Since the election of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States, the leftist underground has surfaced in an unprecedented, full-throated effort to neutralize his historic victory. This underground includes violent communist, socialist and anarchist street thugs from groups like Refuse Fascism (the Revolutionary Communist Party), Antifa (Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists) and Black Lives Matter (Socialists). But it also includes many Democrat politicians, judges and bureaucrats at all levels of government, for example judges essentially governing from the bench with unconstitutional restraint orders, elected officials erecting sanctuary policies in direct defiance of the federal government, and a media willing to give them all rhetorical cover.
Running interference are groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who have joined the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in an unholy alliance to attack and silence the Left’s critics. This war on speech has been going on for a long time, but over the past 17 months has reached a fever pitch. While we see Islamic terrorist attacks on Western targets almost daily now, CAIR literally threatens venues, organizers and speakers who discuss the threats from Islamic terrorism and the Islamic supremacy doctrine of Shariah.
And while CAIR goes on the warpath, the SPLC assists by labeling individuals and groups “bigots,” “racists,” “xenophobes,” “Islamophobes” and “haters.” The SPLC can claim responsibility more than any other for popularizing the “hate” narrative, now ubiquitous in the popular press.
The SPLC claims to target “right-wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” and other varieties of “haters.” It publishes a “Hatewatch” list and an annual “Year in Hate” publication. It’s website includes a “Hate Map” showing where all these supposed “hate” groups are located.
But most of the SPLC’s targets are not hateful or even extreme. Last Spring, as GOP members of Congress practiced for a baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia, extreme leftist democrat James Hodgkinson attempted to gun them down. Rep. Steve Scalise almost died of his injuries and is still recovering. Hodgkinson, like so many radical leftists, was filled with irrational hate toward Republicans based on the provocations of the SPLC and other extreme Left smear shops like Media Matters and MoveOn.org.
The Family Research Council is a mainstream conservative Christian organization. As the focus of SPLC’s “hate” list, it inspired Floyd Corkins, a homosexual activist, to attempt a mass shooting at FRC’s headquarters in 2013. Corkins said he was motivated to “kill as many people as possible,” after he saw the SPLC’s list, which labeled FRC “anti-gay.” The FRC remains on the SPLC list.
Capital Research Center is a DC think tank focusing on non-profit organizations and foundations. Center President, Scott Walter, says, “Hate is the issue here. When you talk about hate groups, you’re talking about a group that is a threat because of its violent tendencies and racism. It’s an outrageous lie that some mainstream Christian group is a threat in terms of violence and racism.”
The SPLC recently added the Center for Immigration Studies, a highly-respected DC immigration think tank, to its list. CIS produces fact-based studies on problems with illegal immigration and our overall immigration system — which few argue is in need of major overhaul. But that fact is irrelevant to the SPLC.
For years the SPLC has been at war with any immigration policy group that advocates any restrictions on immigration at all. It does not discriminate between legal and illegal immigrants. They all deserve “justice” in the eyes of the SPLC.
SPLC even attacks the Remembrance Project, which advocates for victims of illegal alien crime. SPLC claims the Project inflates illegal alien crime statistics, a claim directly refuted by official government data. In so doing, the SPLC dishonors the hundreds of thousands of families impacted by the illegal alien crime epidemic, including tens of thousands killed.* It goes without saying that with controlled borders, many fewer would be victimized.
The SPLC’s targets do not all lean to the right either. Their sole sin seems to be that they disagree with the extreme Left or Islamic radicals. Maajid Nawaz, a moderate British Muslim reformer who was held as a political prisoner in Egypt, was stunned to learn he had been listed in SPLC’s 2016 Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists:
Through the counter-extremism organisation Quilliam that I founded, I have spent eight years defending my Muslim communities in Europe, Pakistan and beyond from the diktats of Islamist theocrats. I have also argued for the liberal reform of Islam today, from within… In a monumental failure of comprehension, the SPLC have conflated my challenge to Islamist theocracy among my fellow Muslims with somehow being “anti-Muslim.” The regressive left is now in the business of issuing fatwas against Muslim reformers.
Also included in the anti-Muslim list is Somali former Muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and former member of the Dutch parliament who speaks out against Muslim suppression of women, especially the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation. In SPLC’s description, it even acknowledges that her friend, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim and her name was pinned to his body with a knife. But she’s the hater?
The SPLC never criticizes any organization of the Left, no matter how extreme. The SPLC even admits it, making plain that the “extremist” designation is related to the political positions staked out by those it labels. In an interview with NBC’s Chris Matthews, SPLC spokesman, Mark Potok, stated:
Well, let me say for starters that our—when we name groups “hate groups,” that has nothing to do with any allegation of criminality or some kind of measure of expected violence. It‘s purely about ideology.
