their way to make it clear that the Society has Negro members.”
The ADL smeared JBS members as neo-Nazis and allies of the Klan, and organized protests while pressuring venue owners to cancel their events. Such defamatory tactics, always directed at the right, would continue, although the right-wing targets would change. Yesterday’s targets, such as Church League of America and JBS, became 21st-century Tea Party members, Southerners protesting removal of statues, immigration reformers, and Republicans who questioned the outcome of an election.
The ADL’s gaze is usually temporarily diverted from enemies on the right when it comes to critics of Israel. A journal article about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt presented scholarly, if not airtight, arguments about their subject. As usual, the ADL hurled demeaning accusations instead of reasoned rebuttals. Thus, Abe Foxman levied charges of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in his book-length response to Mearsheimer and Walt, which bears the inflammatory title, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.
When it comes to Israel, the very groups that otherwise are under the ADL’s protective wing become their hated targets. In 1996, the ADL agreed to pay $200,000 to Arab-American, black, and American Indian groups and individuals who claimed they were victims of the ADL’s hired intelligence agents. A San Francisco police raid on the ADL’s Northern California office in 1993 had revealed that the ADL was keeping files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals. Another related lawsuit dragged on until 1999 because the plaintiffs refused to sign confidentiality agreements. In that case, too, the ADL settled to avoid the exposure of a trial.
The ADL’s attacks expanded to those trying to keep the Boy Scouts free of homosexuality. Foxman wrote that he was “stunned” by the Supreme Court decision upholding the exclusion of gay men from the Boy Scouts, and thus allowing organizations to be “free to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans.” In that explosive case, the ADL had filed a brief on behalf of James Dale, the assistant scoutmaster who was expelled after it was revealed that he was gay.
In 2013, Foxman coauthored Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet, with Christopher Wolf, the national chair of ADL’s Civil Rights Committee, who dedicated the book to his husband. They pointed to the case in 2010 of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death after his roommate Dharun Ravi secretly recorded and then publicized on Twitter a same-sex romantic encounter Clementi had in his dorm room. “Hate speech on the Internet is not just a theoretical problem” or “a matter of civil discourse or of maintaining a higher standard of decency in our approach to matters of politics, religion, and social issues,” Foxman and Wolf wrote. “It can literally be a matter of life and death.”
The book preaches against hate based on “race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.” Foxman and Wolf offered as solutions ADL’s models of anti-bullying education and hate crime laws, advocating harsher sentences for crimes “motivated by hate.” They were proud that, at that point, 43 states had enacted laws “similar to or based on the ADL model.”
But, following the suicide in March 2018 of 34-year-old Andrew Dodson, a promising engineer and scientist, who peacefully participated in the Unite the Right protest against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville in August 2017, the ADL had nothing to say. Counter-protestors attacked Dodson and then mercilessly doxed and smeared him on social media and national television, ruining his reputation.
Nor did anyone at the ADL tear their shirts in grief over “prejudice” when 37-year-old Jan. 6 protestor Matthew Perna committed suicide in 2022, while awaiting sentencing for what was essentially trespassing. The J6 protestors were abused by guards, put in solitary confinement for months, and denied healthy food, heat, and medical care when they were imprisoned. The ADL, of course, said nothing.
In Greenblatt’s view, the Unite the Right rally made “the awful demons of twentieth-century hate” rise again. Although those at the ADL were “repulsed, dismayed, and terrified,” they were “not surprised.” The ADL had been following the “online chatter among the so-called alt-right.” They “alerted local and state authorities” about possible violence and “had posted public warnings about it the week before the rally.”
Indeed, the ADL’s Aug. 7, 2017, post warning that “’Unite the Right’ Rally Could Be Largest White Supremacist Gathering in a Decade” helped to draw white supremacists to the rally, to mingle with those like Dodson and organizer Jason Kessler, who were neither white supremacists nor anti-Semites—as well as Antifa and Black Lives Matter counter-protestors. Antifa, though, according to ADL, is nothing to worry about—just a “loosely organized, left-wing and anarchist anti-racist movement,” and the ADL stood in enthusiastic “solidarity” with the Black Lives Matter rioters after the death of George Floyd.
The independent Heaphy Report on the Charlottesville event reveals that ADL provided the police department with an “event assessment,” which discussed the scheduled groups and speakers, as well as the “schism between some white supremacist groups and the Oath Keepers, a self-styled neutral peacekeeping militia.” Kessler, a local resident, opposed the proposed removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in downtown Charlottesville, an effort initiated by city leaders through a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces. The City Council’s decision to accept the commission’s recommendation and remove the statue was challenged in court, and the case remained stalled due to a state law protecting “war memorials.” After the 2016 election, city leaders declared Charlottesville to be the “capital of the resistance.”
