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SPLC Tag

Stephen Jimenez is the author of "The Book of Matt," a book that calls into question the deeply ingrained narrative that the murder of Matthew Shepard was an anti-gay hate crime. The extensively researched book reveals that the Shepard anti-gay hate crime narrative may be all wrong. Jimenez, who is gay himself, has been praised by prominent gay rights activists, including Andrew Sullivan.  In response to the new information, Sullivan has even called the narrative "a politically convenient myth" deployed to "raise gobs of money and pass unnecessary laws." Stephen Jimenez: Meth And The Murder Of Matthew Shepard from The Dish on Vimeo. On Monday, The New York Post's Andrea Peyser lauded Jimenez for shedding light on "an uncomfortable truth":
 Jimenez unearthed a story that few people wanted to hear. And it calls into question everything you think you know about the life and death of one of the leading icons of our age.

I have written so many times about the fundraising charade conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in which "hate group" numbers are inflated and fear mongering is used to pump up SPLC's massive endowment used to pay enormous salaries. As with the proverbial broken clock,...

The game plays out every time there is a high-profile act of criminal violence.  There is an immediate media and left-blogsphere search to tie the shooter to a "right-wing" entity ...

Rand Paul is the civil libertarian hero of progressives, libertarians, and all people who care about the government being able to summarily execute an American on American soil who does not pose a threat of imminent substantial violence without due process of law. For the past...

How fitting that on the day a supposed sighting of the KKK at Oberlin College was revealed to be nothing more than a woman wrapped in a blanket, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its latest scare tool, New Report: Radical antigovernment movement continues explosive growth:
The number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right reached an all-time high in 2012, the fourth consecutive year of powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures, according to a report issued today by the SPLC... “As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,”  wrote SPLC President Richard Cohen, a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group. In October 1994, the SPLC wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno about the growing threat of domestic extremism; the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed six months later in the country’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism.
This is the same nonsense SPLC peddles every year at this time.  Sooner or later, like a ghoulish broken clock, one of SPLC's predictions will come true, but in the meantime, the SPLC still has not made amends for its "hate map" being used by the guy who shot up the Family Research Council to acquire targets. The SPLC count is grossly exaggerated.  If there's a Neo-Nazi website which lists branches in every state, SPLC counts that as 50 groups, even if the groups are only names on a website. The SPLC has upped the number of "hate groups" in my home State of Rhode Island to 4, including the same supposed neo-Nazi and Klan groups which we repeatedly have pointed out do not exist. In 2011, SPLC listed just one hate group (the non-existent neo-Nazi group):

SPLC Hate Map 2011 Rhode Island

But now SPLC lists 4 groups, putting the non-existent Klan group back on the map:

SPLC Hate Map 2012 Rhode Island

The SPLC also lists some other groups in Rhode Island that have no obvious existence. OMG, hate groups in RI have quadrupled!  Send money! I did a radio interview for ABC News today.  I can't find the clip, but Sam at The Last Tradition heard it and emailed:
I heard you on WABC news update putting the Southern Poverty Law center in its place. Way to go!

The long inexorable descent of the Southern Poverty Law Center continues with the revelation that the shooter at the Family Research Council used the SPLC Hate Group list to target the FRC. I have commented on the absurdity the SPLC has become many times before: Saturday Night...

SPLC has been relatively quiet lately.  Relatively being a relative term, of course. I haven't seen Mark Potok on television much, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention. SPLC may have been relatively quiet, but it has been busy maligning the Tea Party movement  as usual, as...

I was somewhat distracted the past couple of weeks getting College Insurrection up and running. So I guess I missed the national dialogue and soul searching over anti-Christian rhetoric and the War on Christianity being conducted by the SPLC and various groups which cite the SPLC as...

The Southern Poverty Law Center is back in the news because of the shooting at the Family Research Council, a group the SPLC had designated a "hate group" along with the Klan and Neo-Nazis. Based on the available evidence, it is clear the shooter was motivated...

As long-time readers surely know, I have examined the pernicious methodology of the Southern Poverty Law Center in moving from fighting Klan and neo-Nazi groups to fighting for the Democratic Party agenda against conservatives and the Tea Party. In seeking to justify its hefty salaries, budget...

Greetings from the Lone Star State, where it's cold and rainy (in Dallas). Because of pre-travel, travel, meetings, etc., I am unable to provide you with the usual searing insight into the human condition, just links: If chanting USA! USA! USA! is racist, what is chanting Si...

Democrats must be in trouble if The Daily Beast is running a headline White Supremacist Stampede, with this opening line: Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke. Ah yes, the...

There are many cheap tricks used against bloggers.Perhaps the most common is to attribute the views expressed in comments to the blogger.  The problem there is that the nature of a comment section is to give people other than the blogger the chance to express an opinion,...