At a public speaking event, Potok was even more pointed:
Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on … I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them…
In another notorious example of this bias, National Review columnist Charles Cooke confronted the SPLC about the violence of an Ohio Occupy Wall Street group, noting that, in the name of anarchy, it sought “the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio,” and “to blow up the Republican convention.” The SPLC representative responded, “They were Anarchists… We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”
The Language of Hate
Unlike most of its targets, the SPLC is the organization that genuinely expresses hate. In fact, hatred is its stock-in-trade. The SPLC’s goal is to identify and discredit, or even, in Potok’s words “completely destroy” those organizations and individuals it disagrees with. It does so by attempting to label them “racist,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” “xenophobic,” etc. — name your phobe.
To reconcile the SPLC’s often contradictory, and usually false narratives, one must understand that its constant vilification of political enemies is entirely tactical. The terms “hater,” “bigot”, “racist,” and so forth are frequently misunderstood as a spontaneous, visceral reaction to policies the Left opposes. Those with more political savvy recognize it as an application of Saul Alinsky’s Rule #13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
But it actually comes from a very specific tactic first articulated 100 years ago by Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Communist Party, who said:
We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.
In the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, individuals so vilified could face a death sentence. But the tactic was urged on party members everywhere, as suggested by this 1943 Soviet message broadcast to the world’s communist parties:
“Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic… constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become `fact’ in the public mind.”
Does that not sound like what is going on today? Does it not sound exactly like what the SPLC does?
Lenin and his Bolsheviks also believed silencing critics was essential to their cause. He said:
Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.
The SPLC and Repressive Tolerance
The German Communist Herbert Marcuse further developed Lenin’s idea in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse was one of the better known members of the so-called Frankfurt School. Founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research, the school was disbanded when Hitler rose to power, and its professors – all Jewish Communists – fled. Most came to America. The Frankfurt School was reinstituted at Columbia University. Marcuse taught there before heading to Harvard, Brandeis — where he was fired for being too radical — and finally the University of California, San Diego.
Marcuse mentored Angela Davis, the black American Communist who later became involved with the Black Panthers, first at Brandeis, then at UC San Diego, which she attended specifically because he was there. Davis also attended the reestablished Frankfurt School in Germany at Marcuse’s suggestion, where she studied with other Frankfurt School scholars, and remained in touch with Marcuse throughout. Davis described Marcuse as having “a profound influence on my life and work.”
Marcuse and his fellow Frankfurt School Marxists created Critical Theory, an intellectual tool to deconstruct the West through constant criticism. Today it is commonly referred to as Cultural Marxism or Political Correctness, but few are aware of its radical and truly malevolent source. Echoing the Soviets, Frankfurt School teaching relentlessly accused Western societies of being “the world’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism, and Nazism.”
Our First Amendment allows for the free exchange of ideas, even radical ones. Marcuse claimed that despite this apparent “tolerance,” an oppressive imbalance exists in Western societies, which he said, “favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.” To correct this imbalance, he followed Lenin’s lead, suggesting that leftists had a special right to lie, suppress truth, engage in violence and law-breaking to get their way:
Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent… I believe that there is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate… If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one.
In the sphere of public debate this meant:
Not “equal” but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality… Given this situation, I suggested in “Repressive Tolerance” the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressors…
Marcuse further described the types of people who needed to have their freedom curtailed:
[It] would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.
In Marcuse’s formulation anyone who criticizes, for example, programs like social security or Medicaid, is by definition a racist, sexist, etc. and should have his/her voice and activities silenced. Do “aggressive policies” include anarchist violence? As with the SPLC, apparently not. Read what he says about education:
Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior–thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.
Doesn’t this sound like what is happening in education today? However, leftist ideas have never been excluded from discussion in schools and colleges. To the contrary, the educational establishment has been marinating in extreme Left ideology for decades, and while tuition costs skyrocket, liberal arts students emerge from college with fewer and fewer skills to justify it.
The SPLC and Communists
Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance was read widely and his tactics readily adopted by the Left, including the SPLC, for which Marcuse’s formulation became its raison d’etre. Marcuse directly influenced the SPLC through his collaboration with SPLC co-founder and lifelong radical Socialist (and probable Communist), Julian Bond. They got to know each other through work on the National Conference for New Politics, an event Bond helped organize. Late Senator James Eastland described the NCNP as “working hand-in-glove with the Communist Party” to foment “revolution in the United States.” In 1976 Bond and Marcuse were also co-founders of the radical journal In These Times.
In 1965 Bond was vice-chairman of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, a Communist Party USA front. In 1970, Bond joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee which ultimately became Democratic Socialists of America. He also co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later led by black separatist Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who advocated guerrilla warfare in the U.S. Between 1998 and 2010, Bond was also chairman of the board of the NAACP.
Though elected to the Georgia legislature, the body refused to seat Bond three times because of his agitation against the Vietnam War. In response, Bond called on communist lawyer Leonard Boudin to represent him. Boudin’s other clients included the government of Fidel Castro, Soviet agent of influence Paul Robeson, and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Boudin’s daughter, Kathy, was a Weather Underground terrorist who served 25 years for her participation in the 1981 Brinks robbery that left two policemen and one Brinks guard dead. Kathy’s son, Chesa Boudin, was adopted by Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while Kathy was in prison. Chesa has spent time in Venezuela, and consulted Communist leader Hugo Chavez while he was alive.
