SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

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SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby elfismiles » Thu Mar 27, 2014 3:26 pm

... sorry ... Breitbart ...

FBI Dumps Southern Poverty Law Center as Hate Crimes Resource
by Austin Ruse 26 Mar 2014

Christian groups are celebrating with the news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears to have scrubbed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from its hate crimes webpage, where the controversial group was listed as a resource and referred to as a partner in public outreach.

A letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, drafted by Lieutenant General (Ret.) William G. Boykin, Executive Vice President of the Family Research Council (FRC), calls such an association "completely unacceptable."

Signed by fourteen other conservative and Christian leaders, the letter calls SPLC "a heavily politicized organization producing inaccurate and biased data on 'hate groups' – not hate crimes." It accuses the SPLC of "providing findings that are not consistent with trends found in the FBI statistics." Where the FBI has found hate crimes and hate groups declining significantly in the past ten years, SPLC claims hate groups have increased 67.3% since 2000. Where once SPLC's hate list was reserved for groups like the Aryan Nation and the KKK, in 2010 SPLC started citing as hate groups those Christian groups that oppose same-sex marriage or believe homosexuality is not inborn, or are otherwise critical of homosexuality. Among the Christian groups targeted by SPLC was FRC.

In the fall of 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, armed with a loaded semi-automatic pistol and 100 rounds of ammunition, entered FRC headquarters not far from FBI headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. Corkins shot the front desk security guard and tried to gain entrance to the upper floors where he intended to kill FRC employees. Though wounded, the front desk security guard subdued Corkins, who became the first person ever convicted under the Washington, D.C., domestic terrorism law. Corkins said he got the idea of killing FRC employees from reading the SPLC hate list and made use of a map of the FRC office found on the SPLC website.

The Boykin letter concludes that "it is completely inappropriate for the Department of Justice to recommend public reliance on the SPLC hate group lists and data." The letter demanded that all ties between the FBI and SPLC be severed.

SPLC has come under severe criticism from the left and the right in recent years.

Writing in the left-wing website Counterpunch, Alexander Coburn called SPLC founder Morris Dees "king of the hate business." Coburn wrote, "Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees' fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC." In fact, so prolific is Dees at direct mail that he is in the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame.

Writing at the Harper's Magazine blog in 2007, Ken Silverstein said, "What [the SPLC] does best... is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation's richest 'civil rights' organization."

A critical analysis published recently by Professor George Yancey of North Texas University concluded that SPLC targets only those groups its leaders disagree with politically while leaving liberal groups who use extreme language alone.

A 2013 article in Foreign Policy concluded that SPLC exaggerates the hate crimes threat, saying SPLC is not an "objective purveyor of data," instead calling them "anti-hate activists" and suggesting that their reports need to be "weighed more carefully by news outlets that cover their pronouncements."

Though SPLC sits on a bank account of $250 million and raises some $40 million a year in direct mail, some have suggested that the decline of racist groups and therefore the need to tap new sources of funds might have led Dees and his colleagues to target Christian groups as new sources of revenue. Weekly Standard writer Charlotte Hays says, "...several critics with whom I spoke speculated that the last might represent another of Dees's efforts to tap via mailing lists into a well-off and easily frightened donor base: gays."

What has concerned Christian groups in recent years is that their inclusion on the hate list and the use of the hate list by the FBI is unfair and even dangerous to their civil liberties. After all, holding the view that gayness is not inborn and opposing same-sex marriage are hardly against the law.

FRC president Tony Perkins said, "We commend the FBI for removing website links to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that not only dispenses erroneous data but has been linked to domestic terrorism in federal court. We hope this means the FBI leadership will avoid any kind of partnership with the SPLC."

Read Boykin's letter to the FBI below:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-pr ... =168236241

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government ... Law-Center


search.php?keywords=splc+southern+poverty+law+center&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=topics&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

New Report On 9/11 Connection To Oklahoma City Bombing
Post by 8bitagent » 20 Jul 2008 12:32

elfismiles » 21 Jul 2008 18:52 wrote:Let's not forget the Southern Poverty Law Center connections and more...

