SPECIAL EPISODE: How the ADL Abandoned its Stated Mission in Order to Weaponize Anti-Semitism Accusations for the Online Censorship Regime and the Neoliberal Establishment | SYSTEM UPDATE #142
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 and its central mission was as clear as it was noble, to combat the spread of anti-Semitism and the accompanying false demonization of the Jewish people on which anti-Semitism has always depended.
Over the last century, the ADL has built a reputation as a credible and serious group that both fought against one of humanity's longest and most toxic bigotries, while also steadfastly defending core civil liberties, and in particular, the virtues of free speech.
But like so many institutions of authority in the United States after 2016, which entailed the dual traumas of the UK's departure from the EU and then the far more traumatic defeat still of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, the ADL has now radically transformed into something much, much different.
Indeed, in many ways it has become an utterly fraudulent organization.
Its work now has very little to do with combating anti-Semitism.
That's just the marketing costume or the pretext it uses to wield power.
The real mission of the ADL could not be clearer.
It's to advance the interests of the Democratic Party, to ensure the empowerment of Democratic Party leaders, and to protect and preserve the dominant ideology that the establishment wings of both political parties are devoted to, in particular to protect the status quo ideology from meaningful dissent and populist anger.
The ADL is in the news this week because it all but demanded the power to dictate to Axe, formerly known as Twitter, and to its owner Elon Musk what political views can and cannot be heard on the platform.
And that is not some pipe dream, as the ADL itself has previously boasted, and as news accounts confirm, it is already playing that central censorship role at numerous companies throughout Silicon Valley.
Determining, for instance, who has views that are sufficiently extremist, that requires them to be banned from PayPal and from the financial system in general, or who spouts what the EDL and its leaders consider to be hate speech or disinformation, and thus must be silenced and banned from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.
The tactic of the ADL is thuggish, but it's also now common among liberal institutions.
Namely, they explicitly threaten that these companies either obey the ADL's censorship demands or stand formally accused by the ADL of being anti-Semites or somehow promoting other strains of bigotry.
Which can destroy the reputations of anyone they so accuse and destroy their ability to attract corporate advertisers necessary to the survival and prosperity of these platforms.
In other words, like most liberal establishment institutions, the ADL has cynically weaponized and thus completely trivialized what ought to be serious concepts relating to bigotry.
And in doing so, they are attempting to seize the power to dictate what you can and cannot say, which political opinions you may and may not express, over virtually every consequential online platform, with very severe real world consequences if you violate their decrees.
The union of state and corporate power to uphold and implement this new censorship regime is one of the topics on which this show and my journalism primarily focuses.
It is vital to understand how it functions and what weapons it utilizes.
Understanding what the ADL now is and what they are doing is vital in its own right, but is of particular importance for understanding the regime of censorship rapidly enveloping political discourse in the West.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the main focal points of System Update is the various ways that the establishment and centers of power in the West have now developed to stigmatize and increasingly to bar or even outlaw various forms of dissent.
Last week we reported on the efforts to exclude the independent media site The Grey Zone, which tends to focus on aspects of US foreign policy and imperialism in a very critical way, to exclude them from the financial system.
And one of the most recent developments was the closing of the account without any explanation by the fundraising site GoFundMe after The Grey Zone had created a fundraising campaign among its readers to try and generate enough funds to hire three independent journalists and to employ them at a lovable wage and the campaign was a success.
Grey Zone readers decided they wanted to donate their money to that cause and yet GoFundMe without any explanation closed the account and at least as of the time we interviewed the site's founding editor had frozen those funds and we were reported on that Both to report on it, but also to place it in this broader historical context of the way in which internet freedom has been increasingly attacked and assaulted.
And this has been something that's been going on for quite some time, but it really accelerated after the subjects of the British Crown decided in 2016 that they no longer wanted to be part of the European Union and approved Brexit.
As a way of leaving the EU, and then of course the most cataclysmic event in the eyes of Western neoliberals and Western elites was the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the ultimate establishment neoliberal candidate, in the election of Donald Trump.
And after 16, what had been some brewing efforts to eliminate dissent off of the internet, to censor it, to control the flow of information, became radically accelerated.
The lesson that Western elites took from Brexit and then Trump's election was not that there are radical flaws in the policies of Western institutions of power.
There was no self-reflection, let alone willingness to accept blame at all for any of those events.
Instead it was that essentially people had become too free.
People became too free to express their opinions, to circulate information that deviated from establishment decrees, and that therefore the only solution was a crackdown.
Which is often what happens when establishment power centers begin to perceive that power is slipping out of their hands.
That was basically a fulfillment of the promise of the internet, that they would no longer be able to control what people think using their centralized means of corporate and state control, that instead the internet would just diffuse power and disperse it.
And that's exactly what began to happen.
And because of Brexit and Trump's election in particular, they began to perceive that it had become an existential threat to their own power.
And after the 2016 election, that was when the various weapons of dissent suppression and censorship began really to emerge and to be developed and then aggressively implemented.
An exclusion of dissidents from their financial services is one increasingly aggressive tactic that they are using.
Obviously, working in collaboration with big tech is something that Western governments, and the American government in particular, are doing to ensure that dissent from their policy views, such as the war in Ukraine or their pronouncements, such as those about the COVID pandemic or the 2020 election, simply aren't allowed to be heard on the internet.
But a major prong of this dissent suppression is the use of longstanding advocacy groups that purport to represent a particular issue or be about a particular cause.
When in reality their real cause is the same.
The advancement of the Democratic Party and increasingly the exploitation of the credibility they've built up over many years or even many decades to justify censorship on the grounds that it constitutes hate speech or disinformation within their particular field of expertise.
And you have all kinds of groups in Washington that illustrate how that's done.
You have LGBT groups like the Human Rights Campaign, extremely well-funded corporate group that pretends to be about the rights of gay men and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people and the rest, but in reality is nothing more than a tawdry Democratic Party group exploiting that cause to advance the Democratic Party's interests.
You have women's groups or pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood that do the same.
It was Bernie Sanders in 2016, in fact, who accused both Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood as being basically fraudulent organizations that pretend to be about these issues, but in reality are just there to serve the Democratic Party establishment.
And the group that probably exemplifies the corruption of their long-standing cause in servitude not only to Democratic Party empowerment, but especially now censorship of any views that can be incriminating of Democratic Party politicians or that threaten to subvert
The establishment order is the Anti-Defamation League or the ADL, which among all these groups probably has more of a storied history and therefore built up more credibility over the years.
It was founded more than a hundred years ago in 1913.
It was at the time created by B'nai B'rith, the well-known and widely respected Jewish group that had an explicit mission of protecting the Jewish people from persecution.
