In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence— that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”
Jonathan at ADL kicked off a massive Twitter boycott campaign less than a week after the acquisition closed.
Literally nothing had changed about the site.
Our US revenue is still 60% down from that campaign, but slowly improving. pic.twitter.com/7vh5dtdDqi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 6, 2023
Advertisers avoid controversy, so all that is needed for ADL to crush our US & European ad revenue is to make unfounded accusations. They have much less power in Asia, so our ad revenue there is still strong.
This “controversy” causes advertisers to “pause”, but that pause is…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2023
BREAKING: DEBUNKING THE LIES IN ADL’S RESPONSE TO ELON
ADL’s CEO broke his silence on 𝕏 and Elon by lying and trapping the host:
1) He claimed that Elon brought and amplified anti-semitism and hate speech back to the platform.
This is NOT TRUE. The 𝕏 Safety team shared that… pic.twitter.com/o0EYR3rCFK
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 6, 2023
an independent assessment by Sprinklr found that hate speech impressions on 𝕏 “to be 0.003% compared to Twitter’s estimate of 0.012%.”2) Greenblatt clarified that he has never claimed Elon or 𝕏 are anti-Semitic: “I don’t think Twitter as a platform is anti-Semitic.”3) When Greenblatt was asked by the host (who also identified as Jewish) if he was seeking a position or donation from 𝕏 to the ADL, he took offense to this, called it an anti-semetic trope, almost as if he was trying to cancel him, leaving the host uncomfortable and defensive.4) Greenblatt claimed ADL is NOT publicly or privately talking to advertisers, BUT shortly after, said, “It is true we did call for a pause back in November, after the acquisition and since then” and in a previous interview he stated “if it remains a hellscape the advertisers won’t take part in [Twitter]”5) Greenblatt said the ADL is a SMALL non-profit in NY. NOT TRUE. The ADL is an influential organization with over 100 years of history, and according to the ADL’s 2021 tax filings, the organization’s total revenue was $101 million with a balance sheet of $238 million. They ALSO received millions of dollars of indirect government funding via grants to groups in which the ADL has special interests.6) Greenblatt says the ADL works WITH other social media platforms, including Facebook. We saw in the Politico article that @elonmusk posted that the ADL indirectly CONTROLS what can be posted on Facebook.7) Greenblatt claimed he doesn’t know what prompted Elon’s tweets, but Elon was clear it was prompted by the 60% drop in advertising from the ADL’s interference, which Greenblatt admitted in the video. Doesn’t seem like the meeting with X CEO Linda Yaccarino went as well as Greenblatt is making it out to be.
Walsh continues:
While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.
The problem with these numbers (even though he didn’t make the claim that such Tweets have doubled since Musk took over, as the next article claims) is that the ADL is responsible for tabulating them. Who could doubt that they inflate the numbers by lying or at least by including fact-based tweets? (See below for discussion of examples of fact-based “anti-Semitism.” Or their numbers may include false flags from anonymous users, perhaps encouraged or even recruited by the ADL. Why get rid of people like James Edwards, Paul Fromm, Tom Sunic, Jared Taylor and me—all of whom made responsible, fact-based tweets—but keep all the anonymous users on, many of whom make over-the-top nutcase comments that feed into the narrative that people who are critical of Jews are conspiracy theorists or mentally ill? It seems obvious that we were removed at the behest of the ADL since they openly brag about their activism on all social media platforms. But of course, it’s never enough. The ADL wants to destroy any hope that X could be profitable.
Twitter was a cesspool of antisemitic hatred and vitriol long before Elon Musk took over. But now, under his leadership, the newly renamed platform, X, has become an unrestrained free-for-all against Jews, where neo-Nazis and white extremists seemingly run rampant and antisemitism is widespread.
Research shows that since the company’s takeover by Musk in October 2022, the volume of English-language antisemitic tweets has more than doubled.
The last link goes to a report by an organization called Beam which states that it uses the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism for its research. This definition of anti-Semitism clearly includes statements that may well be true and certainly could be made by reasonable people. Here are some of the types of statements said to be anti-Semitic:
- Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
In other words, any claim that Jews as a collective have power in the media, etc. This is outrageous. Where to start with the reams of documentation, much of it available on this website? In fact, the ADL is the prime example of the collective nature of Jewish activism— being essentially an adjunct of the most leftist elements of the Democrat Party which still reliably gets at least 70 percent of Jewish votes and probably well over half its funding. And the Jewish community, including the ADL, do act as a collective on several important issues, the most important of which are support for Israel despite its present reality as a racist, apartheid ethnostate while decrying those same policies in the U.S., and support for replacement-level immigration and refugee policy in the U.S. while calling the use of the term racist and anti-Semitic.
