After 9/11, dozens of state-run “Fusion Centers” popped up all over the country. Now there are roughly 79 of them in operation, and they exist in virtually every state. The 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. But here’s the strange thing: They don’t appear to be doing that.
A couple years ago, investigative reporters at The Nation found that the Fusion Center in Central Florida was investigating, “Criminal and Violent Extremist Use of Emojis.” The 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. The Washington State Fusion Center, for its part, opened an investigation into a report , “concerning a homeowner working on cars in his driveway and letting oil run down the street into Mission Creek in Olympia.”
In any other context, this would be considered fraud. These state governments are taking money to fight terrorism, but they’re not remotely attempting to do that. In fact, they don’t appear to be doing anything of consequence whatsoever, which in this context is especially strange. 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. They usually start using their expanded powers as quickly as possible.
One of two things is happening here: Either these Fusion Centers are a massive and long-standing fraud, or there’s something else going on.
For a while now, there have been signs that the latter explanation is the more plausible one. In their investigation, the Nation obtained documentation indicating that one area of focus for these Fusion Centers is, “First Amendment-Protected Events.” But the journalists weren’t able to provide much more clarity, probably because the government redacted information on their investigations in this area. So, we learned all about the TikTok investigations at these Fusion Centers, but not so much about their crackdown on the First Amendment. And that’s where things have stood for the past several years.
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But yesterday, thanks to a report by Mary Margaret Olohan at The Daily Signal, we have some indication of the actual mission of these Fusion Centers, and what “First Amendment-protected events” they might be interested in. The Daily Signal obtained an email sent in February of 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League (or ADL) to the Washington State Fusion Center. That’s the same Fusion Center that was looking into that homeowner working on his car.
Here’s the subject line: “White Supremacist Fight Clubs, Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate.” In the body of the email, the ADL warns about “online amplifiers of LGBTQ+ Hate” promoting “false narratives, escalating harassment of LGBTQ+ individuals.”
This alleged hate includes, “the vilification of drag shows” and “baseless claims of ‘child grooming’ by LGBTQ+ people.” According to the ADL’s email to this Washington state counterterrorism center, this vilification, “further endangered and isolated an already at-risk community.”
According to the Daily Signal, the email then appears to link to an ADL blog post, which identifies the purveyors of this supposedly dangerous hatred as Libs of TikTok, Gays Against Groomers, Blaze Media, Christopher Rufo, and of course that infamous international terrorist who goes by the name Matt Walsh. The post states, “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.” The ADL says it’s teamed up with GLAAD as well, and they’re all apparently working with law enforcement.
In other words, the ADL told a counterterrorism agency to investigate journalists and political commentators because we’re saying things they don’t like. They don’t even claim we violated any law. Instead, they’re saying that because we oppose the chemical and physical castration of children, and because we believe in biology, therefore we’re “inciting violence.” So they call on law enforcement to “act.” The Daily Signal reached out to the Washington State Patrol about this. They’re one of the state agencies that participates in this “Fusion Center.” They indicated 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.
Obviously we have no idea whether that’s true or not. 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. We also have no idea how many similar emails the ADL has sent to this particular Fusion Center. What we do know is the ADL has a very long history of not simply advising law enforcement agencies, but participating directly in law enforcement functions.
This is a from a speech that James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, delivered to the ADL’s leadership summit back in 2014. “The FBI works with the ADL to host civil rights and hate crime training for our state and local counterparts through a number of programs. … And the ADL, of course, has even greater reach; you trained more than 12,000 law enforcement personnel last year alone, and I want to thank you for that.”
So this is not a typical political nonprofit we’re talking about here. The ADL is conducting training for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. And these partnerships have only accelerated in recent years, post-BLM. As the ADL states on its website, “In 2020 alone, ADL’s Center on 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 H.E.A.T. Map.” In other words, the ADL — which supposedly was founded to combat “antisemitism” — is now a de facto intelligence agency for federal and state law enforcement. This is the organization that’s now advising the Washington Fusion Center to investigate me and several other commentators for having offensive opinions.
If you know anything about the history of the ADL, this probably doesn’t surprise you. The 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. One 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. That incident led to a shootout and the death of one klan member. Whatever 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 it. The ACLU called for an investigation. But in the end, no one seemed to mind. The ADL adopted a pseudo-law enforcement assistant role, which they’ve retained ever since.
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I’ve focused on the ADL so far, mainly because they’re the group that’s trying to have me investigated. But there are many other organizations like the ADL doing the same thing. Maybe the most notable is the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC. You might remember that the FBI cited the SPLC in its infamous memo claiming that “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology” is a significant terror threat. The FBI tried to hide that memo but a whistleblower came forward and released it. The SPLC is a completely discredited group; they’ve even had to pay out defamation settlements for some of their more egregious hack jobs. And the bureau knows that, according to the whistleblower. But the FBI tried to cite them anyway, in order to justify the targeted surveillance of Catholics on the basis of their religious beliefs.
We’ve seen many examples of similar misconduct in recent years, in which the government partners with some supposedly independent, private entity in order to lend some legitimacy to its obviously illegitimate investigations. During the Trump campaign, the FBI effectively teamed up with the Washington Post in order to obtain secret surveillance warrants against the Trump team. The FBI even copy-pasted from a debunked Washington Post editorial in its FISA warrant application against Carter Page.
More recently, the DOJ has been investigating Doctor Eithan Haim because he blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, which claimed to stop butchering children but kept doing it in secret. That got the attention of trans activists and their various advocacy groups, which in turn led the DOJ to knock on Haim’s door. They know they don’t have a legal case against him. They know it’s not a violation of patient privacy to disclose the existence of unlawful and unethical procedures, without disclosing patient identities. But they’re harassing him anyway. They want to send him to prison and take away his medical license.
It’s not hard to see where this leads. As I told the Daily Signal, I have no doubt that if Biden wins another term, we will actually see prominent conservative commentators arrested on hate crime and terrorism charges. They are laying the groundwork right now. First they open investigations and start surveillance. And then, once that’s normalized, they escalate things.
I recently wrote about slippery slopes in relation to trans ideology. This is yet another slippery slope that we’re on. The ADL is telling government counterterrorism centers to suppress political dissent. Unless they pay a price for this — and unless law enforcement agencies stop taking marching orders from these compromised activist groups — then they will continue to make these demands. And eventually they’ll get what they want.
At that point, if it gets that far, the only real question will be which of us do they hit first and try to make an example out of.