OKC Bombing, Southern Poverty Law Center, Strassmeir News
Filed Under (Islam, OKC) by admin on 23-07-2007

From Scott Horton’s STRESS BLOG…

Federal Judge Admits Informant Inside OKCBOMB Plot - Morris Dees of the SPLC Implicated / March 30, 2006

Read the ruling by United States District Judge Dale A. Kimball in the case of the federal torture and murder of Kenneth Trentadue.

The Judge confirms the existance of the informant inside the bomb plot, and that individual’s ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Just wait, it’s Strassmeir. I bet you ten bucks.

Hat tip: Chris Emery

UPDATE: The Judge has re-worded his ruling. JD Cash, McCurtain Daily Gazette :

“Late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball of Utah altered an order he made Wednesday in a Freedom of Information Act law-suit filed by attorney Jesse Tren-tadue.

Kimball amended the portion of his order that had read: “Plaintiff points out the fact that this docu-ment indicates that there was an undercover operative in with Tim McVeigh.”

With explanation, the judge changed order to read: “Plaintiff claims” that here was an under-cover operative.”

http://www.mccurtain.com/headline.shtml

Pressure Drop, Oh, Pressure, Oh, Yeah, Pressure’s got the drop on you.

Posted by— Scott @ 2:32 pm

http://weekendinterviewshow.com/JudgeKimball’sruling06OKCBombingandKennethTrentadueDeath.pdf [.pdf]

http://thestressblog.com/2006/03/30/fed ... mplicated/

3 Comments »

Hello Scott,

We appreciate the excellent support you’ve offered to the OKBIC and getting the truth out on this case over the past several years. You and your outstanding radio show are an excellent source of well researched, credible information on the OKC bombing as well as several dozen other government corruption issues.

Wish there were a few thousand more of ‘you’ out there.

Please keep us posted on any updates you come across re: the OKC case.

Best Regards,
Chris Emery


Volunteer with the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee
http://www.okcbombing.org

Comment by Chris Emery http://www.okcbombing.org — March 30, 2006 @ 4:14 pm

Most of it is thanks to you guys at the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, and, of course, the great reporter JD Cash.

Comment by Scott http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com — March 30, 2006 @ 5:39 pm

…AND…

Bolsters claims government had informant inside conspiracy to …

WorldNetDaily, OR - Mar 30, 2006 … who were present at the paramilitary compound on April 17, 1995, when McVeigh called the camp looking for German-national Andreas Strassmeir and additional … http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/artic ... E_ID=49510

SPLC Investigated For Complicity In OKC bombing
DisInfo.com, NY - Apr 3, 2006 … warnings about the planned bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building when Timothy McVeigh called Elohim City looking for Andreas Strassmeir, also believed … http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle15723.html

And this audio interview from November of last year is of interest regarding Strassmeir and OKC:Download MP3
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com/audio/cash2.mp3

Listen Stream Audio
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com/Int ... aspx?i=147

2005-07-22 MP3
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com/audio/cash.mp3
Scott and J.D. Cash talk about recent developments in the Oklahoma City Bombing case. Play all of Scott's OKC audio clips here. second hour

2005-11-26 MP3
http://www.weekendinterviewshow.com/audio/cash2.mp3
J.D. Cash returns to explain the real facts behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery ring, and the murder of Kenneth Trentadue.

SEARCH: jd cash site:mccurtain.com
http://tinyurl.com/byvrv

Daniel Hopsicker on Atta & Muslim Brotherhood http://www.madcowprod.com/11052004issue.html
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Apr 04, 2014 1:36 am

TWO READS
For close to 40 years the Southern Poverty Law Center has been best buddies with the FBI making sure there is never an investigation into the FBI's assassination of Martin Luther King. Far Left Group? LOL.......

1st read

see link for full story
http://www.worldmag.com/2014/04/fbi_sto ... e_resource

FBI stops promoting far-left group as a ‘hate crime’ resource

Posted April 3, 2014, 11:30 a.m.

The FBI removed the far-left group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from its hate-crime resource list last week. The listing disappeared without official explanation after the Family Research Council (FRC), along with 14 other conservative groups, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey on Feb. 10 asking the FBI to stop promoting the organization.