The ADL was an arm of that movement to combat anti-Semitism, to document it, and to fight against it.
And the ADL over the years has expanded their mission to things like civil liberties and civil rights, During the McCarthy era, for example, the ADL took a very strong stance against Senator Joseph McCarthy's attempts to punish people or remove them from public life based on the unproven accusation that they were members of the Communist Party.
For a long time they were defenders of apartheid South Africa, because South Africa, apartheid South Africa, was an ally of the Israeli government in the 1980s, and then as public opinion changed and made that no longer tenable, they switched to supporting Nelson Mandela in the African National Congress, but in general they've always had a somewhat expanded agenda, but it always has had a touchstone in combating anti-Semitism.
And over the last decade, but particularly in the last six years since Trump's election, like virtually every other institution we discussed on this show, activist groups, media corporations, even just corporations themselves, the U.S.
security state, all of them have subordinated what is supposed to be their institutional mission to the broader goal of defeating right-wing populism and anti-establishment dogma in general, whether it emerges on the left or the right.
They hate them both.
But in the United States, I don't think it can be doubted that anti-establishment or populist sentiment receives more expression and more support on the right than it does on the left.
And so these groups are increasingly devoted to exploiting their agenda to label any kind of opinion that contravenes the establishment or that in any way undermines the establishment wings in Washington of both parties as not just hate speech and disinformation, but hate speech and disinformation that is so dangerous.
That it has to be censored, suppressed.
That is what these groups have become.
In the case of the ADL, it's particularly, I guess you could say, ironic and maybe even tragic because they have had, in the past, a reasonably respectable history of defending civil liberties, of defending free speech even.
They come out of that long tradition of Jewish activism in the United States, such as the ACLU lawyers in the 1970s who defended neo-Nazis, or Jewish left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, who were, who are, they are, still very aggressive advocates of free speech, but the ADL, like pretty much every other establishment liberal group in the United States, has abandoned their belief in free speech because they view it as too dangerous, particularly in the wake of Trump's election.
There's a controversy this week involving the ADL and in particular its devotion to this censorship regime because the ADL decided to basically pat itself on the back and to announce to the world that it was now working with Twitter in the same way that it has spent the last several years working with PayPal to essentially be the authority on what sort of speech should and shouldn't be allowed.
They have a partnership with PayPal, we've reported on this before, we'll show it to you in a minute, where PayPal turns to the ADL and the ADL identifies what they regard as extremist ideology or extremist groups who are then banned from using PayPal.
So that's an exclusion from the financial services system based on ideology as determined by the ADL.
And they're now clearly trying to do the same when it comes to what Twitter does and doesn't allow.
So here is the tweet from the executive director of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, on August 30th, where he said the following, quote, I had a very frank and productive conversation with Linda Iaccarino, that's the CEO of Twitter, now known as X, at least nominally.
I had a conversation with her, a very frank and productive one, about X, what works and what doesn't, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform.
I appreciated her reaching out and I'm hopeful the service will improve.
EDL will be vigilant and give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better and reserve the right to call them out until it does.
What that's really saying is, hey, that's a nice social media site that you have there.
It'd be a shame if something happened to it, like we pronounced it to be a vector of hatred that no corporate advertiser should get near because you permit speech to be heard, views to be heard on your platform that we deem hateful.
That is what that meeting and that announcement were.
It was just extorsive in nature.
It was essentially saying, we're keeping an eye on you, and if you censor the way we want you to censor, we'll be the first to pat you on the back and to say you've reformed.
But if you continue to allow speech that we dislike, then we will use the weight and the credibility that we've built up over decades as a civil liberties organization to instead condemn you for not censoring enough.
That, of course, is the core view of the Democratic Party.
They say it explicitly.
And now all of their little minion activist groups like the ADL are adopting that as well.
Now, the owner of Twitter, now ex, Elon Musk, did not take that threat particularly well.
He understood what its real purpose was and he posted a tweet asking, in response to a European politician, she's very controversial, she's actually an activist, I don't know enough about her to comment one way or the other, but
It doesn't really matter for this purpose, it matters what she said, and what she said was, quote, the fact that hashtag ban the ADL is trending shows how done people are with the, quote, we're labeling everything we don't like as hateful, racist, dangerous, far-right BS.
And that is exactly what this is.
All of these terms, hateful, racist, dangerous, far-right, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, anti-trans, transphobic, disinformation, are really just ways of, just different terms to use for views we dislike or views with which we don't agree.
And everybody knows it.
People are starting to see it.
And so she wrote, quote, people aren't afraid of your intimidation tactics anymore, Jay Greenblatt at ADL.
Your labels have lost their power.
Now, ironically, one of the missions of the ADL originally was that it was going to combat what it called the trivialization of anti-Semitism, meaning the overuse of the term
If it were used for everything, for example, a lot of people believe, and I certainly do, that anti-Semitism accusations are often used to stigmatize legitimate criticism of Israel that have nothing to do with contempt for the Jewish people any more than criticizing the American government means you hate Americans.
Criticism of the Israeli government doesn't mean that you hate Jews.
Those two things, in fact, are crucially separate.
Obviously, there are a lot of Jewish people who don't support the government of Israel.
That's why they vote against them.
And so that conflation and that exploitation of anti-Semitism has weakened the term because people realize it no longer means what it originally was supposed to mean, which was harboring animus for the Jewish people based on simply who they are.
But instead, it's a club, a tool, a weapon to attack people who don't agree with you on a particular issue.
And the more those terms are weaponized that way transparently, the more of the sting they lose, the more trivialized they become.
And people are no longer afraid of the term.
That's definitely happened with racism, which standing accused of that or anti-Semitism used to be devastating to one's reputation.
But through overuse, it's still very harmful, but nowhere near to the extent it was.
So above that tweet, Elon Musk asked, let's put that tweet back up, that original, that first tweet, in response to her saying that, he wrote, quote, perhaps we should run a poll on this, meaning banning the ADL.
Now to say that it would have been unthinkable for a prominent person like Elon Musk in the corporate world to talk about banning the ADL, to say that that was unthinkable even 10 years ago would be an overstatement, an understatement rather.
Nobody would survive that reputationally.
And we'll see if Elon Musk survives his decision apparently to go to war with the ADL.
That is not something a lot of other people have survived.
Tucker Carlson did it.
When the ADL demanded that Fox News fire him, and I'm not suggesting that was the main reason, or even one of the primary reasons, but nonetheless, Tucker Carlson, after the ADL did that, didn't apologize, but went on an attack against the ADL, and as we all know, Tucker Carlson is no longer at Fox.
Elon Musk did not just suggest doing a poll about whether to ban the ADL earlier today, He said the following in response to the ADL's claim that Twitter is now a vector of anti-Semitism.
