Anti-Southern Prejudice, Swindling Hate-Baiters, And The Accusatory Media

A new domestic intelligence report by The Southern Poverty Law Center called "Rage on the Right" raises concerns about the potential for violence by anti-government militias and extremist groups across America. The report says:

The anger seething across the American political landscape — over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" — goes beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

On the face of it, the SPLC seems like an organization that is looking out for the best interests of the United States, and reminding the sane citizens that we should not let our guard down about angry rednecks and racist terrorists, or else we could revisit the nightmares of years passed. But there is one important thing that you should know about the Southern Poverty Law Center; they don't care about helping race victims, immigrants, or anything that they shout about.

The myths that the SPLC are spreading have poisoned the national debate about immigration, politics, and race. And the mainstream media has been all ears. Last year, Morris Dees, the SPLC's founder, told CBS's early show:

What we've found with our intelligence project that we've run for a number of years here is that the political climate, the election of Obama, the immigration issues that have faced the United States over the last five to ten years, and now especially the economy, is almost causing a resurgence of what we saw in the days of Timothy McVeigh, almost a militia movement that is being reborn in the United States.

The trouble with the SPLC's assessment is that its report fails to state facts. They're not in the business of finding out the truth, and offering real solutions. What they are good at is playing the causation and blame game, all for the purposes of enlarging their fund-raising accounts. They profit by highlighting the ills of society and target victims of an economic and political elite. According to W. James Antle III, whose article "Tolerance Mafia" appears in the May issue of The American Conservative, the SPLC took in $32 million from contributors in 2008.

The most egregious example of profiteering by the SPLC was their court-case against the KKK in 1987. Although it may appear that Dees was standing up for civil rights, in reality he was cynically using people's emotions to deepen his own pockets. From "Tolerance Mafia":

Even some of the SPLC’s legitimate civil-rights work was exploited for profit. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million verdict against a Klan group that had brutally murdered a young black man. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that the SPLC “used nationwide fund-raising letters to create the image of a mighty Klan that actually had $7 million” to pay the victim’s mother. In fact, the woman only received about $52,000, most of which she had to pay back to the SPLC, which had given her an interest-free loan. Meanwhile, the SPLC raised $9 million in two years from mailings highlighting her case.

In 2000, Ken Silverstein documented for Harper's Magazine Dees' history of making money by any means necessary, and where he was in the 1960's, when the civil rights movement was at its height. His article "The Church of Morris Dees" can be read here. Silverstein:

In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I...shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.")

In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund.

The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.

So is the Southern Poverty Law Center a great advocate for social justice? Or is it a cash-cow raking in huge dough from the growing tension in the country? If you think the former, then one look at the their compound, the Poverty Palace, worth millions of dollars, and if you've been paying attention so far, then you'll quickly form a second opinion of the SPLC.

They don't track hate groups, instead, they leave their small and isolated markings on other unrelated trails that have nothing to do with hate or racism. They lump in Neo-Nazis, a white supremacist group whose ideology is vehemently racist and anti-intellectual, with We Are Change, a group of young activists who are breaking the left-right political paradigm, and the Oath Keepers, a group that encourages police officers and military officials to maintain their oath to the constitution, and not to the president if such a need arises in the future.

The SPLC would be harmless if all they were interested in was making money, but that's far from the case. Their announcements of impeding acts of domestic terrorism serves far more devious functions; silencing free speech and political resistance. By grouping together organizations like the KKK with We Are Change, the SPLC is making a political connection where there is none. The SPLC is serving as the mouthpiece of establishment paranoia about the rising anger within the country, and their recent reports are in line with reports by Homeland Security and the ever-present police state, which Tom Burghardt has documented so well.

There are many delusional liberals who view the SPLC as a tough civil rights group, but these aren't the liberals of yesteryear. They don't see the consequences of calling all conservative-oriented groups as "hate groups" or labeling patriotic Americans as "crackpots." The dangers of classifying political speech as hate speech are not immediate for everyone. At the beginning, only a select group is targeted for their opinions, but by the regime's end, anyone who utters a critical word is labeled as dangerous to the functioning of society, and send off with little notice. Targeting any group that voices opinions which are different from the so-called mainstream political debate is a tactic that authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. In Nazi Germany, Hitler accused everybody who criticized him of being communists. In our day, the new labels are "terrorists" and "extremists," which the Southern Poverty Law Center are happy to put on anybody who has anything at all critical to say about the federal government, the income tax, the health-care bill, or immigration. Their new name should be the Northern Propaganda Unlawful Center.

