ADL Articles

November 04, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 A fraternity house at George Washington University was vandalized over the weekend, including desecration of a Torah scroll. A day after a fire was set outside a Jewish synagogue in Central Austin, more than two dozen faith leaders and clergy members from across Austin were joined by community leaders at a rally as they called for unity following a recent spate of antisemitic incidents against across the city. Fox News personality Tucker Carlson…

November 03, 2021 Tucker Carlson’s special “documentary” series, “Patriot Purge,” which aired online the first week of November, 2021, via the Fox Nation streaming service, promotes many of the false conspiracy theories  Carlson promotes on his regular show on Fox News—the Biden Administration is on a “manhunt” for conservatives; the FBI played a role in the January 6 insurrection; the military wants to purge any soldier whose point of view…

November 02, 2021 Each year, to commemorate the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the notorious terrorist group Al Qaeda releases a video featuring one of the group’s senior leaders who typically reiterates the significance and impact of those deadly events from their warped perspective. Al Qaeda’s 2021 video, which was recently analyzed by experts in ADL’s Center on Extremism and the ADL department of International Affairs, was notable for…

October 29, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 A third of Jewish college students say they have personally experienced antisemitism in the last year, according to a new survey conducted jointly by ADL and Hillel. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt blasted Facebook following the publication of a series of articles revealing the company's struggles to stop hate speech, human trafficking and coordinated groups that sowed discord ahead of the January 6 insurrection. Community leaders are rallying behind the…

October 28, 2021 Three years ago, Robert Bowers opened fire inside a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, murdering 11 people and devastating the close-knit community of Squirrel Hill. Inspired by antisemitic, anti-immigrant and white supremacist views, Bowers posted his bigoted thoughts on Gab, a site known as a haven for extremists, and then acted on his words, committing history’s deadliest assault on the American Jewish community. In the immediate wake of the attack, and in the…

October 25, 2021 Unite the Right participants hold shields and a sign taken from counter protesters during the day's unrest. Photograph credit: John Penley, Facebook In the four years since the Unite the Right rally (“UTR”) in Charlottesville, Virginia, the major players and groups have undergone seismic change. This is certainly true for the defendants in the Integrity First for America lawsuit, which goes to trial this week. In stark contrast to the white supremacist…

October 21, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 A local chapter of the environmentalist group Sunrise Movement said it won’t march in a voting rights rally in Washington because some of the participating groups are Zionist. A Denver high school was targeted with graffiti displaying messages of hate, antisemitism, racism and homophobia over the weekend, and a Jewish private school had a window smashed and its electricity cut off.  With the third anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting…

October 15, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 International and Jewish community leaders gathered in Malmö, Sweden this week for a conference to combat antisemitism and advance Holocaust remembrance. Twitter is struggling to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and hate speech originating from the fringe social network Gab and migrating to find massive audiences on the platform, according to a new report released by ADL. A review of recently revealed membership rolls for the far-right group Oath…

In the battle over the false idea that Critical Race Theory is “infiltrating” our K-12 schools—and the belief that it must be stopped—the new frontier is children's literature.     Critical race theory bans by state legislatures  Critical race theory (CRT), taught primarily in higher education and law school, is the study of how laws and policies can drive and perpetuate racial disparities and inequities. Even though Critical Race Theory is…

June 29, 2021 In March 2021, Chet Hanks, son of actor Tom Hanks, published a series of social media posts critiquing white men’s attire and behavior, culminating a month later with the release of his song, “White Boy Summer.” A play on Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 hit song, “Hot Girl Summer,” “White Boy Summer” has taken the internet and meme culture by storm.  And while “White Boy Summer” was not initially intended to be hateful,…

October 11, 2021 Since 2020, Twitter has taken steps to decrease hate and disinformation on its platform, officially banning some forms of Covid-19 misinformation or purging QAnon-related handles after the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. But while Twitter’s anti-extremist policies are more effective now than they were a year ago, the platform has not addressed the ease with which users are able to drive traffic to hate and misinformation hosted on outside sites. To examine how…

October 11, 2021 On September 27, 2021, the non-profit journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) uploaded a cache of data allegedly linked to the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia, that included logs from the group’s private chatroom on Rocketchat, its emails from January 13 to September 19, 2021, and alleged membership information for more than 38,000 individuals. A review of these membership rolls found that 133 people provided emails with the …

October 07, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 A new website where Jewish students can report antisemitism on college campuses and receive immediate support from security professionals and law enforcement launched. A new report from ADL details the decades-long efforts from an extremist group to make county sheriffs an absolute authority, with the ability to implement their own political agendas. A federal jury in Seattle convicted the purported leader of the violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen…

October 05, 2021 Screenshot from the Twitter page of the Riyadh International Book Fair. By David Andrew Weinberg On October 1st, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture kicked off the Riyadh International Book Fair under the official patronage of the country’s ruler, King Salman.  Billed this year as “the largest book fair in the history of the kingdom” and even “the region’s largest book fair,” the ten-day convention is one of the Arabian…

September 27, 2021 In the past eight months, at least nine Rise Above Movement (R.A.M.)-inspired “Active Clubs” have cropped up across the United States. This development signals a renewed effort from R.A.M. to rebrand and spread their influence with a focus on real-world white supremacist activism. The clubs are geographically dispersed, loosely connected and localized chapters spanning from Indiana, Wyoming, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. …

September 27, 2021 Right-wing media pundits and politicians continue to use the rhetoric of “The Great Replacement” theory, which claims that white Europeans and Americans are being replaced by non-white immigrants. Though the theory has been adopted and promoted by the white supremacist movement, it is rooted in a racist European philosophy and feeds off white people’s fear that they are being increasingly and intentionally oppressed and made to feel guilty for their…

September 27, 2021 The recent blockbuster series of five articles from The Wall Street Journal exposing Facebook’s complicity in spreading toxic content underscores that it is far past time to recognize the harm caused by Facebook. Yet the company and other social media platforms continue to enjoy free rein despite playing outsized and destabilizing roles in determining what content is served up to billions of individuals worldwide. The “Facebook Files” were based on…

September 05, 2021 The Proud Boys are a right-wing extremist group with a violent agenda. That has never been more evident than over the course of the summer of 2021, when the Proud Boys and their associates reportedly engaged in violence at eight separate events. That violence, often against counter-protesters, has included fighting with fists, as is traditional for the Proud Boys, but paintball guns have also become a popular weapon. Proud Boys have also allegedly attacked journalists in…

September 02, 2021 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 The number of hate crimes in the United States rose to the highest level in 12 years, propelled by increasing assaults targeting Black and Asian victims, the FBI reported Monday. White supremacist and anti-government extremists have expressed admiration for the Taliban, a worrying development for US officials grappling with the threat of domestic violent extremism. More than 70 State Department officials sent a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State…

September 02, 2021 National Hispanic Heritage Month, which kicks off September 15 and ends October 15, provides an excellent opportunity to focus on Latinx literature. These books can be a jumping-off point to discuss the Latinx experience year-round. Our recommended books for elementary and middle school include picture books, chapter books and graphic novels. They help young people explore identity, names, culture, immigration, discrimination and important people in Latinx history. The…