Quote, to clear our platform's name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.
Oh, the irony.
So we're at the point where Elon Musk is now threatening not only to ban the ADL from his platform, But to sue it for defamation, even though the group is the Anti-Defamation League, it was created to prevent the defamation of Jewish people.
And his argument, when he says the irony, and he said it in other tweets, was the ADL is actually now responsible for the spread of anti-Semitism because of this role they're playing in exploiting anti-Semitism to smear the opponents of the Democratic Party and also to justify censorship.
Obviously, if someone believes that a particular group, organization, or group of people is responsible for the censorship of their free speech, they're going to have animus toward that group.
An Anti-Defamation League isn't just any group.
It claims to represent the Jewish people, and therefore, as Elon Musk is arguing, it can risk spreading anti-Semitism.
Just like at the NAACP, it plainly becomes a tool of the Democratic Party, like they do when they say it's not safe for black people to travel to Florida because of Governor DeSantis.
It's going to generate a lot of animus, not just toward the NAACP, but if people believe they represent Black people in general toward black people as well.
Now, the NAACP is rather the EDL is aggressively and actively playing the role of censor since the 2016 election, and they're doing so in multiple ways.
Here is Reuters in July of 2021 detailing what I alluded to earlier, which is the work they're now doing with PayPal, quote, PayPal to research transactions that fund hate group and extremists.
And here's what Reuters reported, quote, PayPal Holdings is partnering with the nonprofit organization, the Anti-Defamation League, to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.
The initiative will be led through ADL's Center on Extremism and will focus on uncovering and disrupting the financial flows supporting white supremacists and anti-government organizations.
It will also look at networks spreading and profiting from anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Asian bigotry.
The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, shared with law enforcement, and shared with policymakers, PayPal said.
Over the past several years, PayPal has also been taking action against businesses peddling extremism that were attempting to use its platforms.
As part of the new initiative, PayPal and ADL will also work with other civil rights organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Quote, we have a unique opportunity to further understand how hate spreads and develop key insights that will inform the efforts of the financial industry, law enforcement, and our communities in mitigating extremist threats, said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL's CEO.
So they're already Assuming the role at PayPal, and not just at PayPal, but the financial services industry writ large, to be the arbiters of which views they consider extremist sufficient to be banned from PayPal and be banned from other financial services groups, which is what happened to the Gray Zone, which is a critic of Israel.
And U.S.
support for Israel.
You don't have to like that view, but obviously American citizens have the right to express opposition to the U.S.
policy of supporting Israel, and it doesn't make them anti-Semitic to do so.
And even if it did make them anti-Semitic to do so, anti-Semitism and racism and homophobia and transphobia are all permissibly constitutionally protected views under the First Amendment.
And having an activist group that's obviously loyal first and foremost to the Democratic Party, like the ADL, be in charge of, have the power to determine which views can get you kicked off of vital platforms that you need for your assistance, like electronically transferring funds and receiving funds is dangerous in the extreme, but that is exactly what the ADL is doing.
In April 2021, VADL decided to take the position publicly that the most watched cable host in the history of the medium, Tucker Carlson, should be fired because, according to VADL, He was, in their words, offering impassioned defenses of the Great Replacement Theory.
They wrote a letter to the CEO of Fox News, the Fox News Channel's Suzanne Scott, and of course they proudly published this letter on their website since the purpose was a public campaign.
ADL letter to Fox News condemns Tucker Carlson's impassioned defense of the Great Replacement Theory.
And they didn't just condemn it in the letter.
They explicitly said, as we're about to show you, that he needs to be fired.
So the ADL was purporting to dictate not just which views can and should get you removed from transferring funds electronically in the internet age, but also which cable host should be allowed on television and specifically demanding that the one that millions of people want to watch That's what all of this is about.
from the air.
And obviously the ADL is using its weight, again, developed over more than a century, to threaten Fox News by saying essentially we will brand you anti-Semitic if you continue to allow this cable host to speak.
That's what all of this is about.
When the ACP does it, when Planned Parenthood does it, when the human rights campaign does it, it's all about saying unless you censor the way we want, censored the way we want, we will accuse you of being associated with and promoting these bigotries, which will jeopardize your ability to survive as a corporation because no other corporations will want to be associated with you.
It's exactly what he said to Elon Musk.
We're watching you, and if you don't censor, we're going to condemn you as anti-Semites, and if we see that you're censoring more the way we want, we will pat you on the back.
Here's what Jonathan Greenblatt wrote to the Fox News CEO, quote, Last night in a segment on his program dealing with voting rights and allegations of voter disenfranchisement, Tucker Carlson disgustingly gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist, quote, great replacement theory.
The hateful notion that the white race is in danger of being, quote, replaced by a rising tide of non-whites.
While couching his argument in terms of what he described as the Democratic Party attempting to replace traditional voters with immigrants from third world countries, Carlson's rhetoric was not just a dog whistle racist, it was a bullhorn.
Make no mistake, this is dangerous stuff.
In short, this is not legitimate political discourse.
It is dangerous, race-baiting, extreme rhetoric.
Now, we have talked about this on this program before, and we actually devoted an entire segment to the lie that Tucker Carlson has been promoting what they consider the Great Replacement Theory and the sense of how white supremacist groups advocate for it.
The view of white supremacist organizations, like the person who went and shut up the supermarket in Buffalo, was that the only legitimate citizens of the United States are ones who descend from Europe, are white people.
And immigration is bad and wrong because it's intended to replace the real citizens of the United States who are white people with non-whites from other parts of the world, Latin America, the Middle East, etc.
Tucker Carlson has never, not once in his life, or at least not once on Fox News, that I know of, even gotten close to that kind of advocacy.
In fact, he explicitly rejects it.
He is very clear about the fact that he regards all Americans who are American citizens as equal citizens regardless of their race and in fact despises this new form of racial ideology that holds some groups are superior than others because in his view that's the greatest moral evil to judge people based on what race they belong to rather than the actions of the individual.
What the ADL is alluding to here, which is as some sort of screen or cover, is absolutely true.
Which is that it's the Democratic Party that has long celebrated the fact that, in their view, immigration would mean that the Democratic Party will be in power permanently because it is changing the demographic composition of the United States and making it less white.
There are Democratic strategists who have written entire books about this.
And how happy they are that they believe immigration is radically altering the demographic nature of the United States and that will redound to the benefit of the Democratic Party forever.
Now, it happens not to be true because a lot of these Democrats didn't anticipate that a lot of these newly arrived immigrants who become citizens will actually be repelled by the Democratic Party and a lot of them are now Complaining that it's the Democratic Party's extremist views on cultural issues, defending the rights of trans people, or abortion, that is alienating these new immigrants, many of whom are Catholic or Evangelical.
