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The Southern Poverty Law Center Helps Spark Political Violence
The recent attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury College was no exception. Progressives quickly jumped from saying it’s fine to “punch Nazis” to calling all conservatives and libertarians Nazis. And the Southern Poverty Law Center is all too eager to promote the view that to anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a hate-filled extremist.
Founded to take on the KKK and remnants of Jim Crow, the SPLC dramatically changed course in the ’80s to equate most of the right with a backwoods Grand Dragon. In this weekend’s op-ed for the Arizona Republic, I show what their new focus has wrought:
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the D.C. headquarters of the Family Research Council carrying a pistol, nearly 100 rounds of ammo and several Chick-fil-A sandwiches. The FRC (and the fast food company’s CEO) opposed same-sex marriage — just as President Barack Obama did that year.
Corkins shot one employee but told authorities his goal was to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” Why did he target the FRC? “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups,” Corkins said. “I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
The same month that the religious liberty lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom were put on the SPLC’s “Hatewatch,” a suspicious powder was mailed to their headquarters. And then you have Charles Murray melee, in which a professor was sent to the hospital, reported like this by the AP:
A libertarian author who has been called a white nationalist said college students who protested his guest lecture this week were “scary.”
Who called Murray a “white nationalist?” The SPLC, of course.
The press constantly condemns “hateful rhetoric” on the right. But if we don’t focus on the left’s “extremist” scapegoating, what’s left of our political discourse will only get more violent.
Published in Politics
Exactly. Perhaps in the past, one could take Southern Poverty Law Center seriously. But in the 21st century, to be denounced by SPLC just means that you are not a Democrat.
The only way to make them stop is to make it painful for them. Or, as a former President once said, “Punch back twice as hard.” Surely there are some good conservative lawyers who will help Murray and others sue SPLC for defamation. And keep on suing them until they no longer exist.
Fox News isn’t far behind on dangerously and obviously insane people who sees nazis everywhere
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/03/lucian-wintrich-i-was-assaulted-in-white-house-press-room-here-is-my-report/
Fox News is a leftist organization. They just are not as Leftist as the others.
When individuals with these groups commit physically violent acts, they should be arrested and charged and convicted.
The SPLC was always a scam; it was Morris Dees’ insight that he could make more money though donations and fundraising by scaring old retired Jews, blacks, and hippie whites than he could make actually trying cases. He was all too happy to sue various backwoods Klansmen. He knew that he’d never recover a penny from them, but he also knew that by plastering their faces in his Klanwatch publication, his donors would be whipped into a terrified frenzy (“See! Nazis behind every rock! What we we do without Morris? What a mensch!”). The result would be millions in donations from publicity and fearmongering. Dees was always a conman playing the long game, first and foremost. It was nothing short of a scandal in Montgomery AL in the 1990’s when the local paper did an expose. At the time, he’d had something like 60 million in the bank, and for a law firm with “southern poverty” in their name, didn’t have a single black attorney on staff, nor did they do legal aid work for the southern poor. Nope. They only took high profile, TV-ready cases against Klansmen and neo-nazis. That’s what brought the money in.
And now? One gets the impression that while Dees still gets the money, the young SWPL staff working for him has been completely unleashed, in all their leftist Millenial glory. Money AND revolution seems to be the game now.
The SPLC needs to register with the IRS as a hate group.
I used to respect the SPLC. Now, I hate everything. The world is a nightmare. I suppose this is why God invented bourbon.
That being said, The Bell Curve — kinda racist. At least, as racist as all social science was at the time. Nature vs Nurture was friggin’ explosive intellectual material after WWII (understandably) — and discussing the heritability of IQ was verboten until the lid was blown off in the early 80s. Now we are at a stalemate: Phenotype describes traits that are a combination of environment and genetics. I, for reasons plainly evident, firmly disavowal biological race — which is just skin tone people — dictates intelligence.
Culture on the other hand…
The evidence is solid that Western Africans have a genetic resistance to Malaria. Most especially the variant of Malaria called Plasmodium Falciparum. The evidence of racial differences in genetic I.Q. is still very speculative.
Please keep in mind that Charles Murray seems to believe that Ashkenazi Jews and Asians have higher IQs than whites. People only report that Charles Murray might have suspected that there was some genetic explanation to the difference between mean white and black IQs without reporting how he mentioned that ashkenazi Jews and Asians tend to have higher mean IQs.
It is fine if you want to call that racist but it isn’t white nationalist racism. An important distinction IMHO.
What I was driving at was everyone was “racist” if you consider Murray racist.
