Elon Musk has intensified his long-running feud with the Anti-Defamation League, calling the Jewish civil rights group a “hate group” in a post on X, the platform he owns and renamed from Twitter.
“The ADL hates Christians, therefore it is is [sic] a hate group,” Musk wrote Sunday, responding to a pseudonymous account that had claimed the ADL views Christianity as extremist.
The exchange drew quick amplification from right-wing figures. U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, accused the ADL of “intentionally creating a targeted hate campaign against Christians.” Provocateur Laura Loomer went further, urging that the ADL be “designated as a domestic terror org.”
At issue is the ADL’s page on “Christian Identity,” a specific white supremacist theology that portrays Jews as descendants of Satan and has been linked to violent extremism. The ADL, in a statement, explained that the ideology is “antisemitic, racist, and unambiguously poisonous” and bears no resemblance to mainstream Christianity. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X that the suggestion his group is anti-Christian is “offensive and wrong,” noting that “many of our staff members are Christian. Many of our supporters are Christian.”
Musk’s outburst is notable because, as recently as January, the ADL had defended him after he appeared to make a Nazi-style salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration. At the time, the group called the gesture “awkward,” a comment that drew backlash within the Jewish community and from the group’s left-wing critics.
The latest clash adds to a series of Musk’s attacks on the ADL. In 2023, he endorsed a post alleging that Jews were pushing “hatred against whites” and accused the ADL of “unjustly” targeting Western societies. He has also threatened to sue the organization for scaring advertisers away from X and recently demanded that it remove Turning Point USA, the group founded by Charlie Kirk who was assassinated earlier this month, from its database of extremist groups.
Kirk’s assassination took place the same day as a school shooting in Colorado allegedly by a gunman whose online activity had been flagged by a member of the ADL’s extremism monitoring division.
Since acquiring Twitter in late 2022, Musk has reshaped the platform’s approach to content moderation, reinstating banned white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes, who has praised Adolf Hitler and trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric. Civil rights groups, including the ADL, have warned that such moves have fueled a surge in online hate.
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