But be that as it may, once the Democratic Party says, in books and elsewhere, that they are Happy about the fact that immigration will change the demographic nature of the United States because we're down to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
Of course it becomes a debatable question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing once it becomes official policy.
And the EDL is just lying here in claiming that Tucker Carlson's Attribution of white replacement theory to the Democratic Party is a cover screen for his real views that he only wants white people to be Americans.
But none of this really matters except for the fact that the ADL wants to have its views be treated as gospel.
As the official view that we all have to embrace and that should determine who gets to speak and who doesn't.
And that's what makes us so dangerous.
If it weren't connected to this censorship component on Twitter, on PayPal, on Fox News, and the airwaves generally, the ADL would just be another group smearing people.
That's politics.
That happens all the time.
It'd be worth talking about and engaging, but it would be just ordinary political discourse.
That's not what they're doing, though.
They're purporting to be the objective arbiter, using what they believe is their ownership of a very harmful accusation, anti-Semitism, To impose the limits of what we can and cannot say without being kicked off of the internet, without being excluded from the financial system, or without, in this case, getting fired from your job.
So here's one of the examples they offer.
Quote, here's a sampling of the myriad examples our researchers have gathered from his Fox show.
In December 2022, Carlson parroted white supremacist and anti-conspiracy theories by blaming Jewish philanthropist George Soros for Americans being, quote, robbed, raped, and killed.
We're going to get to this in a minute, but this is one of the most menacing and insidious attempts to exploit anti-semitism.
George Soros is the single most aggressive donor, financial donor, to the Democratic Party.
He's number one.
In the 2022 cycle, he was just ahead of Sam Bankman Freed, who was number two.
When you have somebody worth a lot of billions of dollars who decides to use that vast wealth to reshape The politics of an entire country, namely the United States, and many, many other countries as well.
George Soros' heir, Alexander Soros, who loves the Democratic Party, basically just published his foreign policy manifesto.
They're like their own country.
And the manifesto was about announcing which priorities internationally they have to promote the government of this country, to undermine the government of this country, to side with the Ukrainians in the war, which regions they're going to be more aggressive in.
Just like the United States government issues foreign policy documents, so does George Soros and his boy with the money that he receives from being inherited that fortune.
The idea that you are not permitted to critique someone whose influence on our politics worldwide and in the United States is so great and that if you do critique it, you'll be stand accused of anti-Semitism is repulsive.
That is the ultimate exploitation of what anti-Semitism is.
There are Jewish billionaires who support the Republican Party.
For a long time, the leading one was Sheldon Adelson, who is a fanatical supporter of Israel and a big, big donor to Republican Party politics, including to Donald Trump.
And almost every liberal pundit or journalist who now says it's anti-Semitic to critique George Soros.
Felt completely comfortable attacking Sheldon Adelson in the most unconstrained ways, using every anti-Semitic trope to do it.
He's the puppet master of the Republican Party.
He's using his massive donations to call the shots and to force the Republican Party to be more pro-Israel.
Now my view is that if anybody is using their vast wealth to influence our politics, the Polk Brothers or George Soros or Sheldon Adelson or whomever, of course you're permitted to talk about what you regard as the harmful influence of that wealth and the expenditures of it.
But do you see what they're doing?
They're taking George Soros and placing him off limits from criticism and exploiting anti-Semitism to do it because he's a donor to the Democratic Party.
And that's when this becomes so cynical.
So they wanted Tucker Carlson fired on the grounds of these anti-Semitic, and one of their examples was he criticizes George Soros, even though it's extremely common for progressives to criticize Sheldon Nielsen.
I've done it for years, and George Soros, and of course there's nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
The article goes on, quote, it was shocking to hear this kind of open-ended endorsement of white supremacist ideology from an anchor and commenter on your network.
At ADL, we believe in dialogue and giving people a chance to redeem themselves.
But Carlson's full-on embrace of the white supremacist replacement theory on yesterday's show and his repeated allusions to racist themes in past segments are a bridge too far.
Given his longstanding record of race-baiting, we believe it is time for Carlson to go.
I'm available at any time to discuss this matter further and look forward to your timely response.
Sincerely, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.
So the question is, do you feel comfortable with having the ADL be the, essentially the dictators of the outer limits of political discourse?
What is permissible political expression and what isn't?
That is absolutely the role they're assuming.
And not just in the process of assuming, but have assumed.
And that's why they're now using that same language to gain a foothold in being able to control the political expression flowing over Twitter because of concerns that Elon Musk is refusing to censor in accordance with the same precept that they've succeeded in imposing at Google, Facebook, and all of those Silicon Valley companies that manage finance.
There has been censorship on Twitter, often though it's a deviation from what this liberal establishment has succeeded in essentially implementing as the systemic limits of free speech and that's why they're targeting Twitter now with these sorts of tactics.
Now, if you're an organization that is boasting of the role you're playing with multiple technology companies to have users removed because of your power to declare them extremist, if you're demanding that various television hosts be fired because of their views, even if you're demanding that various television hosts be fired because of their views, even though they're the most watched and popular host in the country, you are an organization that has gone way beyond your original mission of combating
That is definitely the case for the ADL.
They have ambitions to be the ultimate and supreme guardian of the limits of our political speech, of what we can and can't debate.
They want to dictate that.
They want to control that, not just when it comes to anti-Semitism, but essentially all forms of what they regard as hate speech and increasingly even disinformation.
Imagine how powerful that is.
If you're the group that gets to the decree, what is and is not hate speech?
After that letter was written to Fox News, and while Fox News didn't fire Tucker Carlson in response to that, as we said, Tucker Carlson is no longer a host on Fox News, news and one would have to believe that with the oldest and most mainstream Jewish organization that combats anti-Semitism already having weighed in that he should be fired, that was at least a factor.
The CEO, or rather the executive director of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, went on MSNBC and He bragged, essentially, boasted of how powerful the EDL was, of how many different companies they're involved with in terms of censoring and essentially insisting they should have the same ability to determine who can and can't be heard on Twitter after Elon Musk purchased the platform.
So here's what he said.
The ADL, our Center for Technology and Society, works actively with all the kind of companies in Silicon Valley, from Apple to Zoom, if you will, from Amazon to Microsoft to Meta and indeed to Twitter.
We've dealt with them for years, helping them tackle the challenges of hate speech on their service.
I mean, you don't need me to say the ADL is seeking to become the supreme arbiter of what is and is not hate speech, of what is and is not extremism.
That should be done.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, is saying that.
He's happy about it.
He's proud of it.
On MSNBC, he's saying, we don't just work with one company, we work with almost every company.
