FBI rejects partnership with the Anti-Defamation League.

 

FBI Director Kash Patel. Fox News/Getty.

The FBI has rejected a partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Fox News. FBI Director Kash Patel cited the organizations close ties with former Director James Comey, who went as far as to say the FBI was "in love" with the organization. Patel was critical of the ADL saying they had spied on Americans. The ADL was in the news recently for labeling Charlie Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, as an extremist organization. This designation was used by the FBI to investigate the organization during the Biden administration. Kirk was assassinated last month. 

My Comment:

The ADL has been a thorn in the side of any to the left of Bernie Sanders for a long time. Though, to be fair, they have been fairly critical of pro-Hamas folks on the left now too. They made a ton of enemies and it is surprising it took this long for the FBI to cut them off. 

Obviously labeling TPUSA a hate group had a lot to do with this. Doing so was an obvious mistake, even before Charlie Kirk's death by a left wing nutjob. TPUSA was hardly a hate group. They were a get out the vote organization and one that liked to hold debates with members of the general public. They had many beliefs the ADL disagreed with but that hardly justified calling them a terror group. 

With Kirk's death it was no longer politically possible for anyone on the right to support the ADL after they labeled Kirk essentially a terrorist. Kirk died as a hero for free speech and folks are absolutely not going to be in the mood to listen to an organization that labeled him a terrorist. It's honestly surprising that it took three weeks, but apparently people didn't really notice it until Elon Musk brought it to everyone's attentions. 

The ADL is a bad organization even if you ignore the Charlie Kirk stuff. Ironically, the ADL was found guilty of defamation themselves in the case Quigley v Anti-Defamation League. In that case the ADL used illegally wiretapped communications to imply that the other party in the lawsuit were antisemitic. They lost the case and had to pay more than $10 million in damages. This was not the only case where they were found to be spying on people either. 

They have also been caught lying about things many times. The TPUSA is not the only example of an otherwise unoffensive group being called antisemitic by the ADL. Folks have been deemed antisemitic on both the left and the right just for being critical of Israel. 

And it's not just the right that has major problems with the ADL. They have called many leftists antisemites, though in their case it's probably more realistic. They have also made a lot of enemies in the Muslim and Black communities for similar reasons. I just get the feeling that everyone is tired of them. 

My biggest concern is that their guidelines, which were used by the FBI, were complete nonsense. And folks were getting investigated by the FBI because of this. It wasn't just TPUSA, it was basically every group on the right that was falsely labeled like this. It's long overdue that we stopped listening to them.