Bond and Marcuse also shared an interest in Marcuse’s protégé, Angela Davis. Davis was a member of Bond’s SNCC. When she was jailed for her alleged role in the Black Panther murder of a California Judge, she recruited attorney Howard Moore, Bond’s brother-in-law, who had also helped represent Bond in his battle to be seated with the Georgia legislature. In 1982, Davis and other members of the Communist Party USA founded the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which Bond endorsed. Bond later wrote the foreword to Davis’ book, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance.
Psychological Terrorism
The SPLC has many other connections to communism and communists as well. Mark Potok and the SPLC have been featured numerous times in the Communist Party news magazine People’s World. Quoted in a 2009 article, Mark Potok charged that the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Numbers USA — which he claimed were all the brainchild of “an extreme white nationalist and anti-immigrant culprit” — had caused the “demise of comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.” Was that a crime? Apparently so, according to Potok. In another article, Morris Dees was cited as warning the U.S. Congress that neo-Nazi groups were infiltrating the military, which then could be inadvertently training future would-be domestic terrorists.
In 2011, Potok authored a People’s World article, “Coming to Terms with the Confederacy,” in which he criticized events that recognize confederate history. When questioned by a reporter about the appropriateness of writing for the communists, Potok claimed ignorance of the article’s placement, saying instead that they sometimes wrote for an organization called Otherwords, which was responsible for article placement.
Otherwords, however is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an extreme left Washington, DC think tank created with monies provided by Samuel Rubin, creator of Faberge perfumes and a Soviet COMINTERN (Communist International) agent.53 The SPLC is listed as an Otherwords Partner on its website.
Former SPLC board member James Rucker55 co-founded Color of Change in 2005 with self-described communist Van Jones. Before that, Rucker was grassroots organizing director at the Soros-funded leftwing activist group MoveOn.org.
In short, the SPLC has a sordid history of collaborating with, being inspired and even led by American Communists, and has employed Communist vilification techniques to intimidate and silence political opponents. It has caused SPLC targets to be discredited in the public eye, lose jobs, be refused speaking engagements and other economic damages, and has even inspired attempted mass murder. SPLC’s tactics are a type of psychological terrorism.
Conclusion
The SPLC, in collusion with an extreme Left, anti-American press, radical Islamists, and politicians motivated by ideology, money, fear, or some combination, has elevated defamatory smear tactics to high art. In so doing it has debased the political dialog to little more than infantile, elementary school, name-calling — but weaponized it to destroy its enemies. It The SPLC is the consummate definition of a hate group.
It is a national disgrace. But the most shameful aspect of its transparent behavior, is that the political class has given it legitimacy simply by refusing to call it what it is. And for that reason, it has become dangerous. Left unchallenged, its lies become truth, and encourage even more outrageous lies and disinformation. That in turn allows its practitioners to believe they can get away with anything. They flout laws and are becoming ever more aggressive and brutish in their oppression of political enemies. We see this today with the leftist brownshirts, who mask their identity then attack Trump supporters and others with chains, bats and mace. Will guns be next?
It is a predictable path, as witnessed too many times already in the past century, with the Nazi extermination of the Jews and communist mass murder that has killed more citizens in times of peace than have died in all the wars in history combined.
This path is charted in the 10 stages of genocide. Don’t laugh. We are currently between stages 3 and 4, where institutions like the SPLC seek to increasingly dehumanize their political foes:
At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group.”
Because:
Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.
And while conservatives are furiously attacked for the most circumspect criticism of the Left, at the same time we see leftists routinely advocating murder. Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo is only one example. This is the impulse of unrestrained, compulsive despots. They define themselves by their behavior.
The thugs of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Refuse Fascism, CAIR and all the others, are the ugly face. But behind them are the propaganda mills that give them their justification. More than any other, the SPLC is devoted to this single purpose. What happens if this unholy alliance gains unchallenged power? Unchallenged barbarity.
Some groups are finally hitting back. Coral Ridge Ministries is suing the SPLC for defamation, claiming that it falsely labeled Coral Ridge a “hate” group, simply because its beliefs on homosexuality and gay marriage are biblically based. “It’s ridiculous for the SPLC to falsely tag evangelical Christian ministries as ‘hate groups’ simply for upholding the 2,000-year-old Christian consensus on marriage and sexuality,” Ministries spokesman John Rabe said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is an extreme Left, communist-inspired, if not communist led, influence operation designed to rationalize demonizing and silencing critics of the far Left’s agenda for America. This agenda is no less than fundamental transformation of our Constitutional Republic into a Soviet-style, one-party Socialist state. The SPLC’s tax-exempt status should be immediately revoked, its assets seized under RICO statutes and its leaders investigated for participating in a continuing criminal enterprise to subvert America.
