Elon Musk stepped in it again over the weekend, elevating the hater-driven hashtag #BanTheADL because he’s peeved at how the Anti-Defamation League joined the lefty drive to kill Twitter’s advertising sales after he took over vowing to fully respect free speech.
He carelessly made himself the issue, obscuring a serious gripe.
He quasi-apologized with a later tweet, “To be super clear, I’m pro free speech, but against antisemitism of any kind” — before doubling down on his actual complaint with talk of suing the ADL for supposedly driving Twitter(now X)’s value down by half or (in a followup tweet) maybe “less than 10% of the value destruction.”
The ADL certainly has been gunning for him, releasing reports on how, e.g., he’s allowed some folks back who it finds objectionable, “although the reinstated accounts themselves rarely posted explicit antisemitic content.”
The whole furor, ironically, started after ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt broke bread last week with X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, to discuss the ADL’s hate-speech complaints.
Behind it all lurks Greenblatt’s highly controversial leadership of the once determinedly nonpartisan group: A former Obama aide, he has aligned the ADL pretty firmly with the left and the Democratic Party. (This also leaves the new ADL being soft on antisemitism from the left.)
Thing is, the modern left regularly trashes free-speech rights in the name of combating hate speech — which was exactly how lefties reacted when Musk bought Twitter.
Not to mention how that progressive agenda has quickly morphed into “anti-disinformation” efforts in which (as the Twitter Files revealed once Musk opened up company archives to several reporters) the feds muscle social-media companies into suppressing true information that could support politically incorrect dissent.
Nor to mention the spinoffs into denying GoFundMe and PayPal access for the “wrong” people and causes.
This is a creeping authoritarianism that the ADL should hold no truck with — but under Greenblatt, it is.
We recently dinged Musk for his erratic stewardship of X/Twitter, and he looks to be at it again here. But at least he’s damaging his own company.
Greenblatt, by contrast, is wasting away the moral capital of one of America’s proudest civic nonprofits.