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"I have great respect for the Southern Poverty
Law Center."
~ Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Banksters)
"Instead of monitoring "hate" and
"extremism," they [the SPLC] are concerned with tarring patriotic
Americans who oppose their left-wing agenda as haters and extremists."
~ Former Congressman Tom Tancredo
"When you get right down to it, all the SPLC
does is call people names. It’s specialized in a highly developed and
ritualized form of defamation . . .
What they do is a kind of bullying and stalking . .
. . Americans really need to ask themselves if they are willing to tolerate
this kind of operation in a free society.
~ Laird Wilcox, author of The Watchdogs: A Close Look at
Anti-Racist "Watchdog" Groups
When Rush Limbaugh attempted to buy into an NFL franchise,
the political left spread spectacular lies about him, even falsely and
absurdly claiming that he had defended slavery on his radio program. When the
American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., sponsored a public debate
on immigration policy, the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) smeared and denounced AEI by claiming that it was
"mainstreaming hate" by sponsoring the debate. Of course, Americans
have been debating immigration policy ever since the Louisiana Purchase. The
SPLC is the leading leftist group that engages in this kind of totalitarian
behavior.
When a group of military and police officers
organized a group called "Oathkeepers" to
simply affirm the oath they had all taken to respect and live by the U.S.
Constitution, they were denounced by the SPLC as a "hate group,"
the exact same language the SPLC uses to describe the KKK. When in 2009 the
Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that "Ron Paul for
President" bumper stickers "could identify likely threats,"
their asinine statement came from information supplied to them by the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
The League of the South recently published its
"Declaration of Cultural Secession" advocating a society that
advances what it calls the virtues of "Celtic culture," defined on
its Web site as "the permanent things that order and sustain life:
faith, family, tradition, community, and private property; loyalty, courage,
and honour." The SPLC lied about and defamed
the League of the South by spreading the falsehood on its own Web site that
by "Celtic culture" the League of the South means, and I quote,
"white people." Apparently the SPLC believes that only white people
embrace family, tradition, community, private property, courage, etc.
Impuning the motives of one’s political opponents,
rather than engaging in civilized debate, is an age-old strategy of
socialists and other left-wing extremists. In his famous book, The Law,
Frederic Bastiat wrote of how the socialists of his
day (the 1840s) routinely responded to his criticisms of their
interventionist economic schemes by accusing him of hating the poor. It is
also obviously the modus operandi of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC works hand-in-hand with leftist politicians like Congressman Lacy
Clay (D-Banksters), quoted at the top of this
article, who are too cowardly to sponsor a new Sedition Act that would outlaw
criticisms of the government altogether, as was done during the Adams
administration. Instead, they support in any way they can the operations of
the SPLC, which attempts to censor all serious criticism of the extreme
leftist political agenda of socialist politicians like Lacy Clay by accusing
any and all critics of "hate" or "extremism," the same words
that are used to describe genuine hate groups like the KKK, or criminal or
terrorist organizations and individuals.
The SPLC’s Extreme Left-Wing Agenda
The Spring 2010 issue of an online journal, The
Social Contract, published seventeen articles about the Southern Poverty
Law Center by various scholars and journalists. In an article entitled
"SPLC: America’s Left-Wing Hate Machine," journalist Jerry
Woodruff wrote of how the SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, proudly received
the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU in 1990. Baldwin was a communist who is
quoted by Woodruf as having written such things as
"I am for socialism" and "I seek social ownership of property,
the abolition of the propertied class . . . . Communism is the goal."
Baldwin was a companion of "Red Emma" Goldman,
who publicly advocated murder and violence to further a communist revolution
in America. She was eventually deported, and Baldwin wrote to her, "you
always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life," Woodruff
documents.
Morris Dees’s cheerful
acceptance of an award that is associated with such despicable characters is
not an isolated example of the extremist backround
of the SPLC’s staff and directors. SPLC Director James Rucker is also
the executive director of an organization called "Color of Change"
that was founded by one Van Jones, who was forced to resign from the Obama
administration after online videos appeared showing him publicly describing
himself as an advocate of "urban Marxism" and "Third World
Communism."
Perhaps the most absurd thing the SPLC does is to
sponsor a Web site called "Tolerance.org" and to purportedly teach
"tolerance" in primary and secondary schools. The man in charge of
Tolerance.org is none other than William Ayers, the "Weather Underground"
terrorist of the 1960s who admitted to setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol
building in his youth. "I don’t regret setting the bombs,"
Ayers told the New York Times on October 4, 2008. "I feel we
didn’t do enough" bombing, he said.
