Imagine, just for a second, what would have happened if members of the Ku Klux Klan had intimidated black voters during last fall’s elections. Morris Dees, the sanctimonious fraud who runs the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), would be able to dine out on that incident for the rest of his life.
Curiously, however, Dees and his squalid little shakedown racket have had nothing to say about an actual incident of voter intimidation by an organization they have designated a “hate group”: Elements of the New Black Panther Party, acting as precinct workers, were caught on camera intimidating white voters in Philadelphia.
“The SPLC has been mum on the issue, despite the fact that in 2000, it included the New Black Panther Party among its annual list of hate groups,” writes political analyst Carol M. Swain of Vanderbilt University and member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “In fact, what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN’s award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters, which includes white people as well as black.”
One need not have a brief for Lou Dobbs (I certainly don’t) or other conservative targets of the SPLC to recognize the soundness of Swain’s asessment. Furthermore, the Obama regime (with which the SPLC is joined at the hip — about which more anon) appears to have taken its lead from Dees’s group, notes Professor Swain: “What should have been an open and shut case has become something more troubling, after the Eric Holder-led Justice Department dropped charges against the Black Panthers, who supported President Obama.”
For decades, the SPLC and like-minded leftist “watchdog” groups have indoctrinated police and other law enforcement agencies regarding the putative threat of “right-wing extremism.” Near the end of the Clinton reign, the SPLC helped the FBI compose the overheated and under-researched Project Megiddo report, which described millennium-minded “fundamentalists” and “anti-government extremists” as the most dangerous terrorist threat confronted by the U.S.
Now, under the rule of Obama the Blessed, it appears that the SPLC has been absorbed into the Homeland Security apparatus.
A group called Americans for Limited Government filed a Freedom of Information Act Request demanding to see the sources of the much-discussed Homeland Security Department “Report on Rightwing Extremism.” Not surprisingly, the “intelligence” behind that report consisted of roughly a single working day’s worth of internet browsing, with the SPLC badly over-represented among the second-hand and politically tendentious sources cited in this supposedly authoritative report.
Granted, work on the “Rightwing Extremism” document began under the Bush administration, which illustrates the continuity we’ve come to expect from collectivist administrations, irrespective of their partisan labels. But the eagerness of the Obama-Holder “Justice” Department to dismiss the case against the New Black Panthers indicates that the administration will be much more simpatico with the SPLC’s priorities, and thus more willing to defer to its supposed expertise in identifying the domestic “enemy.”
10:22 pm on August 13, 2009
