The ADL and the Birchers

How we got to where we are

Matt Dallek, who wrote a book on the John Birch Society, has an article in the Bulwark where he disabuses himself from his momentary attack of conscience he had upon noticing the ADL has been, for much of its history, an illegal intelligence operation:

Here was evidence that a venerable civil rights and civil liberties organization had spied, extensively, on a grassroots political movement. Some of the items were strikingly personal. The files included a codicil to a Birch donor’s will, credit checks on individuals suspected of membership, Birch members’ home addresses, chapter meetings, license-plate numbers, and more. Code-named agents posing as far-right activists had infiltrated the society, as well as white supremacist groups. Some of the ADL’s reports were sent to the FBI.

Who allowed gambling in this casino?

He notices they’re shaking down businesses, committing crimes, and engaging in whisper campaigns threatening to free association, but it’s a “triumph for liberal democracy” anyway. This is the nut:

The ADL’s charges were accurate. No smear campaign, this was an exposé. The covert program ginned up negative press and made the society toxic in the eyes of most Americans. The exposure neutered the ability of violent, conspiratorial, white-supremacist elements associated with the society to win elective office or dominate either the Democratic or the Republican party. And the ADL’s campaign forced Birchers to spend time, energy, and resources fending off charges of extremism or bigotry. The incessant public conversation about Birchers as a hate-filled group generated the impression that the organization must be tainted and ought to be shunned.

Do you have a gun to your head, professor?

Do these lines strike you as coming from the confident position of a person who knows truth is on his side? Do these sort of tactics seem like the kind of thing a group committed to the norms of liberal democracy would do? Of course not. Don’t you smell something sulfuric coming off this paragraph? And I don’t mean the opinion expressed, he’s entitled to that, I mean the whiff of a guy who is being prevented, somehow, from following where the logic is leading.

The thing that clinches it for me that the ADL’s subversion of the John Birch Society had nothing to do with any legitimate civil rights concern is this copy of their Facts newsletter from the mid-1960s:

The ADL is taking note that Robert Welch routinely disavows antisemitism and polices it in his ranks, but he troped while he did it. There were also many Jewish Birchers. Granting, for the sake of argument, that it is needful to have a social cop on the beat looking for and policing antisemitic speech, the ADL is being a dirty cop here. The JBS disciplined its ranks, disavowed antisemitism, and never excluded Jews, but the ADL nonetheless worked to decompose them.

Something similar happened in the 1990s during their anti-militia campaign, which the ADL and the SPLC both were part of. Some of the militias were radical and badly regulated. But some of them are definitely not. The progressive theory of gun control rests on the notion that the Second Amendment never meant for you to have a machine gun. Fine. It certainly says you can be part of a militia, and yet that’s what progressive NGOs spent a decade more or less running intelligence operations against. Here is my theory of the watchdog NGO: their chief purpose is to police lawful, constitutionally protected activity, because that’s where the gap is between their values and what they would like to prohibit but can’t.

Dallek and I are in agreement that there must be something else going on here that has little to do with being a civil rights organization. There is some other goal that justifies the use of willfully mendacious accusations of antisemitism against someone who, their own newsletter attests, is disavowing and trying to police it. What might that be? Let’s set aside the totalitarian notion that certain ideas are simply too dangerous to be discussed, though that is a common belief at The Bulwark, and assume there are real goals here.

It’s important to get this history right because of what’s going on. The moment calls for the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The ADL isn’t one thing, it’s a group of people, organized in an institution that’s existed for over a century. It has had many evolutions. It’s timely to put this stuff out there, for one thing, because of the uncomfortable conversations being had in the Democratic Party right now over the historically liberal Jewish voting bloc.

There are also, I think it’s reasonable to suppose, questions about the longterm viability of the ADL itself, which I don’t think Jonathan Greenblatt has figured out an answer to yet. It’s been severed from the B’nei B’rith for a while now, and younger liberal Jews consider it a right-wing organization. Religious Jews tend to find it too liberal. So what’s it for? My criticisms of it as an institution would fall into three categories: that it is a partisan force, that it is a vector of foreign influence (and not just Israeli), and that it is a shakedown machine with documented links to organized crime.