Anne Wilson Smith’s Charlottesville Untold offers an even-handed account that relies on the Heaphy Report, contemporaneous articles and videos, trial transcripts, and interviews with participants. In her telling, Antifa and BLM first assaulted Unite the Right protestors with bottles filled with urine, feces, frozen liquids, burning chemicals, and other weapons, while police stood by. The lack of police response led to the chaos that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, who was run over when she and her fellow leftists swarmed the car of 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., who panicked. Fields received a life sentence after pleading guilty to federal hate crime charges to avoid the death penalty. This was part of a deal authorized by then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr on June 28, 2019.
The ADL followed up with a report, “Charlottesville: One Year Later,” featuring a photograph of the protest-eve tiki-torch march with the by-then deceased Andrew Dodson in an Arkansas Engineering shirt. Unite the Right’s stated purpose, which was to protest the removal of a Confederate monument, was false, declared the ADL. “Their true purpose: To show to the world the strength and defiance of the white supremacist movement.”
The ADL trumpeted how “white supremacists” at Charlottesville learned that “actions have consequences,” such as becoming unemployable, ostracized at school, and deplatformed by social media, web hosting companies, and money transfer companies. But, the ADL warned, temporary setbacks did not silence forever this thunder from the right. In the prior year, their Center on Extremism had “tracked more than 900 white supremacist propaganda incidents” and “54 public events attended by white supremacists.”
Charlottesville and Jan. 6 proved a bonanza for the ADL. Oren Segal, vice president of ADL’s Center on Extremism, bragged in congressional testimony that the ADL “provided expert and financial support in the federal civil rights case (Sines v. Kessler) brought against the neo-Nazis who organized that rally.” The ADL then released an 886-page Continuing Legal Education packet, “After Charlottesville,” to drive home its account of the turmoil.
A web resource page, “January 6, 2021 Insurrection,” boasted how the ADL had signed on as co-counsel in a civil lawsuit against Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. “The January 6 Effect: An Evolution of Hate and Extremism,” provided a map showing where “Hate and Extremism Go Mainstream.” On Jan. 7, 2021, the ADL let us know that “The Storming of the Capitol Was Predictable” and on Jan. 8, “Extremists React to Pro-Trump Siege on Capitol” denied that Antifa had infiltrated the protest. Never did the ADL mention that peaceful protestors were ushered into the Capitol building by police officers, nor the incendiary devices thrown by police, which caused a stampede leading to the death of Rosanne Boyland, who was beaten by police officer Lila Morris as she lay on the ground, immobilized.
Less than a week later, the ADL in a post, “Far-Right Extremists Memorialize ‘Martyr’ Ashli Babbitt,” attacked those “accusing the media of anti-white bias, with posters claiming, against all evidence, that police used unnecessary force against the U.S. Capitol rioters while showing far more restraint against Black Lives Matter and other social justice protestors.” ADL objected to the casting of Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was shot by Capitol police officer Michael Byrd, as an “innocent victim of law enforcement and the government.”
When Travis and Gregory McMichael were railroaded in a George Floyd-era show trial in Georgia, the ADL issued statements about how they provided help to the governor in crafting state hate crime legislation. It may not matter that Travis acted in self-defense when 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, a mentally ill, drug-using multiple felon, tried to seize Travis’s shotgun. The ADL, however, “welcomed” the sentencing of father and son to life in prison without possibility of parole. They thanked “AG Garland @TheJusticeDept and @FBI for working to bring us closer to justice.” Those supporting the appeal were just “White Supremacists.”
The ADL also keeps tabs on “far-right conferences” attended by “extremists” like General Mike Flynn, entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, and Dr. Simone Gold. The ADL’s own conferences offer opportunities to learn how to litigate against “extremists” by prolonging discovery and thereby bankrupting nonprofits—as the New York Attorney General’s office is doing to VDARE. Concerns about immigration expressed by VDARE and others are cast by the ADL as “white supremacist propaganda.” Any criticism of George Soros or his funding of left-wing activist groups is a sign of anti-Semitism that “lurks” behind
right-wing ideas.
No other leftist organization has had as much influence on the American government for as long as the ADL. For about 100 years, the ADL has engaged in spying, harassing, and smearing “right-wing extremists,” whom they claim are the source of most political violence—a claim that New York Post columnist David Harsanyi has proved is “transparently bogus.” Despite its moral pretensions, the ADL has no authority to train police, teach school children, or engage in warrantless spying against those who hold views that conflict with theirs.
Unfortunately, the ADL’s insistence that it is combating anti-Semitism has allowed it to escape the critical scrutiny that has been applied to the left’s other “hate organizations.” That needs to change.