And we've been doing that with Twitter as well, helping them figure out who should be booted off the platform on the grounds that their views are, quote, extremist.
As always, a lot of people believe the ADL's views are extremist.
A lot of people believe that what they disseminate is disinformation.
These terms have no meaning and are entirely dependent upon who wields the power to define them and then apply them.
And the ADL clearly wants to be the group that does so, And at least according to Jonathan Greenblatt, they're succeeding in occupying that role across multiple platforms in Silicon Valley.
We share information, but what we've said again and again and again, and I've had the privilege of speaking directly to Elon a few times, the reason why we are so concerned Is because we think Twitter is such a consequential service.
And again, allowing people who created the toxicity on the platform that led to real-world violence.
Keep in mind that the conspiracy theories that dominated on Twitter for so long exploded in places like Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso, and of course, ultimately in Washington DC on January the 6th.
So what I would say very clearly is that to you, as I've told Elon Musk, as I've told others, We need these companies to engage constructively, smartly, use their innovation to tackle hate speech.
I see that chart you put up.
That contradicts what we're seeing at ADL.
We've seen anti-Semitic speech stay up there longer than ever before.
We've been, you know, indicating we've seen toxic content.
It's not coming down nearly as quickly as in the past.
And considering that the human resources have been massively depleted at the company, So you have to understand what is going on here.
This is a person who is on MSNBC, the all but official network of the Democratic Party, echoing the official position of the Democratic Party that if you don't censor in accordance with their demands, There will be violence.
The whole attempt to censor political speech and to abridge the First Amendment is always, always, always based on the view that political speech that you want censored is too dangerous and will lead to violence if you allow it to happen.
This is the argument of every censor.
And the fact that he connects very deliberately Racial attacks in places like Buffalo or racist murders in places like El Paso to the three hour riot at January 6th, something that is being done very deliberately is a way of saying that it's really the Republican Party or at least the Trump movement that itself is part of this extremism and white nationalism that needs to be banned.
This is a partisan speaking, nothing else.
A partisan group, a partisan individual.
Who is using what he intends in your mind to be objective terms and is claiming a role that in your mind is supposed to make you believe that they're just trying to keep people safe from things like anti-Semitism and racism when in reality
They are demanding the power of censorship to advance the tawdriest and lowliest of all goals, which is the advancement and empowerment of one of the two political parties, and that is all he's about and everything he's saying.
Is a thinly disguised means of doing so.
Now, if the ADL wants to devote itself to the politics of the Democratic Party and the empowerment of Democratic Party leaders, that is their right, obviously.
I don't think they should be pretending that they're about something else.
It's kind of deceitful.
But that's, again, politics.
But when it starts to become a demand for censorship and a successful effort to become the arbiters of political speech over the Internet, that's when it becomes very menacing.
That would seem to figure and loom large as to why it's happening today.
Look, at the end of the day, Katie, ADL and I think so many of us want Twitter to work for all of its users, for journalists like yourself.
For watchdogs like my organization, for the whole country.
But tackling hate speech needs to be all of our commitment.
Because freedom of speech isn't the freedom to slander people, Katie.
Freedom of expression shouldn't be the freedom to incite violence.
That shouldn't be okay no matter who's running the company.
Now, by the way, the argument that he's making in trying to slip in is one that all censors make.
They like to try and pretend that the First Amendment doesn't protect hate speech.
He knows that it does under Supreme Court doctrine and so he avoided claiming that.
There are people who constantly claim, I just saw some pro-censorship Democratic investor type or hedge fund manager today on Twitter claiming that we should censor hate speech because it's not protected by the First Amendment.
That is a false statement The obviously hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
That's why the government can't ban the existence of the Nazi Party or ban Nazis from holding rallies because they have the same First Amendment rights as every other.
It's a fairly narrowly defined exception.
We've gone over this before under Brandenburg, which is the only kind of speech that can be permissibly constrained is if you're standing on the street corner with a gathered mob and you tell the mob That house over there, go burn it down.
And then they go burn it down.
Because that is incitement, deliberate incitement to imminent violence.
But even advocating in the abstraction, the need for violence, saying things like, I think the government has become sufficiently repressive that it's now justified to use violence as a way of combating them, even that is protected free speech, advocating violence.
That is the Brandenburg case.
Now, what is really interesting is that the ADL, as I said earlier, used to be a sort of ACLU-type civil liberties group that long defended free expression.
After World War II and the Holocaust and the like, a lot of Jewish groups began to recognize that censorship is a tool not to protect the marginalized, but to protect the powerful.
And a lot of the absolutist free speech theories came out of Jewish activism in the United States.
That is the reality.
Obviously there were a lot of Christian groups and a lot of other groups that in various sectors felt marginalized and censorship was a threat to them, who also embraced free speech.
But for a long time, Jewish groups were among them.
It was Jewish lawyers in the ACLU who defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, based on the view, and they had a lot of support from black leaders, civil rights leaders, that if censorship takes hold, it will be marginalized groups that are targeted by them.
So for a long time, the EDL used to be pro-free speech, anti-censorship group.
Here, for example, under the Obama administration is Jonathan Greenblatt.
He gave an interview in 2016 where he defended The virtue and value of broad, virtually absolute free speech and the evils of censorship because, again, all of this after Donald Trump was elected was when it really accelerated.
It was when groups like these and the Democratic Party and their allies in the media concluded that free speech was too much of a luxury that we could no longer afford to offer.
But this was before Trump's election.
So listen to what the ADL said at the time about free speech and censorship.
So we at the ADL, and me personally, deeply agree.
You can't outlaw bad ideas.
You can't outlaw hate.
You just can't.
We think the best response to bad ideas or bad speech are better ideas and better speech.
That's what you do.
You counter speech, right?
You don't censor.
But that said, the best response to death threats is jail time.
Right?
Like that is not okay.
That is over the line.
So I might not like Holocaust denial, but we don't outlaw it here in the United States because of our First Amendment.
And look at the ADL.
All right.
I mean, that is amazing.
That is the ACLU, old school ACLU, absolutist free speech view, that even advocacy of Nazism is permissible and that the best way to deal with it and hate speech in general is not to censor it.
But to combat it with countervailing ideas.
This was the prevailing view as recently as 2015 and 2016 of most of the liberal establishment.
And they gave up on the idea of free speech and free elections and a whole bunch of other virtues, including the idea that journalists are supposed to report the news and not engage in activism.
They relinquished all of that out of fear of Donald Trump, just like we jettisoned so many of our core values in the wake of 9-11 out of fear of Al Qaeda.
Fear is what puts people into a submissive posture and strengthens authoritarianism.
And that is how Donald Trump and his movement have been weaponized in the United States from people like this.
