Starting late last week the topic #BanTheADL ran on Twitter (X).

It’s taken me a while to put into words what I have been feeling about that.

Here it is:

I have made no bones about the fact that I hate what the ADL has become.

If you study politics and bureaucracy, you will learn about two inevitable sets of laws.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, states that, “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

And

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Jonathan Greenblatt is Pournelle’s Iron Law and Robert Conquest’s second and third laws of politics in human form.

A former Obama aide, he took the ADL from an organization that was non-partisan and focused on cataloging antisemitic incidents into a Progressive Leftist shakedown organization.  The ADL consistently downplayed or ignored Leftist antisemitism while turning any Right-Wing foible and mention of George Soros into a Nazi rally.

He borrowed from the Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson school of fundraising and used the threat of accusations of antisemitism to strongarm donations from companies, who would pay for the ADL’s blessing.

Under Greenblatt, the ADL doubled its funding and forgot all about Jews.  The ADL wouldn’t say shit about Jews getting beaten up on the streets of NYC by black people but would lecture about the Jewish values of trans-rights and defending drag queen storytime.

The way that the ADL had gone aggressively after conservative Christian groups and bought into the Woke perspective on white privilege and how only whites can be racist, reinforced antisemitic conspiracy theories that the Jews are both anti-Christian and anti-White.

Greenblatt has successfully destroyed both the credibility and the legacy of the ADL.

Elon Musk was the first business leader to push back against them, and technically, nothing he said was wrong.

But…

Have you ever had a fight with your family?  You can fight among yourselves, but as soon as an outsider criticizes a family member, that’s out of line.

I feel like criticism of the ADL is exactly that.

If the ADL is to be taken down, it should be us Jews who do it, and nobody else.

The problem is that the alt-Right antisemites have jumped into this frey in the worst way.

For them, the ADL is a stand-in for “all Jews everywhere.”

You will see things like “the noticing” posted.  That, is the conspiracy theory that the Jews secretly control everything and are out to destroy White Christian America and the ADL is their watchdog to stop people from noticing what the evil Jews are up to.

Another attack is that the ADL was never a good organization and was founded in disrepute.  They say that the ADL was founded to “defend a pedophile rapist Jew.”  That is such a perversion of history, but the antisemites have turned it into lore.

In 1913, in Atlanta, Leo Frank was convicted of the murder of factory girl Mary Phagan.  The evidence of Frank’s guilt was circumstantial at best, and his conviction was dubious.  It involved both a lot of antisemitism and racism in the Deep South.  At one point, when the evidence pointed to the black night watchman, the prosecution said that the night watchman couldn’t have done it because blacks were too stupid to plan a complex crime.  The Frank trial led to a resurgence of the Klan in Georgia.

He was convicted, but his death sentence was commuted due to the dubious level of the conviction.  A mob broke into the jail and lynched Frank.  The mob then held a Klan rally.

None of the mob were arrested, prosecuted, or convicted.

This was the basis on which the ADL was founded.  But according to the White Supremacist antisemites, the trial was a paragon of American jurisprudence, the ADL lied to get a pedophile rapist let out of jail, and in the most extreme comments, Frank deserved to get lynched.

And since that is what they attribute the ADL to, it will always, to them, be an evil organization, founded in evil, by evil Jews.

And these people have been boosting #BanTheADL.

Consequently, only a small percentage of the people on Twitter pushing this are people who seem to have a legitimate grievance that the ADL is no longer a credible civil rights organization and they should stop being able to influence social media companies, and the larger percentage is antisemites who want to lash out at the Jews and want to destroy any organization that might help Jews.

It’s like if your family is having a fight and all of a sudden a mob comes in to kill the side of your family you’re arguing with.

I want Greenblatt fired, I want the ADL overhauled, and I want a strong, non-partisan organization that will help to protect the Jews.

They just want to destroy us, all of us, and they will start with the ADL.

Those are two different goals.  Those people who are also attacking the ADL are not my allies, they are my enemies.

The problem is that Musk doesn’t seem to get that.  I don’t think he’s an antisemite, he’s just being oblivious to how the antisemites have latched onto his legitimate grievance for their own purpose.

The whole fucking thing is a terrible shit-show and the Jews with pay mightily for it.