Ben Shapiro—the pugnacious right-wing commentator famous for “DESTROYING” college undergrads in debates, slamming his political opponents with a wide variety of vicious labels, and his long-pinned tweet about facts not caring about your feelings—thinks the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is being super mean to Elon Musk. He also thinks the billionaire is “correct” in his belief that he’s being defamed by the nonprofit.
Shapiro is white-knighting for Musk—the world’s richest man and owner of the steadily deteriorating social media site X, formerly known as Twitter—because the ADL has called for advertisers to pull their business from X, following what the organization claims is a rise in antisemitic content since Musk bought the site last year.
Musk fancies himself a free speech absolutist, despite his penchant for suing critics, arbitrarily suspending journalists he doesn’t like, and even banning some users for hate speech (which was bad, according to Musk and his minions, when the previous Twitter regime did it).
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But now he’s threatening a defamation suit against the ADL, which he blames for X’s cratering revenue under his stewardship—which has been marred by mass firings, the obliteration of the verification system (making X worthless as a source for breaking news), the amplification of fever swamp trolls who paid $8, and inexplicable technical changes that make the always-janky site even harder to use. (There’s obviously many more reasons Musk’s $44 billion investment is bleeding out, but you get the idea.)
Shapiro correctly acknowledged that such defamation lawsuits have very little chance of success—thanks to First Amendment protections allowing for robust criticism of public figures—but insisted Musk was right about pretty much everything else.
“A lot of these progressive interest groups are very much interested in removing advertising revenue from sources where they can't control the speech,” Shapiro said on his show. He also said the ADL defends antisemites in Congress, as long as they’re Democrats, and claimed the group is essentially threatening, “Abide by left-wing standards of speech or watch your advertising dollars disappear.”
Before I go any further, a few points of order.
In 2020, I published a year-long investigation into the ADL’s extremist violence statistics, in which I determined the organization was being irresponsible and deceptive in its overbroad definitions of such incidents and its use of cherry-picked topline numbers—which helped cement in the minds of many (especially journalists) that extremist violence was occurring at far higher levels than they actually were. My colleagues and I analyzed hundreds of incidents and found just 58 percent of them were actually motivated by bigotry or extreme politics.
I disclose this to say, unlike many right-wing media sycophants who trip over themselves to defend Musk from any reasonable criticism, I’m not here to carry water for the ADL. But I can say that several Jewish writers from across the political spectrum—who have also been critical of the ADL—see what’s happening for what it is.
Conservative writer Seth Mandel said the popularity of the “Ban the ADL” hashtag on X is the work of the antisemitic groypers—“bad people with bad intentions and bad designs.”
Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic took issue with Musk’s statement that “because [the ADL] are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, [they] are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform.” Rosenberg aptly described Musk’s “conceit that Jews cause themselves to be persecuted” as a historically familiar antisemitic smear.
And while Ben Shapiro often self-deputizes as the arbiter of “good Jews” and “bad Jews,” his myopia regarding Musk’s use of antisemitic tropes and his regular cordial engagements with racists and antisemites on X makes him every bit the partisan hack that he decries in the ADL.
And the debates over whether the ADL is to blame for Musk’s failing business (it is not) or whether the ADL is to blame for rising antisemitism (it is also not) completely miss the point for free speech poseurs like Shapiro and Musk.
Calls for advertiser boycotts are, themselves, free speech. And that freedom applies whether you agree with the politics of the agitators or the veracity of their cause.
Even Shapiro knows Musk stands no chance of winning a frivolous defamation suit—a favorite tactic for censorious rich thugs, like Donald Trump, to harass and bankrupt their enemies even when they know they have no chance of winning. But Shapiro—who graduated Harvard Law school with honors—is either willfully obtuse or plainly disingenuous to act as though boycotts aren’t a legitimate form of dissent.
Way back in… May 2023, Shapiro praised the right-wing boycotts of Target and Bud Light over the corporations’ LGBTQ outreach. He also warned other corporate bosses that they too could be on the receiving end of a boycott if they don’t straighten up and fly right.
Shapiro said on his show, “All you corporate brand leaders out there preparing for Pride month. Just remember, this could be you. If you decide to step into this minefield and then you get blown up. Ain’t no sympathy for you over here. And in fact, some of us are quite happy to make an example of you if you decide to become the bleeding edge of the Pride Progress team attempting to foster a societal viewpoint that damages children and wrecks traditional morality.”
To recap, a coalition of right-wing organizations, amplified by right-wing celebrities and media personalities, boycotted corporations for “becom[ing] the loudspeaker for a system of morality that disdains traditional institutions like the nuclear family, that disdains the natural necessity of heterosexual relationships, and pretends that all sexual activity is morally equivalent and equally fulfilling,” as Shapiro put it, approvingly.
“I am more than happy to take my business elsewhere,” Shapiro concluded.
I’m no elite Harvard Law grad, but how is that any different from a progressive organization, like the ADL, calling for a boycott after looking at the content of Musk’s X and determining that, yeah, there’s a lot of antisemitism on here?
Were he not a transparently partisan culture warrior, Shapiro could have at least appended his comment that Musk’s defamation lawsuit threat not only has no chance of success, but that it’s also flatly wrong to conflate calls for boycotts as somehow beyond the pale of acceptable speech—however much he might despise the progressive politics of the ADL.
And just as Shapiro is free to (correctly or not) label vociferous critics of Israel as antisemites, or any number of political opponents as “anti-American,” so too is the ADL free to characterize X as a hotbed of bigoted content.
By encouraging the speech-chilling effects of bogus defamation lawsuits—like the one Musk is threatening against the ADL—Shapiro proves he isn’t merely an unprincipled political hack, he’s a willful accomplice to Musk’s attacks on freedom of speech.
