Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, could not defend President Joe Biden’s use of the debunked “fine people hoax” against former President Donald Trump when asked about it after a White House “unity summit” on Thursday.
The hoax is the false claim that Trump referred to neo-Nazis at a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 as “very fine people.” In fact, Trump said neo-Nazis should be “condemned totally,” distinguishing them from peaceful protesters on both sides of the issue of the removal of a Confederate statue. The hoax has been publicly debunked, but Biden continues to use it.
Greenblatt and the ADL participated in this week’s “unity summit” at the White House, at which Biden targeted the so-called “MAGA Republicans,” lumping them together with violent hate groups, including neo-Nazis. The conference followed up on Biden’s controversial speech Sep. 1 in Philadelphia, in which he described Trump and his supporters as a “threat” to America.
Jake Turx, the White House correspondent for the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami [“My people”], asked Greenblatt whether it was “good faith” for the president to attempt to unify the country while using a divisive hoax that had been widely debunked.
Greenblatt did not dispute that Biden’s claims of Charlottesville were wrong, but said they were justified because of other things that Trump was alleged to have done, which Greenblatt blamed for a climate of violent extremism and hate in general:
If President Trump had been able to say, clearly and consistently — not just in the minutes after Charlottesville, but in the days in the weeks, in the month, in the years, to call out David Duke when given the chance, to not say “stand back and stand by” to the Proud Boys when given a chance to condemn them, to not tweet out antisemitic memes whether they are directed at Hillary Clinton or the press or anyone else, to call out the “Great Replacement Theory” — I could go on and on and on and on and on, but the reason why we’re here is because the failure to communicate that gave permission, gave license to hate, and make no mistake — whether it’s white supremacists, armed militia groups, enraged sovereign citizens, radical anti-Zionists, enraged jihadists — it’s become open season on everyone in this environment.
Trump did, in fact, repeatedly denounce white supremacist David Duke — yet the media never stopped pestering him about Duke, and when Trump eventually refused to answer the question on one occasion, that was used against him forevermore.
The claim that Trump sent a message to the Proud Boys to “stand by” is also a hoax. Trump had just condemned the Proud Boys when asked to do so at the first presidential debate; he borrowed the “stand” language from moderator Chris Wallace.
The “antisemitic memes” to which Greenblatt refers include petty incidents such as a retweet of an image of Hillary Clinton against a background of cash with a six-pointed star, which the campaign said it did not realize had antisemitic undertones.
And “Great Replacement Theory” is a white supremacist take on an actual Democratic Party strategy of changing the political balance in the country through an open-borders policy that, after an amnesty, will produce millions of new Democratic voters.
As for “radical anti-Zionists,” most of those are on the left, as Greenblatt well knows — though that did not stop him from signing a racist Black Lives Matter petition in 2020 together with groups the ADL itself calls anti-Zionist and antisemitic.
Greenblatt, a former Obama administration staffer, did not mention the many things that Trump had done to fight racial prejudice, antisemitism, and homophobia throughout his presidency. His criticism was unbalanced, partisan, and one-sided.
Ironically, Greenblatt was standing alongside Al Sharpton, who has a long history of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic speech, and who has been blamed for inflaming violent tensions between blacks and Jews in New York City in the 1990s.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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