Billionaire Elon Musk has said he bought Twitter in order to support free speech and that the ADL (formally the Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913 as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith) has tried to destroy Twitter, because they don’t like free speech. Good! For more than 15 years, that has included VDARE.com’s speech.
Now Musk, whose net worth is $216 billion according to Barrons, is threatening to sue the ADL for defamation [Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League over antisemitism claims, by Elizabeth Napolitano, CBS, September 5, 2023]:
This is partly because of influencers like Ireland’s Keith Woods, who have made “BanTheADL” a trend on Twitter:
Make them pay! The ADL is a sophisticated extortion racket holding social media companies to ransom. If people don't stand up to them now it will soon be too late to do anything.
— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) September 4, 2023
No one voted to put Jonathan Greenblatt in charge of the internet!#BanTheADL pic.twitter.com/xtkZXcgloI
The ADL calls the fact that it doesn’t like free speech a “misconception” in its official Myths & Facts About ADL:
Free Speech
Misconception: “ADL is attempting to infringe on freedom of speech and liberty on social media and crowdfunding platforms.”
FACT: This is false. ADL produces research documenting the challenge of antisemitic and extremist content across social media and demonstrating how major platforms are failing to adequately protect targets.
While speech—including hate speech—is largely protected from government regulation, private platforms are not obligated to tolerate hate speech and are well within their right to implement policies that prohibit such activities.
So as you can see, the ADL is against freedom of speech—it thinks it should be nonexistent on social media platforms.
VDARE TV
VDARE TV often features Peter Brimelow, a white supremacist who runs the racist, anti-immigration site VDARE, which publishes writing by white supremacists such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent, and Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler. The VDARE TV YouTube channel has 4,887 subscribers and 213,028 views.
Subsequently, in 2020, VDARE.com, was without warning banned from YouTube and a bunch of other platforms.
Similarly, it’s probable that it was ADL pressure that led to Tucker Carlson being fired from Fox. See Defiant Tucker Defends His Discussion Of Demographic Change, Exposes ADL Hypocrisy from 2021, when the ADL called for Carlson to be fired for mentioning the Great Replacement [Fox stands by Tucker Carlson after ADL calls for his firing, Associated Press, April 12, 2021].
Subsequently, however, earlier this year, Carlson actually was fired, which is why, below, he and Musk are discussing filing a joint suit against the ADL:
Elon and Tucker discussing filing a joint lawsuit for defamation against the ironically named "Anti-Defamation League".
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) September 5, 2023
🔊... sound on😂 pic.twitter.com/clH2jJ11C3
Of course, the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t have enough money to make it worthwhile for a multi-billionaire to sue it.
It had an income of $91 million in the most recent year I can find on the ProPublica site [Anti Defamation League - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica], and claims to have spent $70 million of that on expenses: crying wolf, attacking free speech, and damaging businesses like Twitter, it all adds up.
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt gets $575, 000 of that in salary.
The point of the suit is to fight back and stop the “Anti-Defamation” defaming of Musk and his business.
We don’t have Musk’s resources, but we do sue people for defaming us. (Support our Legal Defense Fund here.)
The ADL has us and VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow on its list of wrongthinkers, or Glossary of Extremism as they call it, which has real-world consequences. The damage to Twitters’ brand may have been in the billions.
Its attacks on VDARE.com may be part of why we (a) kept having private venues cancel on our conferences, and (b) are now being targeted by the Attorney General of New York State..
The call to “BanTheADL” is not, by the way, hypocritical. Twitter’s Terms of Service ban doxing and targeted harassment.—and doxing and targeted harassment are the ADL’s whole technique, as well as cooperation with various police and federal agencies to spy on people it thinks may be dangerous, something police use to get around pesky Fifth Amendment restrictions.
The ADL has always been on the lookout for anyone who said anything about Jewish influence in politics, etc. But it’s undergone mission creep, in which it defends all mass immigration—even though, since America is approximately the least anti-Semitic country in the world, this means more actual anti-Semitism, from Arabs, African Muslims, and even Mexicans.
It also has an obsession with protecting gay and transgender people from defamations, which has led it to include Chaya Raichik (of LibsOfTikTok fame) in its category of extremist. Ms. Raichik is an Orthodox Jew, whose doxing (by the Washington Post [Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine, by Taylor Lorenz, April 19, 2022]) led predictably to death threats [Libs Of TikTok Receives Death, Bomb Threats, Alleges Twitter Staff Discussed Deplatforming Her, by Shankhyaneel Sarkar, News18.com, June 14, 2022].
As for VDARE.com vs. the ADL, here’s a selection over the years:
And here’s a final one—responding to 2017 article in CNN that said anti-Semitic incidents were up 86 percent (largely because of two individuals who phoned a lot of bomb threats)—Steve Sailer wrote:
(The bomb threats that weren’t phoned in by a teenage hoaxer in Israel were phoned in by a black journalist named Juan Thompson.)
Steve Sailer went on to say:
Perhaps America needs an Anti-Demonization League to speak out against demonization of groups that aren’t allowed to have an Anti-Defamation League?
But in the absence of an Anti-Demonization League, a cheerful billionaire suing the Anti-Defamation League will do for now.
James Fulford [Email him] is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
