I Got Sprung

Upon finding out on Tuesday that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had deleted its entire “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” I felt like a convict who has given up all hope of ever getting out of prison suddenly noticing that the door to his cell is unlocked and the guards are gone. For while popular indignation against the far-left defamation group for listing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as an extremist group led the hatemongers to realize that they had gone too far, TPUSA was not the only unjust and unwarranted entry in the “Glossary.” I, for one, was on it, too. 

As Rick Moran noted Thursday, the ADL “removed its ‘Glossary of Extremism and Hate’ from its website after numerous complaints from conservatives, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.” And in a revealing indication that the ADL was well aware of how dodgy the whole enterprise really was “rather than remove the entry, the ADL deleted the entire Glossary and said that it no longer considers TPUSA an ‘extremist group.’”

This is yet another indication of how much the cultural tide is turning, and how quickly. Just under two years ago, a lawyer wrote to the ADL on my behalf, calling upon the ADL to remove me from its Glossary of Extremism. The letter said: “Robert Spencer personally challenges ADL to produce one statement of his or of Jihad Watch that treats Muslims with ‘hatred or intolerance’, or which denigrates them based on their identity or immutable characteristics.” This was in reference to my opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, which opposition the ADL deplored as "extremism." In response, though the ADL did not deign to support any of its false and defamatory claims, the organization flatly refused to remove them.

Compounding the absurdity of this was the fact that my lawyer’s letter points out that I have “written and published numerous books and articles defending Jews and Israel.” These include The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, which makes the case for Israel against the Palestinian propaganda that is increasingly taken as fact all across the political spectrum, and Antisemitism: History and Myth, about which Dennis Prager said: “I do not believe a more important book on antisemitism has ever been written.”

All that cut no ice with the ADL. Oren Segal, the ADL’s Vice President of the Center on Extremism, refused to remove me from the list. The ADL's lawyer haughtily said that “We do not believe that Mr. Spencer allegedly ‘defending Israel and Jewish interests’ insulates him from scrutiny.” “Allegedly,” as if the books didn’t actually exist, but were just all part of the sinister right-wing plot to shield “extremists” from the exposure they so richly deserved. But the ADL’s refusal to back off of its defamation of me came during the darkest days of the Biden regime, when the Biden “Justice” department was busily working to frame and destroy Old Joe’s principal political opponent, and the ADL must have thought that in all of its calumny and lies against patriots, it was untouchable. Well, times have changed.

And not a moment too soon. The whole Glossary of Extremism and Hate was part of a larger leftist effort to declare the left’s most effective opponents to be outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse. And it worked. In the heyday of the left’s cultural hegemony, which is, of course, only now beginning to recede, the ADL’s Glossary and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of alleged “hate group leaders” were effective tools to drive innumerable patriotic voices to the margins or silence them altogether. This was to a tremendous degree thanks to the cowardice of all too many people, including many in conservative groups, who were afraid of getting onto the blacklists themselves if they featured any of the “hate group leaders” and “extremists” at an event, or even went so far as to quote one of the demonized people.

Related: Leftists Claim the Free Speech House Is On Fire, But Who Was the Arsonist? 

The corporate left, meanwhile, happily jumped on board, banning, blacklisting, deplatforming, debanking, and otherwise persecuting those who were on the lists. Nobody ever stopped to ask whether the ADL or the SPLC were really the reliable, impartial arbiters that virtually everyone outside of a small circle of patriots was taking them to be. Those who dared to allow themselves to doubt the veracity of these all-powerful organizations were largely intimidated into silence, like virtually everyone else.

It is an irremediable tragedy that it took the murder of Charlie Kirk to create the groundswell of righteous indignation against the ADL that was finally sufficient for it to drop its defamation not only of TPUSA, but of the lesser-known individuals and groups who had suffered from these lies and libels for too long. May it not require a similar tragedy or tragedies to compel these sinister groups, the ADL and the SPLC, to decide finally to close their doors altogether. The scorn and revulsion of patriots who will no longer stand for their propaganda, thus robbing them of all their power, ought to be quite enough to push them along into the dustbin of history, to which they thought they had consigned their victims.

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