“Why did the ADL just defend discrimination against Asians?”
My appearance on the Top Story Podcast on JNS with Jonathan Tobin: “Many of the mainstream, so-called Jewish organizations, particularly like ADL, that grew up fighting anti-Semitism, have now sold themselves out to the progressive movement.”
I appeared earlier this week on JNS’s podcast Top Story with Jonathan Tobin. (Video at bottom of post.)
If you don’t know JNS (Jewish News Syndicate) you really need to. They have great and sensible coverage, unlike lefty outlets like The Forward and Haaretz. If you don’t know Jonathan Tobin, the Editor-in-Chief of JNS, then you really, really need to. He is one of the most prolific and brilliant writers out there.
I was on the JNS podcast twice previously, William Jacobson: Boycotted for Publishing the Truth (December 14, 2021), and William Jacobson: ADL is mired in leftist ideology (September 15, 2022). Jonathan and I also were co-panelists for a Webinar: The Failure of Jewish Leadership ‘Where is the ADL?’ (March 10, 2021) organized by The Jewish Leadership Project.
So as you can tell, one of the things Jonathan and I like to talk to each other about is the abysmal failure of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which once was a leader in fighting anti-Semitism and now, since former Obama aide Jonathan Greenblatt took over, is just a leftist social justice group that serves as a de facto arm of the Democrat party seeking to demonize and censor right of center voices.
ADL came up on the podcast this week, though it wasn’t the main topic, due to its robotic entirely-predictable opposition to the Asian students challenging affirmative action in the Harvard/UNC cases. A snippet is at the start of the podcast, and the rest of the ADL discussion starts at the 38:30 mark.
Most of the discussion was about the SCOTUS decisions in the Harvard/UNC case and in the Colorado website designer free speech case. There’s even a reference by me to this Seinfeld episode.
Sorry, no transcription. You’ll just have to listen.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
You just laid it out. ADL is now a branch of the Left and no longer cares about either anti-Semitism or any form of racial discrimination so long as it is in accordance with the current Leftist narrative. Sides are being chosen. They have chosen theirs.
One of the key parts of the discussions in the anti affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court was the essential zero sum nature of admissions decisions. For every politically correct minority that is admitted with questionable qualifications, it means someone who is not politically correct is denied. And frequently [note for the record I am Chinese in ancestry, albeit my college days were long ago] that person who is denied is Asian in ancestry. The decision means that Asians are now the open enemy of the Left, and the ADL is following orders.
Subotai Bahadur
Add to that the classic work ethic. Just showing up with a certain color can and does degrade the efforts of those that study and work hard on an individual basis. Anti-Asian and Anti-Italian bigotry was just as potent in the later half of the 1800’s and early 1900’s as any Jim Crow law… even more so.
Why should the left care? Like blacks, asians reliably vote democrat. Imagine what black wages and unemployment rates would be like if we hadn’t imported 30 million hispanics while today importing millions more. Yet, oddly, blacks do not recognize what that has done to them. They only complain about government dollars that aren’t going to them, rather than the bigger picture. Working class whites should recognize it too, since they’re getting screwed as well, but they also seem oblivious.
With the advent of new media there are plenty of dissenting voices out there and more folks are paying attention. Slowly but surely the information stranglehold of legacy media/orthodox academia is being broken.
The high profile nature of some lefty excesses; trans crap in schools, harassment of Parents, bud light, Target, Disney, this AA opinion, Rona overreach. All of it is causing more folks to take a second look and explore things for themselves. Some of them are figuring it out and are spreading the word to others.
Cliffs notes: like the SPLC, the ADL has run far afield from its original purpose, and become another leftist hate group.
*change my mind*
Affirming Democrats League.
The ADL is a bullsh-t organization, and exists only as a front for leftist totalitarians who literally own it.
It may only be apocryphal, but the story goes that Mr. Greenblatt was once asked to explain the logic underlying the positions espoused by ADL.
He replied patiently: “Of course I can explain. Let me speak slowly in order that you may understand: It’s turtles all the way down. OK? Do I need to repeat myself? Jeeez.”
Later, he was heard laughing with his Good Friends about how dense and dumb his detractors are. “I explain to them about the turtles. Just today it happened again!!! Lolol And they STILL do not comprehend!!! Lololol”
Lenny upthread.
The self-styled nerd-smart kids in the room pull the “It’s turtles all the way down,” on the “jocko homo’s” in the lunch room. In their eyes the jocko-homos are sub-human, trash animals and unworthy of consideration. Not aprocryphal. These guys are 21st century oven-stuffers.
Jason Scott, a self-styled “anarchivist” and super-spectrum nerd employed by the Internet Archive is a turtles all the way down fellow. Scott created a series of digital detention center server clusters and then populated those servers with texts, images and political essays Internet Archive administrators deem inappropriate. Woke Puritanism. He used a special purpose AI to scrape Internet Archive servers, then dumped all of it into “unindexed” servers. Unindexed data? Imagine a gigantic physical library. Imagine a gigantic front-loader bulldozer scooping all the books up and then dumping them in a pit.
The reason I mention this being he uses the image and symbol – the Woke Ikon – of the “Church of the Turtles All The Way Down.” on the Internet Archive page used to identify the Woke Censorship Server. The Ikon looks like turtles stacked on turtles resting on a flat earth or elephants holding flat earth supported by the World Turtle.
Off-Center and Outsider is the detention center:
https://archive.org/details/offcenter?tab=about
See the Ikon at the link? It’s the nerd special mark on the dungeon door. Silicon Valley nerds see it and smirk. And Jason Scott is the Dungeon Master. He literally dresses like a LSD tortured Willy Wonka. He gets into Willy drag and roams the US nerd speakers circuit. He’s on video.
And do search the web for “vicious infinite regression” and “turtles all the way down.”
When it comes to universities, don’t count on ADL. While teaching at UC Irvine (1998-2016) I personally saw how they were missing in action in the face of anti-Jewish harassment by SJP and the Muslim Student Union. They only care when they can blame it on MAGA types.