Far longer ago than I care to admit, I made a commitment to be an advocate for my people. Becoming an advocate for your ethnic group is a natural part of maturity. It flows naturally from taking stock of one’s roots, one’s community, and one’s identity, then taking ownership of one’s responsibility as a stakeholder in one’s tribe to defend and support one’s extended family.
Just as an honest woman reaches that age where she goes from merely enjoying the casseroles at family gatherings to preparing the casseroles for family gatherings, an honest man should go from benefiting from belonging to a tribe to ensuring that the tribe remains there to benefit and support the next generation of young men.
There’s just one problem: I’m not Jewish.
Everything I just said would not only be uncontroversial but celebrated and supported by the Anti-Defamation League if I had said it while being Jewish. But I am not. And since I am not Jewish, the ADL has relentlessly attacked me, agitating for my being banned from social media, subjecting me to nuisance federal lawsuits for merely attending permitted public protests, issuing fancy “reports” implying that I’m somehow financing terrorism, and reporting to congress on the purported “threat” of my pro-White advocacy groups.
Followers of my work over the decades know that it’s defined by a lack of hatred or hostility towards other identities, including Jews. My position has always been that “national values” are a bit like “family values,” in that being pro-nation for one’s own nation entails being broadly supportive of the nationalist ideal in the abstract. But the ADL leverages their close association with law enforcement, the FBI, the media, and congress to silence my nationalism while promoting their own national chauvinism.
The leverage the ADL has enjoyed to persecute and prosecute those who resist the Jewish Chauvinist agenda belongs, however, to the 20th century. The devolutionary trends in media and politics make it more and more difficult by the year for them to target and strangle chokepoints in government, media, and academia to attack and destroy their enemies.
An organization whose mission is marginalizing others is finding itself increasingly marginalized. Ben Shapiro, the obnoxiously Jewish leader of the largest and most relevant conservative media franchise, has been forced by the ADL’s tone deaf maneuvering to take a public stand against it. Matt Walsh, a member of Ben Shapiro’s media network, celebrates being targeted by the ADL as a badge of honor:
The ADL has always been a chauvinist racket. It originated in the wake of the Leo Frank Trial, where a Jewish office worker raped and murdered a child in 1913. Frank was a member of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish fraternal order, and he called on them to rescue him from Georgia’s criminal justice system. The ADL was born as a vehicle for that secret society to advance and defend Jewish interests no matter what, even in the case of hot-blooded murder.
There can be an argument that the ADL doesn’t truly advance Jewish interests, and it’s an argument made by a growing chorus of prominent Jews. I have no standing in the debate over what’s good for the Jews. I can say, without reservation, that the ADL is bad for everybody else. And even if it survives this current campaign to #BanTheADL, Jonathan Greenblatt’s ADL is a pathetic shell of what it was under Abe Foxman and previous leaders.
The ADL’s brand of shrill, censorious, and sanctimonious tantrums on behalf of their conception of Jewish interests doesn’t belong in the 21st century. It not only can’t thrive on contemporary social media, but will ultimately find itself outright banned. This claim may be unthinkable now, but it was unthinkable a short time ago that the ADL would be routinely ratio’d and marginalized in every public argument where they don’t fully control the platform.
They no longer have the leverage to dominate the discourse that they’ve enjoyed as a privilege for generations, and they don’t understand how to compete in a free market of discourse without the game being rigged in their favor. If you don’t believe me, just check out Greenblatt’s twitter. And if you’re inclined to blame the new ownership, scroll back to before the change of hands to see that this problem existed well before Musk took over.
They’re not going to improvise or adapt to the new context. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like persecution. They’re going to escalate, intimidate, harass, and slander because that’s all the ADL knows to do. That’s their thing. The trolls who dedicate their lives to harassing and slandering opponents call themselves “researchers” and trade awards and acclaim with one another while doing it.
And eventually, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, the social media companies will apply their rules against harassment, intimidation, and misinformation equally — and ban the ADL. You can help move that along by logging onto twitter and sharing the viral #BanTheADL hashtag.