CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In a tweet Thursday, Ohio Treasurer and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel expressed support for a prominent California blogger whom the Anti-Defamation League included on a list of figures the league believes are associated with the "alt-right" movement.
The Anti-Defamation League this week included the blogger, Mike Cernovich, on a post called "From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming the Hate." The post is a primer describing leading figures in the "alt-right" movement, which the ADL said is a modern form of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Cernovich, and another writer, Jack Posobiec, were included in the section describing the "alt-light," which the ADL considers a related, but less explicitly racist faction of the loosely affiliated movement.
The ADL published the article under a section dealing with "extremism, terrorism and bigotry."
Mandel's tweet:
The Anti-Defamation League is a Jewish civil-rights group that says its mission is to "fight anti-Semitism and all forms of hate." Mandel is Jewish and his wife, Ilana, is a member of one of Cleveland's most prominent Jewish families.
In an email, Erica Nurnberg, a Mandel campaign spokeswoman, said: "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors and as a Marine who defended our freedom, Treasurer Mandel believes the ADL is dead wrong for creating hit lists on American citizens. Of all organizations, the ADL should know that making target lists of people based on their political beliefs is a dangerous practice and slippery slope."
The difference between the "alt-right" and the "alt-light" is that while the alt-right generally espouses "racial nationalism," the alt-light promotes "civic nationalism," the ADL wrote in the post, citing a white supremacist author.
The ADL post referenced Cernovich's promotion of the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory about a Washington pizza parlor being a front for a child sex-trafficking ring. A 29-year-old North Carolina man was recently sentenced to four years in prison for traveling to to the pizza parlor and firing a military-style rifle inside after having reading the fake reports about the pizza parlor.
In addition, the ADL describes Cernovich as an "unapologetic misogynist" who "has claimed that date rape does not exist except as a liberal fiction."
The ADL post also references a 2015 since-deleted statement Cernovich posted on Twitter: "I went from libertarian to alt right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is a code for white genocide," according to the ADL post.
But Cernovich later distanced himself from the alt-right "because of its association with white supremacists," the ADL writes.
In the article Mandel shared, Cernovich, writing on the blogging website medium.com, accused the ADL of trying to incite violence against him by including him on a "hit list."
"No evidence or rationale was given for naming me as a hate group leader, and indeed there is no evidence. By the ADL's own description, I'm a media outlet rather than a group leader. I don't lead a love group or hate group. I write books, produce films, and break major stories," Cernovich wrote.
Cernovich also closed the post with the sentence: "The mainstream media is ISIS."
Mandel has adopted an inflammatory social-media style since declaring last December he would seek to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2018. In March, he shared an article written by the Center for Security Policy, a national-security group the ADL has describes as bigoted against Muslims.
In an email, an ADL spokesperson said the organization stands by its report, and said the group calls out "those who preach anti-Semitism and bigotry regardless of their background, party, or standing."