A funny thing happened on the way to this week’s column — I got
“targeted,” “frozen,” “personalized” and “polarized.”
In other words, I got lumped in with the majority of Americans as the
“radical right” — you know, the scary people who believe in God, the
Constitution, family values, and an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
“Targeting” the opposition is the tactic made famous by left-wing political
theorist Saul Alinsky, who wrote in “Rules for Radicals,” that one key route to
power is to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” This
goes along with another of Alinsky’s rules: “Ridicule is man’s most potent
weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.”
That’s the methodology employed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a
so-called human-rights group, in a new report called “Rage on the Right,” which
seeks to convince Americans that “the anger seething across the American
political landscape” as represented by the Tea Party movement is “shot through
with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.”
As an example of how “targeting” works, you have to realize that this SPLC
report is allegedly a review of “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” but there is
not one mention of Islamic extremism included — nothing about the alleged murder
of 13 people at Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan; nothing about the Muslim
convert who apparently killed a soldier at a recruiting center in Little Rock,
Ark.; nothing about the father who allegedly killed his daughter by ramming her
with a car for being “too Westernized”; nothing about the founder of a Muslim TV
station in Buffalo, N.Y., who was charged with beheading his wife for seeking a
divorce; nothing about the murder of a college professor in New York state by
his Muslim student, allegedly in revenge for “persecuted” Muslims.
Just plain nothing.
Because the Southern Poverty Law Center is not legitimately concerned about
hate and extremism, but rather about marginalizing conservatives such as myself
as “the radical right.” