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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
I think what @vancerichards is referring to the following passage: Romans 1:18-23. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”
Actually if you keep going, verses 26 and 27 count as hate speech to the SPLC
Continuously referring to people as Nazis is just intellectual laziness. This is a topic that’s been covered before here and elsewhere, yet is reoccurs. The over use of Nazi is simply diluting the means to the point where it’s becoming silly. In my eyes it’s becoming the infantile equivalent of a child calling another a “doo-doo head” or something like that.
That is all true but the riots in Middlebury have taken on a darker tone. By calling Murray a Nazi, they are justified in using violence to suppress him. Usually leftists called people Nazis to dismiss them. The millennials are taking it to new levels.