The ADL Ignores Yet Another Elon Musk ‘Great Replacement’ Meltdown
Why does the alleged civil rights group continue to give a free pass to America’s most prominent antisemite?
For the past week, multibillionaire Elon Musk has been exploiting the horrific murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to promote his long-held, and long-documented Great Replacement Theory narrative. Zarutska, who was apparently stabbed to death while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina has become a cause célèbre among far-right media figures, who are using the incident as evidence of out-of-control crime in Democratic-controlled cities, despite crime falling perspicuously across the country over the past year and, in Charlotte in particular. Not content with the run-of-the-mill racism, Musk has taken the outrage one step further, openly embracing the narrative that its further evidence that the white race, such as it is, is under coordinated attack by “the left” and forces of immigration to replace the white population in a torrent of tweets and retweets.
“White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population” Musk posted on September 6 in response to Italian fascist account @RadioGenoa posting “In 1900 white population of world was 36%, today it is 8%.” In response to a tweet from another far right account claiming that “Africa has 54 countries, Asia has 48 countries. There are 51 countries with a Muslim majority. Nobody from Africa, Asia or a Muslim country needs to come to Europe or the USA for asylum.” Musk replied “This is not accidental. The radical left is importing voters. And it’s a sure way to win if not stopped.”
This is all textbook Great Replacement Theory rhetoric and it’s all being ignored, once again, but the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL, and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who claim to be “a global leader in combating hate” and “combating antisemitism” predictably had nothing to say about the world’s richest person and owner of the world’s most politically influential social media website spreading overt antisemitic conspiracies for the better part of a week.
The ADL ignored multiple requests for comment about whether they oppose Musk’s latest Great Replacement tirade, or whether they even indexed it as such. They also did respond to inquiries as to whether Musk or any of his affiliated organizations were funding the ADL.
Great Replacement Theory, as the ADL itself notes on its website, advances the idea that as part of an antisemitic conspiracy, “native white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race.” Musk’s tweet commenting on nonwhite countries followed by “This is not accidental. The radical left is importing voters” and “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population” meets any objective definition of Great Replacement conspiracy peddling.
It’s not the first time Musk has trafficked in Great Replacement rhetoric. Musk received modest backlash (not from the ADL, of course) when he said in March of this year that his so-called “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) will “turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements” to “illegals,” as he listed off government programs including social security, Medicare, unemployment aid, disability and small business loans. “If the Dems can bring in 200,000 illegals and get them legalized … even without cheating, if you bring in illegals that are 10 [times] the voting differential in a swing state, it will no longer be a swing state,” Musk said. “And the Dems will win all the swing states in a matter of time.”
In 2023, Musk replied to an antisemitic account endorsing Great Replacement Theory and blaming “Jewish communities” for conspiring “against whites” by saying “this is the actual truth.” This garnered brief but limited backlash.
No doubt feeling pressure to say something, Greenblatt responded by mildly chided Musk on X/Twitter, screencapping the tweet but not mentioning Musk by name, “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one's influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories.”
Soon after, Musk did a propaganda tour of Israel, took photos with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wore IDF dog tags, and recited every pro-genocide justification during his media appearances, thus absolving him of his overt embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories. He didn’t need to denounce or apologize for his trafficking in antisemitic conspiracies as such, just support the state of Israel and its campaign of extermination in Gaza.
Since then, the ADL has pulled its punches and avoided criticism of Musk, culminating in its now-infamous downplaying of Musk’s clear-as-day Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration this past January.
The backlash, even from liberal institutions typically indifferent to the ADL’s slippery and bad-faith invocation of antisemitism, was fierce but—again—faded quickly. The ADL tried to save face by mildly criticizing Musk for making light of the subsequent outrage with a torrent of nazi puns but this, again, was in the “Do Better” mold, not in the totalizing, hysterical condemning terms Greenblatt reserves for advocates of Palestinian rights like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani, or when Greenblatt equates wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh with a Nazi swastika, as he did on MSNBC last year.
As Tamar Manasseh noted in The Forward in January, this isn’t the first time the ADL has been extremely selective about who it fiercely condemns and who it lets off the hook. Detailing the ADL’s double standard for the black community, Manasseh notes that while Musk was afforded “grace” after his inauguration nazi salute, Whoopi Goldberg was publicly condemned and dressed down on national TV for comments far less offensive than a sieg heil.
The ADL is, at its core, a shakedown operation for the Israeli government and its violent policies towards Palestinians. It uses the language and pretense of anti-racism stateside to protect Israel’s left flank from human rights concerns, and smears any substantive critics of Israel as antisemites—all while, conspicuously, going light on or ignoring major antisemites so long as they toe the line on Israel.
The ADL has a long history of overt advocacy for U.S. and Israeli policies of aggression towards Palestinians, and of using research and reports to attack the left, and anti-racist movements more broadly. One of its key methods is to draw false equivalencies between critics of human rights abuses against Palestinians, and Nazi or white supremacist extremists, is premised on the false assertion that any criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic. In 1967, Dore Schary, national chairman of the ADL, slammed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an anti-racist organization, for criticizing the Israeli government in a newsletter. Israel’s critics are extremists, Schary told the ADL’s executive committee, and "they have gained an audience and made an impact, both of which can grow." In 1993, the ADL was the subject of lawsuits and law enforcement investigations for secretly spying on thousands of political activists for decades, including Arab-American groups and critics of the Israeli government. The organization’s intelligence gatherer of 32 years, Roy Bullock, is alleged to have also surveilled the United Auto Workers union, the NAACP, and anti-apartheid activists, at the behest of the South African government. In the mid-1980s, the ADL launched a propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela, and slammed the African National Congress as "totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American."
Despite his open advocacy for the nation-state of Israel, his selective focus on antisemitism when it suits Israel’s short term political interests, and his history of racism against black activists, Greenblatt is still given pride of place in US media, where he seemingly has a standing invitation at outlets like MSNBC and New York Times where he is treated as a good faith warrior against “hate.” No amount of selective and racially-loaded outrage appears to undermine this wholly undeserved image. Greenblatt ignoring Musk’s latest antisemitic conspiracy-mongering is just one more point of evidence for how cynical and instrumentalized the ADL’s feigned outrage really is.