Six months ago, the FBI cut ties with the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center. This week, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC. The arc is not subtle. First, you strip the watchdogs of standing. Then you drag them into court.
The consequences of dismantling the civil rights infrastructure don’t stay in Washington. They show up in parks, playgrounds, schools, workplaces, in the ordinary spaces of Jewish life. Institutional breakdown at the top and rising vulnerability on the ground are one story.
Tracking that is the work. And, as you can see, we do watchdog work as well. When the infrastructure that tracks white supremacists is the one on trial, every group doing this work understands what the message is.
The Justice Department has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud and conspiracy, accusing it of defrauding donors by paying informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups, including a source who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally.
Six months ago, the FBI cut ties with SPLC. Now the same administration is prosecuting it. Dragging the groups who track white supremacists into court is a green light for the white supremacists. Democracy weakens, and Jews are less safe.
The ADL has released an evaluation of Mayor Mamdani’s first 100 days, the latest installment of its “Mamdani Monitor.” The framing: deep concern. The substance doesn’t support it.
The report leans on suspicion toward the mayor’s Muslim appointees while leaving out his engagement with the Jewish community, his reappointment of a police commissioner the ADL itself views favorably, and his elevation of a progressive Zionist Jewish civil rights leader to head the Office to Combat Antisemitism. An administration indifferent to Jewish safety would not be making those moves.
Skokie, IL: Two separate incidents at local parks in one weekend. Jewish youth were targeted with antisemitic slurs, hair-pulling, and physical assault; one was punched and his necklace damaged. This follows an October 2025 hate crime at Shawnee Park in the same village. (NBC Chicago)
Smithfield, RI: The state attorney general released findings on a September 2025 incident where senior football players held a Jewish freshman teammate in a locker room bathroom and sprayed him with Lysol, calling it “gassing” him for his Jewish ancestry. The district reversed the players’ discipline. (Valley Breeze)
Staten Island, NY: Multiple swastikas were drawn in chalk on playground equipment at Bloomingdale Park. NYPD and Parks responded quickly. (SILive)
This is what we do: track real antisemitism, call out when it’s weaponized, and make clear the difference. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate here. We’d love to connect.
We’ll continue offering clear responses, frameworks, and resources as these stories develop.
Antisemitism is not a feeling, and fighting it is not a vibe. It is concrete work. It looks like enforcing a content policy you wrote.
The same week Hungarians voted out a sixteen-year authoritarian, the world’s richest man revived the Soros conspiracy to explain it away. That sequence captures where we are: democratic resistance still works, and the people who fear it reach for the oldest playbook they have, antisemitism.