To seize greater and greater power based on principles that would have been unthinkable prior to Donald Trump.
You just heard this very same person who now wants to anoint himself Supreme Censor six years ago talking about how alarming and even unconstitutional it would be to have somebody performing those functions.
This is how Trump was so transformative and changed So much of how these people think because they really did come to conclude that censorship is now necessary because free speech cannot be permitted.
People are too free, and when they're too free, they do things like leave the EU or elect Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.
Now, just to give you an idea of what the ADL itself says about this idea that they claim to be devoted to combating, which is anti-Semitism, they have on their site A short passage divine to identify antisemitism, which is what they're combating.
What is antisemitism?
Quote, antisemitism is the marginalization and oppression of people who are Jewish based on the beliefs and stereotypes, myths and disinformation about Jewish people, Judaism and Israel.
Parallel to all systems of oppression, anti-Semitism manifests as the dehumanization or exploitation of, or discrimination or violence against Jewish people.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic.
In intent or effect, as it often invokes anti-Jewish tropes, is used to defranchise, demonize, disparage, or punish all Jews, and or those who feel a connection to Israel, exploits Jewish trauma by invoking the Holocaust in order to position Jews as akin to Nazis, or renders Jews less worthy of nationhood and self-determination,
So, other than the fact that they pretty clearly are equating criticism of Israel or opposition to Zionism, the idea that there should be a state, an ethno-state based on Jewish identity, they have a pretty narrow view of what anti-Semitism is, which is basically violent or discriminatory sentiments towards Jewish people as Jews.
Now, there are a lot of Jews in the world, millions of people.
Who don't believe in Zionism, who support a boycott of Israel.
So, just putting that as anti-Semitic is already pretty dubious.
It illustrates a willingness to weaponize that term to basically villainize certain political views that, of course, should be subject to debate.
But the term anti-Semitism itself is pretty narrow as they define it, and that's what demonstrates How eager they are, how willing they are now to weaponize that term.
There is no conceivable argument that Tucker Carlson expresses anti-Semitism defined in those narrow terms, even though they demanded that he be fired in the name of it, or that so many people who have been banned from Twitter or other big tech sites or excluded from PayPal are as well.
This is weaponization of these terms led by the ADL.
Now, One of the most alarming ways this has been happening is, as I said, an attempt to decree off-limits any questioning of or critiques of the activities of George Soros, even though he is clearly a person devoted to using his billions of dollars to transform the world and his political image.
Just this weekend, Wajahat Ali, who is sort of very banal and therefore beloved within liberal media, commentator, he's Muslim, but he's gone around lately saying that any raising of George Soros or even other critiques is anti-Semitic.
Here's what he said about the hashtag BanADL that was trending on Twitter and even about criticism of the CIA.
Quote, BanADL The phrase Soros funded and the phrase quote the deep state are all anti-semitic dog whistles used by white supremacists to promote a hateful conspiracy that has now radicalized individuals to commit violence against Jews and people of color globally.
The fact that Musk and the Republican Party is all in with this So he's essentially saying that if you are opposed to the Anti-Defamation League, if you criticize the CIA and the FBI as the deep state, if you're somebody who talks about the influence of George Soros, you are a white supremacist and an anti-Semite.
Now, what is amazing about that is it was very easy to find, as I did, a very long history of Wajahat Ali attacking Sheldon Adelson, who's just like George Soros, a Jewish billionaire who exercises legal rights to use his money to shape American politics, using all sorts of Anti-semitic tropes.
Here in November of 2018, quote, money buys you a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Congratulations, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson.
Sheldon Adelson was a disastrous human being for Muslims, Palestinians, and recently U.S.
democracy.
If you give $30 million to President Trump and $113 million to Republicans, you too can buy the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to civilians.
Well done, Miriam Adelson.
Years of demonizing Sheldon Adelson as this extremely wealthy oligarch using his money to shape American politics and particularly forcing the Republican Party to be more pro-Israel.
Now, I think it's a legitimate critique of Sheldon Adelson, but someone who has been spending years voicing that critique cannot then turn around and accuse people of being anti-Semitic because they offer the same kind of critiques of George Soros.
Do you see how liberals and democrats are so flagrantly now abusing these terms?
Stapling to people's foreheads the worst labels possible, racist and anti-semitic, and otherwise being bigoted, purely for partisan goals that have nothing to do with the terms themselves?
First talked about this when Mehdi Hassan, who's very similar to Wajah Ali, just smarter, but a pure Democratic Party supporter, despite criticism of the Democratic Party, won on Morning Joe.
And this was during the time when, this was right after the first indictment of President Trump.
That was brought by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose campaign was supported by a PAC that had received a gigantic sum of money, many millions of dollars from George Soros, part of George Soros' campaign to elect people as district attorneys who have a, quote, reformist agenda of less jail time, less prosecutions,
Obviously that's George Soros trying to use his millions of dollars to radically reshape the communities in which you live with a different ideology.
He has the right to do that, people have the right to critique it.
And so when Donald Trump was indicted, people pointed out that this was one of those district attorneys who was elected using funds that came from George Soros, not directly to the campaign, but through a PAC that supported him.
And here was Mehdi Hassan who decided, like Wajahat Ali, he's the ownership of anti-Semitism accusations, blatantly weaponizing them by accusing people who pointed out that this prosecutor was funded by George Soros.
He said that such people are anti-Semites.
Listen to what he said.
Talk about how off they are trying to paint this DA as some tool of a Jewish international banker.
Yeah, it's become kind of fact on the right, but as so many facts on the right turn out to be, they're not factual at all.
And we did some digging on my show into this nonsense.
You heard Stefanik say he got a million dollars from George Soros.
None of that's true.
Alvin Bragg, just hear the facts, Joe.
Alvin Bragg announced his candidacy for DA in June of 2019.
In May of 2021, a PAC called Color of Change said, We're going to spend some money promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy.
George Soros, a few days later, gives them a million dollars.
They end up spending a half a million dollars on Alvin Bragg's campaign.
They don't give the money to Bragg.
It's their own ads promoting Bragg.
No money changes hands.
So Color of Change gave no money to Alvin Bragg.
George Soros gave no money to Alvin Bragg.
Not even indirectly.
No million dollars, no half a million dollars.
We reached out to the Soros people.
George Soros, they say, has never met with Alvin Bragg.
Never spoken to Alvin Bragg, never phoned Alvin Bragg, never emailed Alvin Bragg, never been on a Zoom call with Alvin Bragg, never given a dime to Alvin Bragg.
So in what world, in what world is Alvin Bragg a Soros DA or a Soros-backed animal, to quote disgustingly Donald Trump?
Only in the fevered imagination of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists who now dominate the American conservative movement.
By the way, Joe, quick point.