I can go through years of ADL fact-finding pamphlets but I’m not going to overdo that here. The thing to notice is how the perspective of the ADL changes. After the end of World War II, with the Nazi menace defeated, in the same way that the LGBT movement had to repurpose itself into the service of transgender prisoners after Obergefell v. Hodges, the ADL had to repurpose itself toward finding American right-wing boogeymen to justify its existence after it ceased being FDR’s main civil intelligence division.

As a cryptid fancier, I wouldn’t tell you boogeymen aren’t real, but any true cryptozoologist knows you have to take care to distinguish between the real thing and a guy in a monkey suit, because truth is an objective good itself, but also for the sake of one’s credibility.

The best thing to read about the perspective of the ADL as it changes during this period is Irwin Suall’s pamphlet about the extreme right and the military-industrial complex, which has the quality of Vienna in 1913. It was written before he joined the ADL officially, but it’s very representative of cracks starting to show in the Democratic Party as the New Deal coalition was starting to break down. Michael Harrington is credited in it, and the two would later break, with Suall becoming basically a neocon.

The Trotskyist perspective, which is what Suall was at the time, is that to combat Soviet totalitarianism, one must also be engaged in permanent democratic revolution at home. What he calls the “American Ultras” supply the domestic boogeyman. And where does the boogeyman boogy? Bookstores:

Dan Smoot is a former FBI agent, much in favor on the hustings of the extreme right. His Report is probably the most rabid of the successful Ultra publications, containing a running fire on almost every respected institution in American life.

National Review keeps one foot in the pad of the Ultras and the other in the camp of old style reaction. Its editorial board is similarly divided, with James Eurnham invariably providing the sophisticated, cultured rationale for the line of the moat dyed-in-the-wool extremists. Editor Buckley however consistently acts like the middle aged editor who ha wearied of his youthful conservative idealism and lacks the zest to resist the pressures and blandishments of the Ultras. [n.b: later in the year this pamphlet was published, Buckley published his famous excommunication of the Birchers]

Each of these publications has benefited by a recent phenomenon on the right: the mushrooming of bookshops that specialize in “Americanist” literature. There are now several dozen of these outlets, with new ones appearing regularly. Each stocks the current best selling books and pamphlets of the radical right; a sort of literary underworld.

The grandaddies of these shops are two booksellers: the Bookmaker in New York and Poor Richard’s Book Shop in Los Angeles, The Bookmaker is also in the business of publishing its own pamphlets, its most recent effort being a defense of General Walker. The West Coast is ahead in the burgeoning bookshop development with such stores as the Heritage Book Shoppe in Van Nuya, the Freedom Bookstores in Fullerton and Whittier, the Minuteman in Pasadena* Crowe’s bookstore in Santa Barbara, and the Betsy Ross Bookshop in West Los Angeles.

So even in the early 1960s you can see the pattern of abuse directed toward wholly peaceful activity in the interest of combatting what they call the extreme right, based on the notion that they may not be doing anything wrong right now, but they could do something wrong in the future. This is another way a lot of extremism monitoring is at variance with lawful due process. This document was published around the same time as the Reuther Memorandum, and both are parts of a growing climate of hysteria about the radical right at the time. You can see an early version of another thing that’s common today: a style of left-wing writing where one elaborates a filigree of objections to an unobjectionable thing.

It’s coming mostly from the labor movement—Walter Reuther led the UAW, and Suall came from the ILGWU. The idea is to paint the bosses as right-wing kooks. Behind all this is a genuine class conflict—Birchers by and large were small industrialists, Robert Welch made candy. The way the class conflict plays out is the unions are able to make accommodations with large industrial concerns, but the small ones, in the intervening decades, ended up getting mostly wiped out. All of Dallek’s writing about the ADL and the Birchers—he was a speechwriter for Dick Gephardt—has the chameleonlike quality of trying to pretend the Democratic Party’s institutional infrastructure is not there, when it’s all around this. He’s been part of it!

