The Fascist and His Little Helpers

© Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

As much as we might hope that it’s lonely on the wrong side of history, it’s getting remarkably crowded. Trump continues his dogged descent into autocracy, and the legion of cowards leaping to his aid is growing by the day.

On Sunday, as he praised the jackbooted arrest of a peaceful protester, he was joined by another toady, this one dressed up as a civil rights group.

Mahmoud Khalil was one of the people behind the pro-Palestine protests on the Columbia University campus. He’d been a favorite target for pro-Israeli groups at Columbia who lobbied politicians to have him deported. A few days later, he was arrested. Even if you don’t support Khalil’s cause, this should terrify you.

The ADL, ostensibly a civil rights org, decided in a spectacular feat of brown nosing, to praise Trump’s actions, saying “We appreciate the Trump Administration's broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism — and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.”

The view from Trump’s colon must have been breathtaking.

It was the kind bootlicking that we have come to expect from an organization that claims to fight antisemitism while also bending over backwards to make excuses for Musk’s Hitler salutes.

Nobody has the time to write a blog post about every kowtowing coward who jumps on the Trump train to fascism, but I feel compelled to write about the ADL. Not because they are the worst, or the most egregious, but because I know a little bit about them. I used to work there.

It’s not something I’m proud of, but back in 2018 I was suffering from freelance fatigue and wanted healthcare. I also didn’t know much about the organization beyond having interviewed their extremism experts several times over the years, so when I was offered a job as one of those experts, I took it.

I know, I know. Ignorance isn’t an excuse.

During my first week, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt introduced me to the staff as “the new hire Noah” and also announced that he had hired the author Vegas Tenold, but that Tenold wasn’t there that day. Sufficed to say that Greenblatt is as hands on as he is loved by his staff, which is to say, not very.

I worked for the ADL’s Center on Extremism, a part of the ADL dedicated to monitoring and investigating extremism, primarily online. Most of my time was spent investigating whatever fuck shit the nazis were up to (this was between 2018 and 2020, so they were up to a lot,) but I was also providing trainings to law enforcement on how right-wing extremist groups work, and speaking to stake holders. To a frustrating degree it meant convincing allegedly reasonable adults that no, the far left isn’t as bad as the far right. If I had a dime every time I was asked “But what about antifa?!”

At my first public speaking engagement for the ADL, at a synagogue on Long Island, I regrettably made an older woman cry when I told her in exasperation that she, an older Jewish lady, had nothing to fear from antifa, a group of activists dedicated to fighting a political ideology that historically has taken a dim view of the Jewish people.

The ADL not only provides training for local, state, and federal police, but also compiles memos on groups and individuals that it forwards to law enforcement. ADL leadership often brags about how we can go into the online spaces where the state, for civil rights reasons, can’t. In these cases, the ADL serves as a gopher for cops.

After the murder of George Floyd, a few of my co-workers and I wrote a letter to leadership arguing that the ADL’s deep relationship with law enforcement came at the price of its admittedly already tarnished civil rights bona fides. We suggested pausing the relationships with cops until we could figure out what it should look like in a post-BLM world.

The letter was received with deafening silence, then lip service. It was explained to us that the ADL would leverage its relationship with law enforcement to affect change. Exactly how we would do that wasn’t mentioned and no change in how we worked with cops was planned. Leadership also pointed out that “in the struggle for civil rights, sometimes it is important to employ strategic silence.” Taking a page from Rosa Parks’ book, the ADL bravely decided to sit down and be quiet.

At the same time, ADL employees were instructed to avoid making social media posts with the hashtags #BLM or #BlackLivesMatter. Later, the Guardian revealed that the ADL had also been gathering information on Black Lives Matter activists. I was unaware of this, but in hindsight it’s hardly surprising.

In fairness, the ADL released several statements condemning Floyd’s murder, but talk is cheap.

While this was going on, I had been tasked with compiling a list of political candidates who had made extremist statements or ran on an extremist platform. This was during those heady days when Republican candidates first realized that they could say the most outlandish shit and the voters would love them for it, so naturally the list was long and GOP heavy. Throughout the work on the list, I was encouraged to look for cases of extremism coming from the left. It was even explicitly suggested that congresswomen AOC, Ilhan Omar, or Rashida Tlaib would be good places to start.

In the interest of journalistic fairness I looked into them, but in the end they didn’t match up to the litany of madness coming from Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Tommy Tuberville and others. Say what you will about social-democrats, but they’re a long way from ranting about Jewish space lasers.

Compiling the list was a continuous fight, and it was heavily implied that the leadership would love some left-wing extremism on it. When we found none that made the cut, word came from the C-suite that the list had been killed. I was told that there was no interest in a list that didn’t have any Democrats on it.

It was the last straw for me. The soul crushing prospect of more law enforcement memos and cop trainings, combined with the increased directive to investigate “antifa groups" and pro-Palestine protests, became too much. When VICE offered me a job I grabbed it with both hands and ran.

The point here isn’t to rant about the ADL, but to point out that what is happening to the regime’s enemies isn’t new, but part of a long infamous tradition. In his 1989 book “Modernity and the Holocaust,” the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes how Nazis of the Third Reich reduced the Holocaust to “a routine bureaucratic-technical task,” made possible by the reduction of Jews from fellow citizen to something other; a weed, something that needed to be cleaned. The regime can’t do this alone. It needs help, and the ADL is perfectly placed.

By carrying the administration’s water, the ADL lends its voice and credibility to Trump’s efforts to dehumanize and criminalize dissent. The ADL’s word carries tremendous weight among America’s Jews and if Jonathan Greenblatt says that Khalil is a terrorist, then a lot of people will believe that he is.

The ADL’s wholehearted support of this travesty of justice makes it infinitely easier for Trump to target other activists, and he has already promised more.

The ADL does not care about your civil rights.