A hate crime is defined as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” The FBI helps prosecute those responsible for hate crimes. Until last week, the agency recommended the SPLC as a resource to learn more about hate crimes. But conservative groups have long questioned the SPLC’s motives.



2nd read

http://www.worldmag.com/2014/04/fbi_sto ... e_resource


The Church of Morris Dees

By Ken Silverstein -- Harper's Magazine, November 2000

How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance

Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its "Teaching Tolerance" program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of "hate groups" and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then.

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye." The Center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants <http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/kkk-5.htm> . But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered "hate crime" with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of "armed Klan paramilitary forces" and "violent neo-Nazi extremists," and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.

In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse.

Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all "hate crimes," including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by "lone wolves." Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia organization.

No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy--or the confession thereof--is an end in itself.

Any good salesman knows that a products "value" is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees-who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern-is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame. "I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church," Dees has said. "Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation-why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling." Here, Dr. Dees (the letter's nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available "at cost" for $30 on the SPLC website into "a $325 value."

This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get "communities seething with racial violence." Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us "intolerance against those who are different," turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It's reassuring to know that "Caucasians" are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees, we're all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.

Morris Dees doesn't need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the "strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history." Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center "to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. " Today, the SPLC's treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning "people like you."

The SPLC's "other important work justice" consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to "hate groups," sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members-a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the Center's other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center's programs were calculated to cash in on "black pain and white guilt." Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that "probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs."

Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.

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." Soon the SPLC win move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.

(Original URL: http://www.texasls.org/articles/reading ... s_dees.htm)

Copyright Notice: In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work on this website is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed an interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only. Ref.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

Also see: Intolerance Identified -- Morris Dees & The Southern Poverty Law Center
The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 4, No 50, December 11, 2000

"This man [Morris Dees] works to gain the trust of young people by displaying the evils of admitted racist organizations that have a tiny number of adherents. Mr. Dees then proceeds to propagate the notion that conservative organizations -- particularly those that are pro-gun or anti-government -- pose the same dangers, and thus, must be impeded."
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby elfismiles » Thu Apr 24, 2014 5:03 pm

One Of These Is Not Like The Others
Image

John Bush - 2 hrs · .

I was mentioned by name again in an SPLC report. They even used my image in their little collage on the front page. Cute. Had they done any research at all on me, they would find I am not a right-wing activist, rather an anarchist. No wings on this one. Just pure liberty!

From the report:
Another fairly well-known right-wing activist, John Bush of Texans for Accountable Government, cited Agenda 21’s alleged final goal when he tried to get his hometown of Austin, Texas, to drop a resolution meant to make the city more energy efficient. “Before carbon was thought of as the most evil thing in the world,” he said, “there were ... internationalists hashing out a plan to further their scheme for world government through the means of excessive environmentalism.”

http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/ ... _web_0.pdf

https://www.facebook.com/john.bush.9421 ... 4408575917


My interview with John Bush:
http://www.anomalyradio.com/blog/2013/1 ... john-bush/
http://www.anomalyradio.com/media/arnin ... 31016a.mp3
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby American Dream » Thu Apr 24, 2014 5:42 pm

We should be very, very clear that SPLC does have lots and lots of information on lots on some very bad individuals and groups. That said, the following statement from respected anti-fascists in Oregon also has traction with me:


Rose City Antifa statement on the SPLC
Posted on April 21, 2014

From our comrades at Rose City Antifa:

The SPLC article about Stxrmfrxnt has been circulating around. We did not publish it due to serious political disagreements with the SPLC and their position in the article itself. It may however be useful to outline those issues briefly, and post an article based on the SPLC piece.

The SPLC characterizes the far left as equally problematic as the far right. Groups like ARA and Earth First! are also classified as dangerous extremist organizations by the SPLC. The SPLC has published numerous smear pieces on militant antifascists while simultaneous co-opting our research and taking credit for our gains. We must admit, the SPLC does do useful research on ongoing far right activity. However the over-arching politic is not one we can support.

