The Anti-Defamation League has removed an online resource guide about extremism, one day after Elon Musk escalated a wave of right-wing criticism against the group by criticizing an entry.
The deletion of the Glossary of Extremism and Hate was first reported Tuesday by Jewish Insider. The guide is no longer on the ADL’s homepage, and searches of its contents yield no results.
“With over 1,000 entries written over many years, the ADL Glossary of Extremism has served as a source of high-level information on a wide range of topics for years. At the same time, an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated. We also saw a number of entries intentionally misrepresented and misused,” an ADL spokesperson told Jewish Insider in a statement. “At ADL, we always are looking for how we can and should do things better. That’s why we are moving to retire the Glossary effectively immediately. This will allow ADL to explore new strategies.”
The glossary contained roughly 1,000 entries explaining left- and right-wing extremist groups and movements and the ideas they promulgate. An initiative of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, which grew out of the organization’s mission to protect Jews and also monitors online extremism and alerts authorities about potential threats, the glossary was widely cited by researchers, journalists and internet users seeking to better understand the extremism landscape.
In recent days, following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, right-wing critics of the ADL had taken aim at the guide, complaining that it had characterized Kirk’s group Turning Point USA as an extremist organization. An entry for Turning Point USA in fact said that the group both said it rejected white nationalism and attracted white nationalist members.
Musk had been one of a number of conservatives, including lawmakers and Donald Trump Jr., to demand that the guide revise or remove its Turning Point USA entry. His criticism reached a new height on Monday when Musk tweeted a screenshot of the entry for “Christian Identity,” a small extremist movement that is not the same as Christianity, and said the ADL “hates Christians” and was “a hate group.”
Musk’s outburst was 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. (Those critics have lambasted the group for equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.)
Prior to the guide’s deletion, the ADL had revised the Turning Point USA entry, including to include information about Kirk’s support for Israel, Jewish Insider reported.
An introduction to the guide, still available online, notes, “It is not all inclusive. Being included in this database does not mean that individuals or groups are engaging in illegal or violent conduct, but rather that in ADL’s judgment the views as exemplified by the statements made in support of those views can be considered extreme.”
The guide’s disappearance comes as the Trump administration has scaled back government spending on monitoring extremism. 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.
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