July 30, 2019 After a deadly shooting spree at the Gilroy (California) Garlic Festival on July 28 that left three dead and 15 injured, an Instagram account was discovered that appears to have recently been created by the shooter, Santino Legan. In a post made not long before the attack, Legan asked why towns were overcrowded and open space paved over to make room for “hoards [sic] of mestizos and Silicon Valley white tw*ts.” Legan also urged people to read the book Might…

July 29, 2019 Items and merchandise promoting right-wing extremist ideologies, including white supremacy and the anti-government militia movement, are still being offered for sale by various third-party sellers on Amazon, in apparent violation of the company’s own policies, according to a recent search of the retailing site by experts in ADL’s Center on Extremism. Hateful books (including paradigmatic white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries) are easily accessible, usually…

July 02, 2019 While Facebook is working with leading civil society organizations, including ADL, to address civil rights concerns on their platform, their latest report raises more questions than it answers about how Facebook intends to do this.  Many of the audit committee’s recommendations are not novel but, if implemented, would be valuable steps forward in addressing hate, harassment and radicalization on Facebook — such as blocking for targets of large-scale…

July 02, 2019 Even as mainstream social media companies are struggling to eliminate extremist content and users from their platforms, the opportunities of scale and reach provided by these platforms continue to be leveraged and weaponized by extremists. And as mainstream companies increase their content moderation efforts to clamp down on hate, extremists are migrating to other platforms. White supremacists are relatively easy to find on mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter, despite…

June 25, 2019 UPDATE:  On June 26th, ADL submitted this statement urging passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act as part of House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties hearings entitled “Continuing Challenges to the Voting Rights Act Since Shelby County v. Holder. This week marks six years since the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nation…

June 14, 2019 THE WEEK’S BIG 3 Organizers of the “DC Dyke March” attempted to implement a ban on Jewish Pride flags, claiming they too closely resemble the flag of Israel. In Detroit, a small group of neo-Nazis carrying weapons disrupted an LGBTQ Pride march by spewing homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic slurs at participants and pretending to defile an Israeli flag. A gay man in Atlanta was shot and killed in what police are classifying as a hate crime. Read on for…

June 13, 2019 Key Highlights In 2018, 13 individuals were arrested for domestic criminal activity motivated by Islamist extremism. Four of the 13 arrests were linked to terror plots, one of which resulted in the murder of a high school student. All 13 individuals arrested for domestic Islamist extremist activity in 2018 were lawfully in the United States at the time of their arrest. Eleven of these individuals were U.S. citizens, one was a lawful permanent resident originally from…

June 11, 2019 On Saturday, June 8, ten neo-Nazis associated with the National Socialist Movement protested Detroit’s Motor City Pride Festival, carrying guns and shouting homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs. NSM leader Burt Colucci and Aric Lemieux, NSM’s South Michigan chapter leader, headed up the protest, which included participants from Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Michigan. Lemieux expressed his intention to protest the festival months ago, and other group…

June 07, 2019 June 6, 2019 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 YouTube announces a new effort to remove extremist, white supremacist content from its platform, in what ADL called “an important step forward.” In an attempt to claim ‘prominent’ conservatives were being censored on social media platforms, a Fox News host cited an avowed anti-Semite as an example. Volkswagen is partnering with ADL to fund a new office in Berlin that will research and combat anti-Semitism throughout…

June 02, 2019 Remarks by Jonathan Greenblatt CEO and National Director, Anti-Defamation League To the ADL National Leadership Summit June 2, 2019, Washington, D.C. (As prepared for delivery) Thank you, Esta, for that kind introduction, and welcome to our 2019 National Leadership Summit. I am so glad to be here. Its been an exhausting year and a hard year, and to that end I want to ask you to pause for a moment of silence to honor the 12 people who were killed in…

May 31, 2019 May 30, 2018 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 Jews in Germany were warned that wearing a kippah in public may be dangerous, due to a disturbing increase in anti-Semitic incidents. The Ku Klux Klan attempted to hold a rally in Dayton, Ohio over the weekend but failed spectacularly – being out numbered 600 to nine. Twitter is weighing whether banning white nationalists from their platform or allowing them to stay on and be debated is the proper approach in dealing with this issue. …