In the article the SPLC posits that increased government intervention including censoring Stxrmfrxnt and increased surveillance of neo-Nazis are good solutions. We feel that this misses the very obvious point that the U.S. gov’t is an agent of white supremacy. Any increased gov’t powers will be used more, and with greater force against the left. There are very clear *reasons* why neo-Nazi and far right activity is ignored whereas leftist activity faces constant repression, is branded terrorism, and gets long prison sentences. It is not a case of the Department of Homeland Security having “taken its eye off the ball”, it is a case of a system devoted to maintaining massive inequalities that serve capitalist interest.

Anyway, we feel the SPLC statistics when extracted from their messaging are important. They demonstrate that white supremacists are extremely dangerous, which is something that we are constantly stressing in our education and outreach. We feel that the far right should be monitored and vigorously opposed. They should not be allowed to have platforms or networking opportunities. However, we feel that this opposition should come from working class communities themselves and not from the state.



http://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2014/04/ ... -the-splc/
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Apr 25, 2014 1:14 am

Here's the SPLC article, made tiny for perhaps obvious reasons:
http://tinyurl.com/kfp272r
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby Searcher08 » Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:47 am

So... the SPLC gets a free pass or at best a 'slapped wrist' or perhaps even as far as a 'Tut tut' but that as long as they are the Enemy of my Enemy, who gives a shit, eh?

The fact that the SPLC is an organisation that amplifies and propagates "Hate" as much as a product as as Coke. "Hate, that's what we do" should be their brand.

There is no critique of the organisation, just a statement about which 'tick boxes' they still have to meet.

It is the same old strategy as the ADL. Encourage a level of emotional response to an existing phenomena that preferably borders on prolonged sustained hysteria. Provide no solutions. Make lots of money from it. De-humanise. Always and everywhere, create fear. If not creating fear, attempt to define what is acceptable.
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 25, 2014 9:40 am

The SPLC characterizes the far left as equally problematic as the far right. Groups like ARA and Earth First! are also classified as dangerous extremist organizations by the SPLC. The SPLC has published numerous smear pieces on militant antifascists while simultaneous co-opting our research and taking credit for our gains.


LMFAO! This is exactly the kind of partisan LULZ I cannot resist lampooning. Groups like ARA and Earth First! are either 1) dangerous extremists or 2) LARP nerds who like to write strongly worded manifestos. Are we not supposed to take their own words seriously? Why does violent action become "okay" when it's "the good guys" -- you know, the ones who share our beliefs?

Then to kick it up a notch, they invoke "smear pieces on militant antifascists" -- presumably the kind of cheap and craven hit-and-run journalism that would dare suggest that "militant" should be taken at face value.

I have serious problems with SPLC but it's not because they ain't cheering for my favorite sports teams...
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Re: SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 25, 2014 11:02 am

Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:40 am wrote:
The SPLC characterizes the far left as equally problematic as the far right. Groups like ARA and Earth First! are also classified as dangerous extremist organizations by the SPLC. The SPLC has published numerous smear pieces on militant antifascists while simultaneous co-opting our research and taking credit for our gains.


LMFAO! This is exactly the kind of partisan LULZ I cannot resist lampooning. Groups like ARA and Earth First! are either 1) dangerous extremists or 2) LARP nerds who like to write strongly worded manifestos. Are we not supposed to take their own words seriously? Why does violent action become "okay" when it's "the good guys" -- you know, the ones who share our beliefs?

Then to kick it up a notch, they invoke "smear pieces on militant antifascists" -- presumably the kind of cheap and craven hit-and-run journalism that would dare suggest that "militant" should be taken at face value.

I have serious problems with SPLC but it's not because they ain't cheering for my favorite sports teams...


I have strong critiques of certain tendencies connected to Earth First! and to Anti-Racist Action but to paint both groups broad brush as "dangerous extremists" seems overstated. Also, I wouldn't want to equate property destruction with racist/fascist serial killers nor self-defense against neo-Nazis with terrorizing immigrants, jews, muslims and/or people of color.

As much as I feel ambivalent towards existing north american Anarchism, the SPLC literature I have seen broadly portraying anarchists as equivalent to criminal gangs seems really effed up to me.

All that said, SPLC has the resources, ability and intention to document in detail lots of crypto-racists, crypto-fascists and other such bad actors which are very, very important to know about.
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