There appears to be no reason to suspect that Ayers
has ever abandoned his revolutionary communistic ideology. Woodruff writes of
how Tolerance.org works closely with another far-left group known as the
National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME), which raises money by
selling bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and other trinkets with sayings
imprinted on them by Karl Marx, Castro’s henchman/murderer Che Guevara, and Red Emma. NAME is said to have given a
standing ovation for its 1997 convention keynote speaker, Ward Churchill, the
fake American Indian/plagiarist/resume fraud who was forced to resign from
the University of Colorado several years ago after he publicly compared the
people killed in the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 to Nazis. Ah,
tolerance.
The SPLC as a "Hate Group" Hedge Fund
Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president a
student of mine who was the president of the College Republicans asked me if
I thought Obama would play the race card and accuse his legitimate critics
(of socialized medicine, for example) of being motivated by racism as a way
of censoring debate. My response to the student was that such a thing is
considered to be too vulgar and uncivilized for a president to engage in,
which is why Obama and the Democratic Party would probably assign the job to
one the hundreds of "nonprofit" organizations that are essentially
fund-raising and propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. The Southern
Poverty Law Center quickly took the lead, since it was already so experienced
at race baiting and racial racketeering.
For example, it was the SPLC that spread the false
stories during the Clinton administration that there was an
"epidemic" of fires at predominantly black churches in the South.
Investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere
quickly proved the story to be false, which would have destroyed the
credibility of any conservative or libertarian organization, but never an
organization or individual on the extreme Left. That of course is where your
typical member of the "mainstream" media sits.
In another Social Contract article entitled
"Cooking the Books on Hate: A Closer Look at the SPLC’s Famous
List," Steven Menzies quotes the SPLC’s
chief hatchetwoman/propagandist, one Heidi Beirich, as saying that its list of "hate
groups" is determined by vague "journalistic procedures." But
when any group is placed on the list there is usually no specific
information, no footnotes, and no fact checking is possible. "Mr. X of
the YZ organization is said to have once associated with a dubious character
with racist feelings" is the kind of statement that is used to
"list" a "hate group."
There have never been any left-wing groups on the
SPLC’s lengthy list of "hate groups." It’s "Hate
Watch" Web site clearly states that it is supposedly "Keeping and Eye on the Radical Right." There is no mention
of the Radical Left, such as the organizations the SPLC’s board members
all have founded or belong to and associate with. When pressed, the
professional political haters at the SPLC will admit, as Mark Potok, author of the laughingly-named "Intelligence
Report" did, that his "hate group" list is "all about
ideology," as Menzies writes.
In "Fighting Hate for Profit and Power,"
also in the Spring 2010 issue of The Social Contract, John Vinson
demonstrates just how dogmatic, hateful, and plain weird Mark Potok of the SPLC is when he quotes him as saying of the
critics of an open-border immigration policy (which would include most
members of Congress and most Americans) that he will "destroy,
completely destroy them" with his practice of "ritual
defamation." Ah, tolerance.
The teachers of tolerance at the SPLC responded to
the creation of the TEA Party movement by issuing a 2010 "Intelligence
Report" entitled "Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism"
claiming that the TEA Party movement is "shot through with rich veins of
radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism." Most
"mainstream" journalists support everything the SPLC stands for
(radical socialism, essentially) and therefore reports such hysterical
nonsense as though it were scientific fact.
The SPLC has become an extraordinarily wealthy organization, and its directors and employees profit very
handsomely from it. Morris Dees long ago became a millionaire from this shady
scam. Apparently, its main source of revenue is fundraising letters that are
sent out to the least intelligent/most gullible liberals in America who
actually believe the SPLC’s wild and unproven smears and respond by
sending them a check. In a Social Contract article entitled
"Bashing for Dollars: The SPLC’s Predatory Game," Brenda
Walker writes that by 2005 the organization had an endowment of $174 million.
"Very little of the hoard is spent on actual civil right work,"
writes Walker. "The major products are smear campaigns," which are
essentially fundraising campaigns.
In an article entitled "The Church of Morris
Dees" in the November 2000 issue of Harper's magazine Ken
Silverstein noted that the SPLC spends such a high percentage of its revenue
on salaries, perks, and fundraising that "The American Institute of
Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst rankings of any [nonprofit]
group it monitors." That, I suppose, is how it was able to move into its
new palatial headquarters building in Montgomery, Alabama that is known
locally as the "Poverty Palace."
All of this is undoubtedly why leftist journalist
Alexander Cockburn wrote in the New York Press in 2007 that "I've
long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively
one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless
fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into
unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has
an endowment of more than $100 million . . ." Amen, Brother Cockburn.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Article originally published on www.LewRockwell.com. By authorization
of the author
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