A shocking new report reveals that the ADL has been pressuring law enforcement to open terrorism investigations into conservative commentators. Plus, major media companies are experiencing mass layoffs and shutting down left and right, and in our daily cancellation, I find myself in the middle of another social media controversy for my unorthodox, unapproved opinions about therapy, mental illness, and depression.
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00:01:59.780After 9-11, dozens of state-run, quote-unquote, fusion centers popped up all over the country.
00:02:05.700Now there are roughly 79 of them in operation, and they exist in virtually every state.
00:02:10.020The point of these centers is supposedly to facilitate cooperation between the federal government and the states in order to gather intelligence and prevent terrorist attacks and other serious threats to the homeland.
00:02:25.220A couple years ago, investigative reporters at The Nation found that the fusion center in central Florida was investigating, quote, criminal and violent extremist use of emojis.
00:02:35.440The Fort Worth fusion center, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a plot to break the Netflix star Joe Exotic out of prison, while the Capital Region fusion center was busy looking into viral TikTok challenges.
00:02:47.280The Washington State fusion center, for its part, opened an investigation into a report, quote, concerning a homeowner working on cars in his driveway and letting oil run down the street into Mission Creek and Olympia.
00:02:58.760Now, in any other context, this would be considered fraud.
00:03:02.120These state governments are taking money to fight terrorism, but they're not remotely attempting to do that.
00:03:08.080In fact, they don't appear to be doing anything of consequence whatsoever, which, in this context, is especially strange.
00:03:13.960I mean, normally, when federal and state governments give themselves vast powers of surveillance and lofty new mandates, they don't waste their time chasing down homeowners who are being a little sloppy while they work on their cars.
00:03:25.400They usually start using their expanded powers as quickly and as widely as possible.
00:03:30.260So, one of two things is happening here.
00:03:32.580Either these fusion centers are a massive and long-standing fraud, or there's something else going on here, or a little bit of both.
00:03:41.320Now, for a while now, there have been signs that the latter explanation, something else is going on here, is the more plausible one.
00:03:48.200In their investigation, the nation obtained documentation indicating that one area of focus for these fusion centers is, quote, First Amendment-protected events.
00:03:57.120But the journalists weren't able to provide much more clarity on that, probably because the government redacted information on their investigations in this area.
00:04:04.600So, we learned all about the TikTok investigations and the emoji investigations at these fusion centers, but not so much about their crackdown on the First Amendment.
00:04:12.880And that's where things have stood for the past several years.
00:04:15.960But yesterday, thanks to a report from Mary Margaret Olihan at the Daily Signal, we have indication of the actual mission of these fusion centers and what First Amendment-protected events they might be interested in.
00:04:29.980The Daily Signal obtained an email sent in February of 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League, or the ADL, to the Washington State Fusion Center.
00:04:39.340And that's the same fusion center that was looking into that homeowner who was working on his car in a sloppy way.
00:04:46.680White supremacist fight clubs anti-LGBTQ plus hate.
00:04:50.620Now, in the body of the email, the ADL warns about, quote, online amplifiers of LGBTQ plus hate, promoting, quote, false narratives escalating harassment of LGBTQ plus individuals.
00:05:01.940This alleged hate includes, quote, the vilification of drag shows and, quote, baseless claims of child grooming by LGBTQ plus people.
00:05:10.800According to the ADL's email to this Washington State Counterterrorism Center, this vilification, quote, further endangered and isolated an already at-risk community.
00:05:19.620According to the Daily Signal, the email then appears to link to an ADL blog post which identifies who the purveyors of this supposedly dangerous hate are.
00:05:31.280And those people are Libs of TikTok, the account Gays Against Groomers, Blaze Media, Christopher Ruffo, and, of course, that international infamous terrorist who goes by the name Matt Walsh.
00:05:44.040Now, the post states that, quote, the ADL is advocating for government partners to strengthen laws against perpetrators of online hate as well as consulting with law enforcement partners to act on online hate speech that incites violence and or credible threats.
00:05:59.460The ADL says that it teamed up with a GLAAD as well, and they're apparently all working with law enforcement.
00:06:04.980In other words, the ADL, just to get you up to speed here, the ADL told a counterterrorism agency to investigate journalists and political commentators because we are saying things they don't like.
00:06:19.280They are trying explicitly to use the arm of the law to silence us at gunpoint.
00:06:26.820Now, they don't even claim that we violated any law, right?
00:06:31.860They're not claiming that because we haven't.
00:06:34.900Instead, they're saying that because we oppose the chemical and physical castration of children and because we believe in biology and because we don't think that men should be cross-dressing in front of children, therefore, we are inciting violence.
00:06:46.080So they call on law enforcement to act.
