Research & Analysis

August 16, 2019 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 A man in southern Nevada was arrested after investigators uncovered his plot to attack an LGBTQ nightclub, a local synagogue and the regional ADL office with firearms and explosives. A white supremacist group distributed anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic fliers at Seattle-area synagogues as part of a coordinated propaganda effort. And over 100 tires were slashed in a predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in NJ. Read on for more on these headlines,…

August 15, 2019         View this post on Instagram                       A post shared by Anti-Defamation League (@adl_national) on Aug 15, 2019 at 11:54am PDT Update: As of September 4, 21 of the following channels remain active on YouTube. An analysis by ADL’s Center on Extremism found that a…

August 08, 2019 Patrick Crusius, the white supremacist allegedly behind the August 3 massacre in El Paso, Texas, was very clear about his rationale for committing this act of violence. In an online screed titled, “The Inconvenient Truth,” he wrote, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas… I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”  These words echo what we’ve heard in recent…

Update: Just days after Unite the Right’s 2nd anniversary, white supremacist and Charlottesville attendee James Patrick Reardon Jr., of New Middletown, Ohio, was arrested for allegedly making threats to the Youngstown, Ohio, Jewish community center. Reardon was charged with telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing for allegedly posting an Instagram video of a man shooting a semi-automatic rifle with sirens and screams in the background. The video was captioned, &ldquo…

August 07, 2019 A mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019, shocked Americans across the nation. The horrific attack left 22 people dead and even more injured. Shortly before the attack,  alleged shooter Patrick Crusius is believed to have posted a manifesto on the website 8chan. The four-page screed was intended to provide a justification for his deadly spree. It is not the first time a white supremacist killer has followed precisely this…

August 06, 2019 In the days following the El Paso, Texas, shooting massacre that left at least 22 dead, white supremacists and other anti-Semitic extremists reacted to the murders and the killer’s manifesto with a mixture of praise and criticism. Kevin MacDonald, a longtime white supremacist author and psychologist, tweeted that he agreed with the shooter’s assessment of the political dynamics in the country, and shared his concern about the “great replacement,&rdquo…

On Saturday morning, August 3, 2019, a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and at the adjacent Cielo Vista Mall. The death toll is believed to be at least 20, and several dozen people are reportedly injured.  The alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas, was taken into custody shortly after the shooting. The FBI has reportedly opened a domestic terrorism investigation into the shooting, while Texas authorities are investigating the…

August 02, 2019 THE WEEK'S BIG 3 A new report from ADL reveals extremist items, including those promoting white supremacy, are widely available for purchase on Amazon, despite the company’s terms of service against such products. The alleged gunman responsible for killing three at a California food festival promoted a book cited by white supremacists on social media shortly before opening fire. The NonProfit Times is out with their annual “Power and Influence Top 50,”…

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…