Posted on April 26, 2010

The Hidden Agenda of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Tom Tancredo, Townhall, April 23, 2010

With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, many liberals exploited the actions of one deranged individual to tar millions of patriotic Americans as extremists and potential terrorists.

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In an excellent piece “What’s behind the anti-Tea Party hate narrative?” the Washington Examiner’s Chief Washington Correspondent Byron York notes that “Many of the claims that extremism is on the rise in America originate in research done by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that for nearly 40 years has tracked what it says is the growing threat of intolerance in the United States.”

The SPLC is not only taken seriously by the liberal media, but also by the Department of Homeland Security. When they issued their now infamous report on “Right Wing Extremists” that warned “disgruntled” military veterans will become potential terrorists, they quoted a SPLC report entitled “A Few Bad Men” that claims racists are infiltrating the military.

Coincidentally, “A Few Bad Men” appeared as the SPLC attacked the American Legion for its support of immigration enforcement, which they called “Legionnaires’ Disease.”

This is indicative of what the SPLC is really about. Instead of monitoring “hate” and “extremism,” they are concerned with tarring patriotic Americans who oppose their left wing agenda as haters and extremists.

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In an excellent report put out by the Center for Immigration Studies, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jerry Kammer detailed the smear tactics used by the Southern Poverty Law Center to silence those in the immigration debate.

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Kammer shows that the SPLC even sees racism in the Lord of the Rings, which one of their columnists called “little more than a glorified vision of white patriarchy” in which the heroes “are manly men who are whiter than white” and “are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good.”

The SPLC not only sees no problems with left wing racists, they also have no problem with left wing terrorists. Their “Teaching Tolerance” magazine fawningly interviewed Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who they described merely as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author” who “has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.” They did not mention that Ayers set off bombs in the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and the New York City Police Department. {snip}

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That’s the SPLC in a nutshell. The Lord of the Rings is racist, but a group called “The Race” is not. Patriotic Tea Partiers are potential terrorists, but actual terrorists like Bill Ayers are civil rights organizers.