00:06:49.640The Daily Signal reached out to the Washington State Patrol about this, and they're one of the state agencies that participated in this fusion center.
00:06:56.820They indicated that they take emails from the ADL and various other interest groups under advisement, but they denied opening any investigation on the basis of the ADL's email.
00:07:06.540So according to them, as far as we know, there is not a current criminal investigation against, say, me for tweeting things that they don't like.
00:07:15.400Now, obviously, we have no idea whether that's true or not.
00:07:18.960We also have no reason to believe that it's true.
00:07:21.400You know, it would certainly be strange for the ADL to send an email like this to a counterterrorism center if they thought it would just be ignored, right?
00:07:30.740The fact that they're sending it would seem to indicate that there's some kind of relationship here, that there's some sort of precedent.
00:07:36.180We also have no idea how many similar emails the ADL has sent to this particular fusion center or any others.
00:07:43.680What we do know is that the ADL has a very long history of not simply advising law enforcement agencies, which they shouldn't even be doing that, but participating directly in law enforcement functions.
00:07:54.480This is a quote from a speech that James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, delivered to the ADL's leadership summit back in 2014.
00:08:01.060Quote, the FBI works at the ADL to host civil rights and hate crime training for our state and local counterparts through a number of programs.
00:08:07.860And the ADL, of course, has even greater reach.
00:08:10.160You trained more than 12,000 law enforcement personnel last year alone, and I want to thank you for that.
00:08:17.900So this is not a typical political nonprofit we're talking about here.
00:08:20.640The ADL is conducting training for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
00:08:27.120And these partnerships have only accelerated in recent years, post-BLM.
00:08:31.620As the ADL states on its website, quote,
00:08:33.220In 2020 alone, ADL's Center for Extremism provided law enforcement with critical intelligence about extremism over 1,000 times and tracked over 5,000 new incidents of hate on our online interactive heat map.
00:08:45.520In other words, the ADL, which supposedly was founded to combat anti-Semitism, is now a de facto intelligence agency for federal and state law enforcement.
00:08:56.800This is the organization that's now advising the Washington Fusion Center to investigate me and several other commentators for having offensive opinions.
00:09:04.200Now, if you know anything about the history of the ADL, this actually probably wouldn't surprise you.
00:09:10.940The ADL has a long and well-documented history of working with law enforcement, even going so far as to actively participate in law enforcement investigations.
00:09:18.760One of the more famous cases took place in the 1960s when an ADL director raised money for the FBI to pay some Klansmen $36,000 in an effort to set up other Klansmen.
00:09:29.300Now, that incident led to a shootout and the death of one Klan member.
00:09:34.140Whatever you make of that operation, journalists noted at the time that it was obviously a little strange for a private tax-exempt organization to be involved in this.
00:09:42.280The ACLU at the time called for an investigation.
00:09:46.040But in the end, no one seemed to mind.
00:09:48.200The ADL adopted a pseudo-law enforcement assistant role, which they've retained ever since.
00:09:53.920Now, I've focused on the ADL so far, mainly because they're the group that are trying to have me specifically investigated.
00:10:01.440But there are many other organizations like the ADL doing the same thing.
00:10:05.540Maybe the most notable is the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.
00:10:08.700You might remember that the FBI cited the SPLC in its infamous memo claiming that, quote,
00:10:14.080radical traditionalist Catholic ideology is a significant terrorist threat in America.
00:10:19.140The FBI tried to hide that memo, but a whistleblower came forward and released it.
00:10:22.480But the SPLC is a completely discredited group.
00:10:26.580They even had to pay out defamation settlements for some of their more egregious hack jobs.
00:10:31.880And the Bureau knows that, according to the whistleblower.
00:10:34.060But the FBI tried to cite them anyway in order to justify the targeted surveillance of Catholics on the basis of their religious beliefs.
00:10:42.740We've seen many examples of similar misconduct in recent years in which the government partners with some supposedly independent private entity
00:10:50.360in order to lend some legitimacy to its obviously illegitimate investigations.
00:10:54.460During the Trump campaign, the FBI effectively teamed up with the Washington Post in order to obtain secret surveillance warrants against the Trump team.
00:11:02.360The FBI even copy-pasted from a debunked Washington Post editorial in its FISA warrant application against Carter Page.
00:11:08.720And more recently, the DOJ has been investigating Dr. Ethan Haim because he blew the whistle on Texas Children's Hospital,
00:11:15.180which claimed that it had stopped butchering children but kept on doing it anyway in secret.
00:11:20.520And that got the attention of trans activists and their various advocacy groups,
00:11:23.880which in turn led to the DOJ knocking on Haim's door.
00:11:27.360Now, they know they don't have a legal case against him.
00:11:30.460They know it's not a violation of patient privacy to disclose the existence of unlawful and unethical procedures