Jewish Currents reports:

In the weeks after a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, influential right-wing figures searched for culprits to blame. Many of those upset about the murder of the Turning Point USA founder zeroed in on one target in particular: the Anti-Defamation League. Critics, including high-profile conservative accounts like Libs of TikTok, highlighted the ADL’s inclusion of Turning Point in its Glossary of Extremism and Hate, containing more than 1,000 terms, groups, and individuals the ADL considers extremist. The short glossary page on Turning Point mentioned connections between the group and “known extremists,” as well as past scandals with employees making “racist or bigoted” remarks. “Even after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the ADL still lists Turning Point USA as a hate group. They have blood on their hands,” wrote an X user named Pericles Abbasi on September 27th, in a post viewed by 6.5 million. In response, Elon Musk wrote that “the ADL needs to change this now.” The billionaire and X owner would go on to tweet at least nine times about the organization over the following four days, calling the ADL a “far left hate propaganda machine” that “hates Christians.” Musk claimed the FBI had been “taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL,” which had led the bureau to investigate “Charlie Kirk & Turning Point, instead of his murderers.”

A former staff member at the ADL Center on Extremism (COE), who requested anonymity because they signed a non-disclosure agreement upon leaving the organization, called the glossary “one of the best assets and resources” offered by the ADL—a public resource to help people “understand extremist activity in their community,” and a tool for extremism researchers and law enforcement as well. When it launched in 2022, the ADL had boasted of a “first-of-its-kind” database that joined “a body of online research tools at the cutting edge of exposing hate.” But on September 30th, Jewish Insider reported that the organization had decided to take down the entire glossary from its website. To justify the move, the ADL told the news outlet that “an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated” and that “a number of entries” had been “intentionally misrepresented and misused,” though the former employee said COE staffers had been “tasked with keeping it updated and added to it regularly.”

The ADL also made several tweaks to a separate, longer “backgrounder” page on Turning Point—removing language about Kirk creating a “platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists,” for instance, and adding that he had publicly condemned some “extremists”—before deleting that page, too, on October 1st. (Other backgrounder pages, on groups ranging from the Palestine solidarity group Jewish Voice for Peace to the white supremacist Goyim Defense League, remain on the website.)

These hasty efforts to mollify MAGA were too little, too late. The same day that Turning Point’s backgrounder came down, FBI Director Kash Patel announced, first on Fox News, and then on X, that the bureau would cut ties with the ADL, which had been a longtime partner. Patel framed the decision as a rebuke of former FBI Director James Comey, who became a target of the MAGA movement thanks to his bureau’s investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia, and who has long maintained close ties to the ADL. In a statement shared with Fox News, Patel described the ADL as “an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization,” running “spying” operations on Americans. “That era is finished,” Patel declared. “This FBI formally rejects Comey’s policies and any partnership with the ADL.” (Two days later, the bureau announced it would also cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups.) [Continue reading…]