My absolute faith in the media has been shattered. For decades I was informed that the Southern Poverty Law Center was an entirely responsible and reliable source of information on bigots, racists, and advocates of terrorism. Even when year after year, article after article, they listed me as a leader of a vast neoconfederate terrorist network that aimed to destroy the USA, reinstitute slavery, and light fuzzy yellow ducks on fire, I continued to believe the Washington Post, NPR, and all the other beacons of truth, and I refused to put any stock in what the wife of Morris Dees (founder of SPLC) had said about his sexual abuse or what many employees had alleged of harassment, abuse, misuse of funds, and racism. I mean, if you can't trust NPR, the New York Times, and the Washpo, whom can you trust? Certainly not your own experience, though admittedly, my faith was tested when one of their leaders, Mark Potok, arranged an interview with a talkshow host in the city where I lived, and his arguments--that I had known so and so who knew such and such who had been on a platform once with a second cousin of David Duke--did make me wonder, but I reassured myself that a champion of justice like Mark Potok must have been having a bad day, because otherwise he was just a slander and liar, too cowardly even to make a claim he would have to back up in court.
I saw the news on the usual suspect social media and wondered if it was true. It looked to be. So I was waiting for your response. I knew it would come.
I remember listening to a podcast by a self-described Neo-Nazi or Social Nationalist or whatever he was supposed to be. This was about 2014. Around that time one of his associates founded something called “National Front”. I watched part of a video of this guy giving a speech before the faithful with his obvious handler girlfriend standing behind him and wondered if he knew that was what she was. Then the first guy showed up at Charlottesville during that illustrious event in 2015 and eventually got arrested for whatever he did or did not do there. After that I heard that the great leader with the obvious handler girlfriend had a falling out with his associates in the group so they apparently disbanded and then he sold the rights to the group’s name and logo to a black nationalist group. Several years down the road I heard that the two of them, probably sans handler girlfriend, were now reformed ex-racists and had founded something called “Recovered From Hate”. What can one say? Imagine my level of shock when I saw the news about the SPLC.
I feel like we may have missed out on a major funding opportunity! Does this mean I could’ve been getting paid to take all my kids to the Confederate Cemetery every Memorial Day?!
One time I found SPLC’s Hate Map to be useful.
After the 2016 election, there was an incident in our locale where some racist right-wing flyers that were distributed to a number of homes during the night. Supposedly the work of an outfit called the First Order or New Order or something along those lines, the flyers bore messages like “Make America White Again, and Greatness will follow!” and were left at the end of people’s driveways… anchored by rocks!
Some sociologist at Mary Washington was featured in the local paper talking about lingering white supremacy and making a big deal of it all. The whole thing was so hokey and it should have been obvious to anyone that the flyers were either the work of some punk teenagers, or were a leftist false flag op. The SPLC Hate Map was helpful in that it lacked any reference to such a group as the First Order in our area or anywhere else. My guess is that the sociologist knew the perps.
I am reminded of a 2009 article by Alexander Cockburn. “King of the Hate Business” (https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/king-hate-business/). The king to whom Mr. Cockburn refers is Morris Dees, the “archsalesman of hatemongering,” who plied his trade through the Southern Poverty Law Center. Cockburn states, “Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats, and for the same reason: it’s their staple.”
Cockburn was a good man. I read him with pleasure and we got on well when we met. We exchanged notes on the Balkans and I wrote an appreciation she. He died.
Cockburn was a decent writer and that rarest of things: an honest lefty, or at least such was my perception. The litmus test is generally that they’re willing to denounce a military intervention being carried out by a Democratic Administration.
When Trump was first elected, the SPLC’s fundraising appeals all spoke of a ten- or twenty-fold explosion in new hate groups. As I recall , they found a rather creative way of backing up such an outrageous claim. For instance, the Constitution Party was already on the watch list. The $PLC noted that just about every state had a local branch of the party. So that’s about 50 new hate groups right there, when you factor in the CP of Alabama and the CP of Alaska, etc. Not to mention that anytime two or three old codgers are gathered together at Waffle House, and they’re complaining about the country going to hell in a hand basket—Bingo! Hate group. Of course, it’s not easy to find an SPLC mole who looks like someone who eats at Waffle House, who can eavesdrop on the codgers.
Pshaw! Next you’ll be telling me that the Rothschilds helped finance the Bolsheviks or the CIA the Baader–Meinhof Group or that the CIA and Mossad have been financing and running, at the management level, Hamas, Al-Quaeda and ISIS. Can’t be.
An Israeli political expert who knew Begin well described his relations with Arafat as a suicide pact in which each Used the other to justify his actions. Since Arafat was notoriously corrupt, I’ve always wondered how much he took from Begin and co.
Many years ago I felt honored when I made the SPLC’s bad guys list to join Tom Fleming, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, et al. I can’t claim I reached full parity with Tom, Sam, or Joe but to have been mentioned alongside them was a morale booster.
It is now great and well-earned fun to hoot and howl with gales of laughter as the DOJ pulls back the curtain on the SPLC and exposes its naked and ugly body of work formed and deformed over the past decades, but the hate and horror that the SPLC created can never be discounted, discarded or forgotten. May all the bloody hounds who traveled under, and rallied around, the SPLC banner rot in jail, if not in hell.