Racial Racketeering for Fun and Profit: The Southern Poverty Law Center Scam

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
June 22, 2011
published on LewRockwell.com
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"I have great respect for the Southern Poverty Law Center."
~ Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Banksters)

"Instead of monitoring "hate" and "extremism," they [the SPLC] are concerned with tarring patriotic Americans who oppose their left-wing agenda as haters and extremists."
~ Former Congressman Tom Tancredo

"When you get right down to it, all the SPLC does is call people names. It’s specialized in a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation . . .
What they do is a kind of bullying and stalking . . . . Americans really need to ask themselves if they are willing to tolerate this kind of operation in a free society.
~ Laird Wilcox, author of The Watchdogs: A Close Look at Anti-Racist "Watchdog" Groups

 
When Rush Limbaugh attempted to buy into an NFL franchise, the political left spread spectacular lies about him, even falsely and absurdly claiming that he had defended slavery on his radio program. When the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., sponsored a public debate on immigration policy, the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) smeared and denounced AEI by claiming that it was "mainstreaming hate" by sponsoring the debate. Of course, Americans have been debating immigration policy ever since the Louisiana Purchase. The SPLC is the leading leftist group that engages in this kind of totalitarian behavior.


When a group of military and police officers organized a group called "Oathkeepers" to simply affirm the oath they had all taken to respect and live by the U.S. Constitution, they were denounced by the SPLC as a "hate group," the exact same language the SPLC uses to describe the KKK. When in 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that "Ron Paul for President" bumper stickers "could identify likely threats," their asinine statement came from information supplied to them by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The League of the South recently published its "Declaration of Cultural Secession" advocating a society that advances what it calls the virtues of "Celtic culture," defined on its Web site as "the permanent things that order and sustain life: faith, family, tradition, community, and private property; loyalty, courage, and honour." The SPLC lied about and defamed the League of the South by spreading the falsehood on its own Web site that by "Celtic culture" the League of the South means, and I quote, "white people." Apparently the SPLC believes that only white people embrace family, tradition, community, private property, courage, etc.


Impuning the motives of one’s political opponents, rather than engaging in civilized debate, is an age-old strategy of socialists and other left-wing extremists. In his famous book, The Law, Frederic Bastiat wrote of how the socialists of his day (the 1840s) routinely responded to his criticisms of their interventionist economic schemes by accusing him of hating the poor. It is also obviously the modus operandi of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC works hand-in-hand with leftist politicians like Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Banksters), quoted at the top of this article, who are too cowardly to sponsor a new Sedition Act that would outlaw criticisms of the government altogether, as was done during the Adams administration. Instead, they support in any way they can the operations of the SPLC, which attempts to censor all serious criticism of the extreme leftist political agenda of socialist politicians like Lacy Clay by accusing any and all critics of "hate" or "extremism," the same words that are used to describe genuine hate groups like the KKK, or criminal or terrorist organizations and individuals. 

The SPLC’s Extreme Left-Wing Agenda

The Spring 2010 issue of an online journal, The Social Contract, published seventeen articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center by various scholars and journalists. In an article entitled "SPLC: America’s Left-Wing Hate Machine," journalist Jerry Woodruff wrote of how the SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, proudly received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU in 1990. Baldwin was a communist who is quoted by Woodruf as having written such things as "I am for socialism" and "I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class . . . . Communism is the goal."

Baldwin was a companion of "Red Emma" Goldman, who publicly advocated murder and violence to further a communist revolution in America. She was eventually deported, and Baldwin wrote to her, "you always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life," Woodruff documents. 

Morris Dees’s cheerful acceptance of an award that is associated with such despicable characters is not an isolated example of the extremist backround of the SPLC’s staff and directors. SPLC Director James Rucker is also the executive director of an organization called "Color of Change" that was founded by one Van Jones, who was forced to resign from the Obama administration after online videos appeared showing him publicly describing himself as an advocate of "urban Marxism" and "Third World Communism." 

Perhaps the most absurd thing the SPLC does is to sponsor a Web site called "Tolerance.org" and to purportedly teach "tolerance" in primary and secondary schools. The man in charge of Tolerance.org is none other than William Ayers, the "Weather Underground" terrorist of the 1960s who admitted to setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol building in his youth. "I don’t regret setting the bombs," Ayers told the New York Times on October 4, 2008. "I feel we didn’t do enough" bombing, he said. 

There appears to be no reason to suspect that Ayers has ever abandoned his revolutionary communistic ideology. Woodruff writes of how Tolerance.org works closely with another far-left group known as the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME), which raises money by selling bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and other trinkets with sayings imprinted on them by Karl Marx, Castro’s henchman/murderer Che Guevara, and Red Emma. NAME is said to have given a standing ovation for its 1997 convention keynote speaker, Ward Churchill, the fake American Indian/plagiarist/resume fraud who was forced to resign from the University of Colorado several years ago after he publicly compared the people killed in the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 to Nazis. Ah, tolerance. 

The SPLC as a "Hate Group" Hedge Fund

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president a student of mine who was the president of the College Republicans asked me if I thought Obama would play the race card and accuse his legitimate critics (of socialized medicine, for example) of being motivated by racism as a way of censoring debate. My response to the student was that such a thing is considered to be too vulgar and uncivilized for a president to engage in, which is why Obama and the Democratic Party would probably assign the job to one the hundreds of "nonprofit" organizations that are essentially fund-raising and propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. The Southern Poverty Law Center quickly took the lead, since it was already so experienced at race baiting and racial racketeering...

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