Republicans say they love money in politics.
Money is speech.
So even if he did give money to Barack, which he didn't, what's wrong with that?
What objection could they have to the Jewish billionaire Holocaust survivor?
I can't possibly imagine.
Okay, so if you mention George Soros' name in connection to this DA, even though George Soros, by many Hassans on admission, gave a million dollars to the PAC, Let's spend a half a million dollars promoting Alvin Bragg's candidacy four days after the PAC announced that they were supporting Alvin Bragg.
You're an anti-Semite.
You hate Jews.
That's the only explanation.
And yet, like Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hassan spent years saying things like this.
Donald Trump tweeted, Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.
I agree.
And then Mehdi Hassan replied, guess who turned out to be Adelson's puppet and gave his wife the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
There is always a Trump tweet in the archive.
I just, I honestly don't understand how somebody can spend years explicitly saying that the Republican Party are puppets to a Jewish billionaire who's controlling the strings behind the scenes And then turn around and say, anybody who says something similar about George Soros is anti-Semitic.
I mean, are these people so incapable of self-critique, or are they just sociopaths, knowingly willing to call people anti-Semites, simply because it advances their party a little bit to do so?
It really repulses me to watch anti-Semitism being trivialized and weaponized in this way.
Just like it does for racism accusations or transphobia accusations, right?
I mean, you're talking about defaming people, you're talking about really accusing people of hating Jews for doing things that they themselves have done, just from the different partisan side.
Here's another Mehdi Hassan tweet.
For those of you on the left who foolishly thought Trump would be, quote, neutral on Israel, you should ask why Sheldon Adelson is giving him $100 million.
They're just constantly Depicting Donald Trump as a puppet of this Jewish billionaire.
Here's another.
Quote, "We really tried to promote Trump as pro-Israel," the source says.
He's always wanted Adelson money.
Over and over and over again.
People like Mehdi Hassan, Wajad Ali, all these people in the Democratic Party who are loyalists in the Democratic Party and media felt totally comfortable saying about Sheldon Adelson what they now say you can't say about George Soros without being anti-Semitic.
The point here is not hypocrisy.
The point is that they have taken these bigotry accusations and rendered them meaningless.
Through their very cynical and obviously partisan application of them, but the problem is this is what now is being used, the framework, to determine what you can and can't say in the hands of these kinds of people who are just cynical partisans and nothing else.
That who now has the power to control our limits of political debate based on their ownership of these bigotry accusations.
Now, the ADL itself has a really interesting history when it comes to this because the ADL's position prior to Joe Biden getting elected, when it came to Ukraine, was the same as most of the Western world.
Namely that there is a dominant battalion in Ukraine called the Azov Battalion that is a neo-Nazi group, said the ADL.
It was a law in the United States that no money or training could go to anything in Ukraine that would even get near the Azov Battalion because to do so would be to fund unarmed Nazis.
Facebook had a policy prior to the war in Ukraine that said it is prohibited to praise hate groups.
And one of the hate groups that you were not allowed to praise was the Azov Battalion because they were deemed a hate group in the West.
And the ADL was one of the groups leading the way in getting the Azov Battalion proclaimed to be that.
Soon as Joe Biden made it a priority to flood Ukraine with arms and weapons, and therefore to flood the Azov Battalion with arms and weapons, the ADL suddenly stopped talking about the Azov Battalion as a neo-Nazi group.
and refuses to say anything about the fact that Joe Biden is arming actual Nazis in Ukraine.
So even when it comes to anti-Semitism or arming neo-Nazis, the ADL prioritizes their partisan loyalties above what is supposed to be the core mission of their group.
One Jewish news outlet, the Forward, noticed this, and in July of this year, just a couple weeks ago, posted an article asking, quote, does Ukraine really have a neo-Nazi problem?
U.S.
officials won't say.
Quote, some Jewish leaders have pulled back their criticisms of the Azov Brigade since Russia's invasion, So they used to, these Jewish groups did, warn of the Azov battalion and now suddenly they're silent because Joe Biden needs them to be silent so he can arm Ukraine and the Azov battalion.
Quote, in his existential struggle against Russian invaders, Ukraine, a pro-Western democracy, you can see already all these phrases, shows you that the forward is completely on board with the Biden administration's view.
In its existential struggle against Russian invaders, Ukraine, a pro-Western democracy, ...has elevated some problematic heroes with fascist origins.
And its allies, including Jewish leaders and liberal politicians usually on guard against such forces, have largely downplayed or denied this phenomenon.
At least 13 members of Congress, for example, have met with Azov Brigade members and their spouses over the last nine months, despite Congress having banned U.S.
funding for the unit since 2018 because of its extremist roots.
In June, an Azov delegation met with a leader of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group that in 2015 reported, quote, numerous allegations of unlawful detention and the use of torture by the unit.
AESOP members have also been welcomed twice at Stanford University, where they were lauded by former U.S.
Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and the noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who later told the news website SFGate that he viewed them as, quote, heroes.
And the Anti-Defamation League, the world's premier anti-Semitism watchdog, has softened its assessment of the group since Russia's invasion.
The Azov Brigade was established by far-right Ukrainian nationalists in 2014 in response to Russia's invasion of Crimea.
It started as a volunteer civil military founded by Andrei Voletsky, a neo-Nazi, who wrote in a 2010 manifesto that Ukraine's mission was, quote, to lead the white peoples of the world in the last crusade for their existence, a crusade against the subhumanity led by the Semites.
Voletsky was now 44, left Azov in 2016 when he was elected to Parliament, where he served until 2019.
He now leads a right-wing political movement called the Azov Movement, which has its own paramilitary force known as the National Militia with an estimated 20,000 volunteers.
Many of the Azov Brigade's current senior commanders come from Boletsky's original group and remain tied to him politically.
Today, the brigade itself has an estimated 2,500 active soldiers, with affiliated units that, taken together, have about 5,000.
Two of the leading U.S.
groups fighting anti-Semitism, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADLU, are also at loggerheads in their views of the Azov Brigade and the lionization of Stepan Bandera.
Efrem Zorov, who coordinates Nazi war crimes research at the Wiesenthal Center, criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for failing to call out the brigade's continued use of a Nazi-inspired insignia and ongoing ties to right-wing radicals.
Quote, I can appreciate that he wants to keep these men fighting.
They're good fighters, Zorov said.
But you must put your foot down.
If you want to be a democracy, you don't walk around with Nazi symbols.
Embracing the Azov Brigade and Bandera quotes only feeds Putin's lies that Ukraine is a Nazi country, Zuroff added.
It's not a Nazi country.
It's a country that glorifies murderous Nazi collaborators, though.
I don't know.