And despite many campaigns by the ADL to raise money off attacking Musk (trust me, I’m on their mailing list), Greenblatt claims that any suggestion the ADL would try to shake down Musk (like they did with Kyrie Irving and the New York Nets) is an “anti-Semitic trope.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin asks Jonathan Greenblatt if he was seeking to have a role at X or shaking @elonmusk down for donations to the ADL (like he did to Adidas and the Brooklyn Nets) and he responds by saying that’s an “anti-Semitic trope.” pic.twitter.com/NE33VoMvd0
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 6, 2023
To which Musk replied:
Because the answer is “Yes!” regarding seeking donations, hence JG’s refusal to answer the question.
JG instead went on the attack, implying that Sorkin, despite being Jewish, is somehow an anti-Semite just for asking a basic conflict-of-interest question! 🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 6, 2023
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
Are we supposed to think that all Jews in the West are more more loyal to the countries they live in than to Israel? How do they know that, given that many Jews living in the West have dual citizenship and all can emigrate to Israel at any time, and given the power of the Israel Lobby with its long record of supporting U.S. wars that benefit Israel at great cost to the U.S. and credible charges of spying on behalf of Israel?
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Claiming that the “existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” is one thing (I wish we European-descended peoples could have our own ethnostate), but it’s silly to deny that Israel is a racist ethnostate. Thomas Friedman, an apologist for Israel if ever there was one, has called Israel a Jewish supremacist state, and the current government includes people who proudly proclaim their racism (see “How Democrats Learned to Defend Israel’s Ethnocracy,” by Mitchell Plitnick).
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
It’s reasonable for Americans to be more critical of Israel than other countries given the level of financial, military, and diplomatic support that the U.S. routinely gives it. The U.S. is essentially endorsing whatever Israel does.
- Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
The “blood libel” is a reasonable belief given Ariel Toaff’s book on medieval Ashkenazi practices. Indeed, the campaign against Musk is highly reminiscent of the campaign against Prof. Toaff’s book, as described in the above review.
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Which policies? Being concerned with race and with ethnonational interests? Religious fundamentalists and the ethnonational right are clearly in charge in Israel, to the point that there have been huge protests by liberal Jews—without lessening the pro-Israel activism of the ADL and the rest of the Israel Lobby in the U.S. The above-linked article by Mitchell Plitnick in Mondoweiss makes clear the ethnonational reality of Israel and the massive explicit support it receives from nearly the entire U.S. Congress.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
It’s hard not to hold the Jewish community responsible when one notes the massive support that American Jews give to Israel, without which Israel would likely have been destroyed a long time ago. Support for Israel spans the Jewish-American political spectrum, including neoconservative Jews who have been a powerful force in the Republican Party. Despite some dissenting Jews, support for Israel is a collective project of the American Jewish community because the great bulk of Jewish financial, political and media power is directed at support for Israel.
The ADL never stops seeking to portray white people as monsters who are always on the verge of lynching a black person or burning down a synagogue, and are only stymied in their efforts by the constant vigilance of the ADL.
More recently, every time President Trump did anything to restrict immigration, the ADL immediately went to court and filed paperwork seeking to have a federal judge declare his efforts unconstitutional—and they almost always got their way. The ADL paints white Americans who oppose mass immigration as “Nazis,” while at the same time defending Israel’s extremely race-based immigration policies.
The ADL is also a gigantic and Orwellian surveillance outfit. Author Matt Taibbi once described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The ADL does the same thing to truth, freedom, and Christian culture.
Did you know that for decades, when many U.S. Representatives and Senators received letters from “right-wing conservatives,” they would forward the letters to the ADL so they could “keep an eye on” them? Did you know that many newspaper editors across America used to do the same thing? Even more incredibly, PayPal recently gave the ADL access to its database to search for transactions from groups it doesn’t like. This isn’t a secret; PayPal admits it. Every American should be up in arms over this, but nobody seems to even be aware of it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 8, 2023