In his article "The creepy tyranny of Canada's hate speech laws" Glenn Greenwald writes:

For as long as I'll live, I'll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes, will never understand the view that it's better to try to suppress adverse beliefs than to air them, and will especially never understand people's failure to realize that endorsing this power will, one day, very likely result in their own views being criminalized when their political enemies (rather than allies) are empowered.

In the wake of an FBI militia raid in Michigan, the Obamanoids have begun to chastise all political groups who are critical of Obama's health care plan, and the government's overall agenda, even going as far as declaring the government's critics as potential domestic terrorists. The mainstream media, when it is not shaming Tiger Woods for his sexual misdeeds, is accusing all government critics of being racist right-wing nuts who harbor violent fantasies. CNN has focused a large amount of attention to Hutaree, which is a social outlier in the militia circuit, and attributes their wacky qualities to other constitutional-oriented and disaster-focused militias that are based around the country. Kevin Hayden of the website Truth is Treason, exposes the lunacy of positioning so-called militias like Hutaree with other organizations, which are more legit and respectable:

CNN has used several of the Michigan Militia pictures when talking about the fringe religious militant group, Hutaree.

Hutaree was the subject of several raids over the last few days and were supposedly planning to target and kill police officers in order to spark a war with the government or “start the revolution…”

The problem I have with this allegation is that Hutaree, an extreme right-wing Christian militant group, claims that their purpose is to be prepared for the “Rapture” among other things. This group is not based on nor talks about Constitutional Principles. This is not an unorganized militia, who’s goal is to assist their respective states in time of need or disaster.

So capitalizing on the recent SPLC report on the “radical right” and the “ever expanding militia movement” – oh, almost forgot the “Patriot movement” – CNN and other Mainstream Media attempt to demonize Tea Party members, activists, Constitutionalists, Libertarians and most certainly militia members for this dastardly plot to kill police officers.

The Northern Propaganda Unlawful Center wouldn't be so successful if it weren't for the prejudice held by liberals for people who live in the South, and a biased media establishment that is not interested in reporting facts, but in maintaining social and political perceptions. Stephanie Ramage illustrates one revealing example of the New York Times' anti-South bias:

In an article today on its front page titled “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” the Times states that it is the South’s racism that has made it irrelevant to politics. The problem is not the South’s waning hold on politics, it’s the Times’ once-growing, now-waning hold on the South.

The Atlanta area is home to 4 million people of diverse backgrounds. Atlanta itself is the hometown of Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The city and its suburbs are at the very epicenter of the conservative-liberal seismic shift. Yet the Times didn’t think the Atlanta area important enough to explore for its story.

Instead, reporter Adam Nossiter went for the easy, worn-out, stereotypes in Vernon, Ala. It’s Vernon, Ala. What did they expect? But there aren’t many voters—of any kind—in Vernon, Ala. So, how could such demographically feeble places like Vernon have set the tone for a whole region?

If the Times had even a shred of integrity, its editors would have sent a reporter here to the “black Mecca,” in Jimmy Carter’s home state, to find out why there were dozens of McCain-Palin yard signs in my own neighborhood in Decatur, in Ansley Park, in Virginia-Highland, and even in Midtown.

The Times would have us believe that anyone with those signs in their yards must be ignorant, uneducated, impoverished racists. Yet, I know many of the people who planted the signs in their yards and they are professors, doctors, lawyers, writers and scientists. Those signs stand in front of half-million dollar homes and next to driveways where cars bear the faculty and staff tags of Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, Emory, and UGA. Some have Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard alumni insignia. The Times didn’t just miss part of the story. It actually missed the whole story.

Although a vote for McCain-Palin is not in anyway a reflection of intelligence, that isn't the point. The point is that the New York Times and the establishment media is more interested in conserving an out of date narrative about the correlation between race and politics in the South, than it is about reporting the facts and the truth. Such a narrative is destructive to the fabric of the United States, for one, because it's false, and second, it diverts attention from a constructive political dialogue, which would emerge and grow if the media participated in it rather than try to subvert it and destroy it.


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