The Southern Poverty Law Center Steps in It - Again
by KC McAlpin, US Inc. US Inc., November 5, 2015
One of the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) notorious stable of smear mongers just launched another howler. Hefty lefty Heidi Beirich penned a blog entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas' Kris Kobach" Nov. 2 on the SPLC's "Hatewatch."
The hit piece attacks Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for speaking at the Writer's Workshop conference in Washington DC recently, and says the conference was put on by the "white nationalist Social Contract Press." Ms. Beirich included a snapshot of Kobach speaking at the gathering.
There was just one problem. It turns out the snapshot had been taken by one of the conference's black attendees, a woman from Georgia who has been a regular at the conference for years. Beirich got the photo from another left wing smear machine called "Imagine 2050," which it lifted without permission after the woman posted it on her Twitter feed.
In fact, besides black Americans, there were Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans in the audience. Two of the conference speakers were Hispanic. I should know. I emceed the conference and I am seated on the podium next to Kobach in the photo.
Wouldn't any normal person conclude that it was very unlikely that American minority group members in significant numbers would register and attend a convention of rabid "white nationalists?"
Of course they would, because the charge of "white nationalism" is a complete lie. What brings this annual gathering of Americans of all colors and backgrounds together is their patriotic love for this country and their insistence that our borders should be secure, that criminal aliens should be deported, and that American workers should not be fired and replaced by foreign workers like hundreds of programmers were this year at Disney.
But Ms. Beirich and her fellow SPLC/Imagine 2050 mud slingers don't want to debate those positions because they are opposed to all of them, and they realize their hard-left views in favor of open borders have almost no popular support. So, following Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" playbook of intolerance, they resort to personal attacks and character assassination against anyone who opposes them.
This is simply the latest episode in the SPLC's long history of launching false smear attacks against political opponents. A few years back the SPLC printed a story in their Intelligence Report magazine accusing a retired county sheriff the SPLC mud-slingers were "tracking" of advocating the killing of federal agents. When he called them out for the lie and threatened to sue, they quickly retracted the story and apologized.
In another example the SPLC wrote that the Tea Party was "shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism." Only this week, a black Tea party activist named Jenean Hampton made the SPLC look ridiculous when she was elected Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky.
Earlier in the year, the SPLC attacked GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson as "an extremist," for his conservative political views, and then when challenged, quickly retracted the charge.
The welcome and growing emergence of patriotic, pro-American blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans in American politics gives the SPLC and its thought police fits because it gives the lie to their racist, white nationalist, narrative. The reality is that the only organizations obsessed with racial identity are those on the far left like the SPLC and its Imagine 2050 cousin. In fact Imagine 2050's motto is "race, identity, democracy."
But the SPLC's incessant mud-slinging also helps to divert attention from its founder, Morris Dees' own racist history, and the fact that he has amassed a multi-million dollar fortune while working for an "anti-poverty" organization, whose $300 million cash hoard rivals that of Clinton Foundation.
Dees and his law partner once defended a Ku Klux Klansman charged with beating some blacks at a Montgomery, Alabama bus station. Dees worked in the campaigns of openly segregationist candidates for public office and more recently embraced the Confederate flag flying over the Alabama State Capitol as "part of my heritage."
The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper once interviewed thirteen former black SPLC employees, twelve of whom claimed there was an atmosphere of racism in the organization.
These are the kinds of origins and facts that the SPLC would pounce on to demonize and attack other organizations as "racist" or "white nationalist." But because the corrupt and reclusive Dees hides behind his "anti-racist, anti-hate" group facade, the media gives him a pass.
So my question to Ms. Beirich is, how can you work for such an odious organization?
More about the hateful SPLC attack
Read the blog post by Inger Eberhart describing this hateful attack by the SPLC.
The Southern Poverty Law Center: Part Karl, Part Groucho, by Mark Krikorian, November 9, 2015.
More information about the SPLC
The Southern Poverty Law Center - A Special Report, The Social Contract, Spring 2010.