I’m no Talmudic scholar, but it seems altogether fitting that the FBI would cut its ties with the Anti-Defamation League on Yom Kippur. It’s the most solemn of Jewish holidays, after all — a day of atonement and repentance. And the once-proud but now hard-left ADL has much to atone for, much to repent.

We can start with the obvious: Elon Musk isn’t David Duke, and Turning Point USA isn’t the Aryan Brotherhood. As we covered in yesterday’s Executive Summary, the ADL got caught labeling the TPUSA organization as an extremist group in its since-retired “Glossary of Extremism,” saying the late great Charlie Kirk organization had garnered support from Islamophobes and white supremacists.

FBI Director Kash Patel didn’t mince words, nor did he stop at mere words. “[Disgraced and since-indicted former FBI Director] James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them — a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans. That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”

Good for Kash.

The same goes for the ADL’s fellow-traveling leftist pressure group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, with which the FBI has also cut ties. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” Patel noted. “Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”

As Fox News reported on Wednesday, “TPUSA’s [since-deleted] backgrounder page on the ADL website falls under the ‘Center of Extremism’ tag and describes the conservative group as having ties to ‘a range of right-wing extremists and has generated support from anti-Muslim bigots, alt-lite activists and some corners of the white supremacist alt-right.’”

Of course, the ADL failed to put forth any evidence that this “support” was reciprocated by TPUSA. What we have here, then, is guilt by unilateral association. Who knew the Left had become a bunch of McCarthyites?

But that’s not exactly accurate, is it? After all, McCarthy was right about everything, while the ADL and the SPLC have both been dead wrong about their bigoted categorization of truth-telling iconoclasts like Musk and mainstream conservative groups like TPUSA. (If you’re looking for a great takedown of the ADL for its failure to accurately assess crimes of political violence, John Lott has you covered.)

Speaking of Musk, he didn’t pull any punches when he learned about the ADL’s smear of TPUSA. On Sunday, he showed that two can play at the knee-jerk smear game, posting, “The ADL hates Christians, therefore it is a hate group.” In a separate post, he added, “Using such false and defamatory labels about people and organizations encourages murder.”

Indeed, and that’s the danger when it comes to the Left. As Turning Point’s Andrew Kolvet rightly put it:

What’s happening right now to the ADL and SPLC is critically important and deadly serious. They are both part of an ecosystem leveraged by radical left vigilantes to dehumanize conservatives and stoke political violence. They provide the sheen of legitimacy for the left’s violent foot soldiers.

The day before Charlie was murdered, the SPLC published a newsletter directly attacking Charlie. In May, they added TPUSA to their notorious Hate Map. Did these contribute to the assassin’s motive? We may never know, but the swirl of extremist propaganda certainly played a role.

This is how Great Britain ends up throwing people into prison for “intolerant” social media posts. And it’s how deranged leftists like Tyler Robinson end up assassinating future American presidents.

We’re better than Great Britain, and we have been for 250 years. Let’s keep it that way.