That distinction seems pretty thin and trivial to me.
me that I want to see this distinction he's drawing of the Simon Vils-Volpinter.
Embracing the ESA brigade and Bandera, quote, only feeds Putin It's not a Nazi country.
It's a country that glorifies murderous Nazi collaborators, though.
I don't know.
That doesn't seem very comforting to me.
Oh, don't worry.
They're not a Nazi country.
They are, though, a country that glorifies Nazi collaborators.
Murderous Nazi collaborators, in fact.
They're a country that calls as heroes people who walk around with Nazi insignia on their uniforms.
Don't worry though, they're not a Nazi group.
They're not a Nazi country.
Now here is what, that's just the kind of narrative the ADL is determined to avoid.
So remember, before the war in Russia, just to give you a sense for how easily manipulated these terms are, like anti-Semitism accusations, the ADL's position was the Azov battalion is a neo-Nazi group and a very dangerous one at that.
When asked why they're not following the Simon Wiesenthal Center in warning that it's wrong to arm the Azov battalion and to criticize the Ukrainian government for Lauding them and glorifying them, here's what the ADL said, quote, we need to keep priorities straight, said Andrew Sturlative, the group's director for European Affairs.
I thought the priority of the ADL was to combat Nazis.
Apparently not, though.
They're saying the reason we're not calling out the Azov group, even though they're neo-Nazis, is because we need to keep our priorities straight.
Well, what are those priorities that would allow you to overlook the funding and arming by the United States government of neo-Nazis?
Quote, we are not going to contribute to Russian propaganda that is aimed at lowering American political support for Ukraine just because we see a few guys with worrying arm patches.
The actual threat posed by Ukraine's far right, he said, was, quote, negligible.
The ADL's assessment of Azov has undergone a profound shift since the start of the current war in Ukraine.
Back in 2019, the group described the Azov battalion in a report as a Ukrainian extremist group and militia that has ties to neo-Nazis in Ukraine as well as white supremacists worldwide.
A week after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the ADL described Azov as the Ukrainian National Guard unit with explicit neo-Nazi ties.
But by November, the ADL told a reporter for a pro-Russian news outlet called Grayzone...
That was the mediologist banned by GoFundMe without explanation.
That the center on extremism, quote, does not see the Azov regime as the far-right group it once was.
Oh, these Nazis, they reformed overnight.
Because now the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, which the ADL actually serves, that's their real mission, not combating anti-Semitism, now wants to arm them.
So, you know what?
Now we're going to trivialize and say, oh, it's just a few guys running around with some worrying arm patches.
We're not going to call them out and object to the funding of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine because doing so might undermine the Biden administration's efforts to keep the public on their side in the war in Ukraine.
That's their real goal.
Do you understand that?
It's to promote and protect Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
That's who wants to control the permissible balance of our political speech in the United States based on the lie, the fraud, that what they're really about is combating anti-Semitism.
Surlovich said the Center on Extremism's most recent assessment is that, quote, it is impossible to say how many extremists might still remain with the Mazov unit, but it would certainly be far fewer than it had in the past.
Can you imagine the ADL in any other context where doing so was not necessary to help Joe Biden and the Democratic Party being this dismissive about a group that just a year earlier it warned were serious neo-Nazis?
Look at what the EDL is willing to do to its own supposed primary mission.
Turn it into a parody, a joke.
Because they can no longer now warn about neo-Nazis in Ukraine because that contradicts the Joe Biden and White House position.
Quote, the ADL's equivocal stance goes beyond Azov.
In a Junior Times article about some Ukrainian soldiers' use of neo-Nazi-derived symbols on their uniforms, an ADL spokesman did not express outrage.
A Ukrainian soldier with a patch containing the Totenkopf symbol, which was posted by Ukrainian officials to Twitter but later deleted, The photo.
Instead, discussing one photo, the article highlighted a soldier with a skull and crossbones patch known as a Totenkopf, which was famously adopted by the Nazi SS.
The ADL official said he could not, quote, make an inference about the wearer.
Oh, look, just because he has a, like, well-known Nazi SS symbol doesn't mean he doesn't make judgments about his politics or his character.
Quote, the soldier-specific Totenkopf, said the spokesman, appeared to be merchandise of a British neo-folk band called Death in June.
The band's name memorializes a June 1934 event known as, quote, the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler executed leaders of the Nazi party who helped bring him to power.
Do you believe the ADL has anything to do with combating anti-Semitism?
Is that the action of a group that does?
I actually think neo-Nazis are pretty bad.
And that's one of the reasons, among many, from the start I've been concerned about the United States flooding Ukraine with lethal weapons and money.
Because I know that it's going to strengthen real deal Nazis.
The ADL sees people in the United States with MAGA hats on and wants them removed from the internet and kicked out of the financial system and censored from speaking.
And then they see real neo-Nazis in Ukraine who they used to vehemently denounce and warn about, and the minute it becomes politically disadvantageous to the Biden White House for them to continue to warn about neo-Nazis, something you would expect a genuine anti-group, a genuine linkabiting anti-Semitism to do, they immediately turn around and start making excuses.
Oh, that guy probably, yes, he has a neo-Nazi patch on, but...
It's not like that proves anything.
Or, it's just a bunch of guys running around with some worrying patches.
We're not going to call that out.
The Biden administration needs public opinion on its side.
We're not going to jeopardize that.
The issue with the ADL is not that they're a fraudulent political group, though they are.
The issue with the ADL is not that they weaponize anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry accusations cynically and in a way that destroys people's reputation, not because those accusations are warranted, but because it serves the Democratic Party, even though that's also true about the ADL.
What makes the ADL so pernicious and so worthy of this critical scrutiny is that they are exploiting All of the respect and goodwill they built up over 115 years or 110 years to position themselves as the arbiters of what political speech in the United States and the broader internet generally is and is not permitted.
They have the power to censor your views by cynically accusing you of being an anti-Semite or an extremist simply because your ideology deviates from theirs.
In one way, they're just a kind of prong in this broader censorship regime.
It's the censorship regime itself that merits the most concern, but it is important to understand who the players within it are.
We spent a lot of time talking about the new disinformation industry that essentially got funded by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar overnight.
Designed to formalize censorship, acts as some sort of noble effort to cleanse our political discourse of false information.
I deeply apologize if it's anti-Semitic for me to point out that George Soros, along with Piero Biniar, is the one funding that industry, but he is.
But it's also important to understand who the activist groups are that are seeking to seize control of our discourse.
And the ADL is absolutely doing that, and they're not doing it due to an agenda of wanting to combat bigotry.
That's the justification.
That's the pretext.
They're doing it to advance neoliberal ideology and the interests of the Democratic Party, and that makes them extremely dangerous.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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