Alternatively, for the sake of argument lets say Charles Murray is totally a racist. Why do modern SJWs feel compelled to beat up a lady to show that they hate racism?
Because the world is a nightmare — here’s a glass of bourbon.
I lean toward Bulliet, myself.
I think the problem is more basic than that, JLock; it’s that whatever IQ tests measure, it stops being interesting as soon as the test taker puts down her pencil. Being a successful human being (let alone a successful human race) demands a lot more than being able to solve puzzles quickly, however useful puzzle-solving might be. As Murray himself acknowledges, “nature” is about much more than genes, but so is “nurture;” DNA is DNA, but the little bearer of that genetic information is, from the get-go, affected by the quality of nutrients the pregnant mother receives and the levels of stress she is exposed to. And, as usual, all you have to do to re-contextualize the matter of intelligence (genetic or mimetic) is to invoke the Nazis; there were plenty of highly intelligent, well-educated people helping Hitler commit mass-murder.
Human beings are intelligent. Intelligence is a characteristic of the species. What we do with that intelligence varies very widely. Thank God.
Every preacher who ever read the first chapter of Romans to his congregation is put right along side of Klansman and Nazis on SPLC’s list of hate groups. The end of Jim Crow hurt their fund raising now they have to go out and create enemies to fight. Why do people still listen to them?
I think it was Jon Gabriel who once said that the difference between the left and right is that the right sees the world as a struggle between right and wrong. The left sees it as a struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. (Jon, forgive me if is have incorrectly attributed that to you.)
The SPLC feeds into the leftist world view.
And perhaps sometimes confuse ‘haves and have-nots’ with oppressors and oppressed.
What is in the first chapter of Romans?
Dr Jordan Peterson might agree with that, but further explain it in terms of objectively measurable personality types. I tend to see the world in terms of oppressors and oppressed myself, with the oppressors being the ruling class as constituted by the administrative state. I’m not a leftist, but that doesn’t disprove the point.
I think I see the world in terms of love and not-love. (Not-love being less loaded and specific than “hate.”)
You should have become a cop. I was an EOH. Equal Opportunity Hater. Skin color or ethnic background didn’t matter to me. I suppose I had firefighter envy. Actually I envied their recliners in the fire station television room. If you want be loved become a firefighter.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say intelligence is not static but like everything in humans (and life) is fluid and dynamic. And intellect, like any other skill, can be practiced, exercised, and strengthened.
Conventional IQ tests are a snap shot of what a few people value at a certain time in culture. They have yet to scratch the surface of an iota of measuring the capability of human behavior. We think of intelligence as completely frontal lobe — but new tests suggest that archaic parts of the brain like amygdala size are key as well. And that high intelligence, if not nurtured properly, can result in depression, anxiety, even delinquency, and dereliction.
Plus we all know people who are “dumb” who aren’t “stupid” — we all can be stupid in ways our “dumb” friends wouldn’t. I have “dumb” friends who don’t let anything get past them. Us “smart” people are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, lies, and scams. Intelligence is a malleability — nothing more.
I agree, it is just that left wants to make is some sort of race, gender, sex distinction as opposed to a class issue with a few classes or groups lording it over the rest and stirring the pot so the various lower groups are busy fighting each other and not the true opponent.
And Fox News Radio is leftier than FNC. No doubt because radio is the farm team for the big show and you don’t move up by being rightier than thou.
Doug, you being eloquent, world-weary (and wary), and a former officer to boot should know people like me are too busy talking to do any doing.
Your perspective and perspicacity are priceless, friend.
And I’ve changed my picture again to reflect my current mood which is one of asceticism and hatred of shaving.
Perhaps more important than intelligence is wisdom. I remember a fellow in one of my classes who worked for a city government. He was the supervisor of a group of cons who were brought in to do clean up work as part of their sentence. He was so adept at working with them, and during the class, his sharing was astute and thoughtful.
Regarding the SPLC, they are a despicable organization. I wish there were some way to take them down.
The SPLC was once a very pragmatic and sensible calm organization. Julian Bond is a hero of mine, in that old tradition of Black and Quaker intellectual meld.
What they are now is unrecognizable and indefensible to me. A tragic twist to a great story and a testament to our times. We’ll see — wisdom is intelligence that has made mistakes, been caught and punished, and given clemency by the very institutions it once reviled.
I keep waiting for a skilled conservative author to write a decent book about the inner workings and ideological shifts at the ACLU and SPLC–the journey from left to stridently, irrationally left. I’m still waiting. There have been a few stabs at magazine length pieces, but nothing all that well developed.