02/08/2009
Here’s the third (or maybe the fourth) editorial in the last week from the NY Times about the horrifying Nativist Menace:
The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday released “The Nativist Lobby,” a report examining the connections among the three Washington-based organizations that have led the charge for restricting immigration to the United States.
They are the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA — a lobbying group, think tank, and grassroots organizer, respectively.
All three groups are well known — you have probably come across their leaders denouncing immigration “amnesty” in news articles and on TV. The groups have the ear of conservative politicians all over the country, and their efforts have inspired many of the hard-line federal, state and local initiatives cracking down on immigrants and immigration. Numbers USA even took credit for a storm of blast faxes and phone calls to Congress that helped to kill a major immigration bill in 2007.
What is less well known, the report says, is what the groups have in common: histories connecting them to a retired Michigan eye doctor with a long-held interest in eugenics, racial quotas, and white nationalism.
The groups insist that they do not hold racist or extremist views. That’s good.
But the report argues that people should know about the groups’ history, something they and their allies don’t usually like to talk about. It calls them “fruit of the same poisonous tree.”
Many people who want stricter policies on immigration are not racist or extremist. Many care about seeing the law enforced, or are worried about overpopulation. But it’s also true that there are racist and extremist elements in the movement, and it is important to call them out.
Kudos to the S.P.L.C. for shining a light.
So, now we know what the NYT’s Two Minutes Hate of three editorials screeching about "nativists" was all about: it has been a marketing campaign for this new proclamation by the money machine that is the Southern Poverty Law Center ("Dedicated to Wiping Out the Last Vestiges of Poverty, Southern or Otherwise, in the Lifestyle of Direct Marketing Association Hall of Famer Morris Dees").
When denouncing the "ties" of immigration realist groups, shouldn’t the New York Times Editorial Board at least mention its own ties to the SPLC? For example, Editorial Board member Adam Cohen’s "Professional Profile" on Spoke.com reads:
"Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was [among other things] … a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala."
Thanks to Nicholas Stix on VDARE.com for finding that. (Here are summaries of some of Cohen’s essays. And here, Hans Bader says, "If Adam Cohen did not exist, the Onion would have to invent him … ")
As the SPLC blog "Hatewatch" complacently commented when congratulating the NYT editorial board on its denunciation of Marcus Epstein(of all people) as a "white supremacist:"
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Indeed.
It’s also easy to see why the Editorial Board had to keep banging the gong, rather than have the News department at the NYT write up this latest SPLC press release about that terrifying "retired Michigan eye doctor:" it’s not news. The SPLC has been flogging the same story about Dr. John Tanton since at least 2002.
Here is part of Tanton’s March 11, 2002 reply to 18 bullying questions from the SPLC:
Here are several questions of my own:
- I would like some assurances from an analysis of your staffing patterns that you do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or national origin. Please supply a list of your staff and governing board complete with an analysis for these four pillars of non-discrimination, and correlated with salary level. In your opinion, to avoid the charge of discrimination, should the makeup of your staff mirror the city of Montgomery, the state of Alabama, the United States — or perhaps the world? What groups are over- or underrepresented?
- Please give me your reaction to the Harper’s expos?©(November 2000) on the SPLC, charging your colleagues with veniality and hypocrisy, among other items. What is the social justification for your absolutely enormous endowment? These monies were evidently obtained from donors under false pretenses of actually doing something about Southern Poverty. Granted, based on your IRS 990 report, the SPLC has rescued its governing board and top staff from poverty. What have you done for the average impoverished Southerner, whose plight you have appropriated into your organization’s name?
- Finally: there is an old maxim that what we say about others tells more about ourselves that it does about others. In this connection, SPLC is given to accusing others of racism and hate crimes. Exactly how would you describe the emotion that motivates you? Is it Love for those who are different or who you perhaps perceive as "enemies?" Or is it more akin to Hate on your part? My analysis is that it comes much closer to the latter than the former. Certainly SPLC is chief among the hate-mongering groups in the United States, if not the world.
John H. Tanton
That’s just a bit of it. It’s a great read.
And here’s a summary of a Pulitzer-finalist investigative report into the abyss of abuse that is the SPLC.
By the way, a commenter recently offered an intriguing explanation for the otherwise baffling presence of the word "Poverty" in the name of the Southern Poverty Law Center: it’s there to make the acronym "SPLC" almost indistinguishable from "SCLC," the famous acronym of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that was once headed by Martin Luther King Jr. If true, then Morris Dees, a master direct marketer, has been more or less practicing mail fraud on elderly, easily confused donors for decades.
Finally, we can see once again how much good it’s done FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA to try to be as respectable as all get out on immigration and never talk about race: you still get denounced as white supremacist hate groups by the New York Times!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.