A few years after this pamphlet, just before Suall joined it, the ADL straight-facedly made the juvenile false equivalence between the Birch organization, basically reading clubs, to the Communist Party. That they are doing unauthorized reading outside the ADL’s curricular guidance—by then being taught in many public schools—is very much the essence of the organization’s problem with the JBS:

The evolution to notice is that for a long time the ADL tried to keep its role as the spy wing of the Democratic Party after the defeat of the Nazis—supporting intelligence and publishing efforts to smear isolationists by association with Nazi sympathizers. The ADL had a close relationship with Walter Winchell, for instance. After Suall joins in 1967 they began going after the anti-Zionist left. Arnold Forster began writing about a new leftist antisemitism arising from anticolonialist opposition to Israel in 1974—the new thing Tablet magazine and Bari Weiss’s operation have been surprised to discover after 10/7 has been written about for 50 years.

As I said in the review of the Alex Jones videographer’s book, at the heart of the Bircher worldview is the desire not to rule the world, and that’s the opposite of the quality we most associate with fascism, that unmistakable libido dominandi. It’s no skin off my back if people want to read weird books and talk about them with each other.

There are partisan reasons, and reasons of leftist ideology, that are behind the ADL’s anti-Bircher campaign. There’s the residual World War II notion that an anti-war Republican probably hates Jews, the notion that democratic progress depends on a stronger negotiating position for organized labor against the crazy Bircher management. But all of this falls rather short of a neutral arbiter of civil rights, doesn’t it?

The left was mostly supportive of Zionism during this time. Michael Harrington, the founder of the DSA, considered Zionism a national liberation movement, and that’s the faction Suall eventually broke with. So why did he break with it?

There are complicated answers to that question no doubt, but the unmistakeable fact is, by the Reagan era, after heading the fact-finding division of the ADL for some time, the relationship with the FBI had become extremely close. And the relationship the ADL is facilitating is not just between the American Jewish community and the FBI, but the Israeli state and the FBI:

This is a request to a top FBI official to attend and event which is not just about civil rights or Jews, but international relations touching on the state of Israel. Should our main federal law enforcement institution maintain a close intelligence relationship with an NGO that is also acting as a vector of foreign influence? Or should we define some lines that must not be crossed, so the public won’t infer what it’s reasonable to infer based on these documents, that the ADL is a kind of auxiliary secret police that works hand-in-glove with both the FBI and a foreign government?

When I complain about James Comey saying he’s been in love with the ADL on behalf of the FBI, the issue is he accepts this history as a just-so story irrespective of how it’s related to the party politics of Democrats, and the standing and interests of the state of Israel. Those are not unreasonable things to worry about when an FBI Director is confessing his love affair with an institution that has had a major hand in both.

But the ADL and the FBI’s love affair is at least in theory subject to federal open records laws. These days a lot of that coordination flows through DHS state fusion centers, which are federally funded but governed by state law, where many states have given big fat exemptions to anything that flows through them. Dallek has a book about the origins of homeland security in FDR-era civil defense. Which model of civil defense is more consistent with American traditions and constitutional rights, this one—untransparent, liable to all kinds of anonymous snitching typical of totalitarian societies, and in a jurisdictional grey zone? Or the Bircher one of reading clubs, militias, HAM radio networks, and so forth? Which is more susceptible to fascism?

I’m left wondering why The Bulwark would publish something like this. Is the idea that the ADL’s proud subterfuge—Arnold Forster copped in his books to having agents enter the houses of right-wing enemies under false pretenses and steal their membership lists—is something one should feel justified to do today?

It’s not, and setting that question aside, it’s not feasible either. It was probably illegal then, and any fudging of the law is much harder to justify today with surveillance authorities being what they are. Back then it may have been necessary to work with a group like this to increase counterintelligence coverage, but it’s certainly not now. I’m not sure anything about the ADL’s anti-Bircher campaign is worth defending on the merits, but the idea that there’s anything comparable we might do today is pure foolishness.