Is It Illegal To Call a Conservative Antisemitic?

The title of this post feels like an exasperated cry of a liberal media critic.  One can imagine looking at the contortions journalists go through to avoid calling, say, Thomas Massie antisemitic even after he distinguished "Zionism" from "US Patriotism" and introduced a "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Bill" and shouting "Goodness, is it illegal to call a conservative antisemitic or what?"

But alas, this isn't a purely rhetorical question. Eugene Volokh reported the other day that the ADL has apparently settled a defamation case filed by a conservative activist who claimed that the ADL defamed him by calling him an "extremist" and saying he peddles "antisemitic beliefs" (details of the settlement don't appear public, but apparently the ADL has removed references to this activist from its website).

The ADL's statements are quintessential examples of protected opinion, but the presiding judge, far-right extremist (can I say that?) Reed O'Connor, twisted the law into knots to let the claim survive a motion to dismiss. Presumably reading the writing on the wall (including the fact that any appeals would go up to the equally lawless Fifth Circuit), the ADL elected to settle.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the ADL's right-ward pivot over the past few years -- Noah Shachtman had a fantastic deep dive in New York Magazine, and I too have offered some of my thoughts. But one aspect that can be overlooked is the incredible pressure the ADL came under in recent years to stop calling out conservative antisemitism -- paradoxically, precisely because ideas once contained to the far-right were increasingly being embraced by "mainstream" conservatives, which (in the eternal-victim mindset of the right) proved that the ADL was "biased".

For a long time, this pressure mostly came in the guise of working the refs -- just repeating, over and over and over again, that the ADL was left-wing and biased and in thrall to the Democratic Party and ever so unfair to the conservative movement. One would never know from these critics that the ADL was facing mounting criticism from liberals (not the left, which always has loathed the ADL, but mainstream progressives who've long made up the ADL's base) for being too solicitous towards conservatives. Still, their efforts yielded results. Fox News parrots right-wing talking points about the ADL promoting "Critical Race Theory"; the ADL quickly promises a "thorough review" to placate them. Elon Musk demands the ADL denounce the anti-apartheid chant "Kill the Boer" (as part of his promotion of the "White genocide" conspiracy); the ADL immediately obliges.

But now, the conservative efforts are pushing past propaganda and into concrete legal action to harass anyone who tries to police conservative antisemitism. The abuse of defamation law (surely, the irony is intentional) is one manifestation. The Twitter/X lawsuit against Media Matters for (accurately) reporting that hateful content was appearing on the platform next to advertiser content -- also a Reed O'Connor special -- is another. And at least adjacent to the point is the threat by the Attorney General of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, to investigate AI chatbots for daring to give Donald Trump low marks on antisemitism -- literally arguing it is a form of fraud and misrepresentation to not give Trump his flowers on the subject. Bailey insist that giving Trump a superior grade on antisemitism is a matter of "objective historical facts," even as less than a third of American Jews approve of Trump's handling of antisemitism and more than half think is personally antisemitic.

So the pressure is very, very real -- which is not at all to justify bending to it, but we need to pay heed to what is actually going on. The right is committed to abusing its legal power to decimate any organization -- absolutely including any Jewish organization -- which dares try to call out conservative antisemitism. This can and should be called what it is: a declaration of war on the Jewish community, and an existential threat to our security and well-being.

Finally, one cannot miss the parallel here between the ADL and the American university -- another institution whose reputation for liberalism was not entirely unearned but certainly greatly exaggerated.  There, as here, venerable American institutions were slammed over and over again with complaints about "bias". There, as here, that decades long rhetorical war has now crested into the most flagrant abuses of authoritarian power we've seen in my lifetime. And there, as here, the attempt to appease the fundamentally authoritarian with humiliating acts of supplication will not work -- they will never trust you, they will always demand more, and you will never be a better fascist than the true believers.