The Mask Removed

Friday 4 May 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

National Review Online with a rare glimpse of the SPLC sans their mask of political indifference:

In light of the May Day arrests of the Cuyahoga 5, the Occupy Wall Street–affiliated group of men who planned to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio, I called the Southern Poverty Law Center to find out of they had any plans to start tracking the Occupy movement.

[. . .]

And then he went on a long speech about “anti-abortion extremists” that had very little to do with what I was asking, but no doubt made him feel good. I met this with silence, so he said that, really, the SPLC only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology.

“Isn’t that exactly what happened in Cleveland?” I asked. “These five men, all linked with Occupy Wall Street, attempted to blow up a bridge as an overture to the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the name of anarchism. They also looked to blow up the Republican convention.”

[. . .]

He paused. “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”

[. . .]

He felt the need to keep explaining, so I let him. We only ever cover left-wing groups when they have a right-wing component, he told me. For example, “when anarchist groups are infiltrated by those on the right; Neo-Nazis, that sort of thing.”

I asked whether this was a little like the way the French do masculine and feminine plurals; that if there are a thousand women and one man, it becomes masculine. In other words, that the SPLC covers a group if there is even a minute “right-wing” component. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.

When the SPLC says they’re “not set up to cover the extreme left”, it should be taken explicitly as “we’re a partisan group that struts about as apolitical, but really we’re just cover for the extreme left.”

2012-05-04  »  madlibertarianguy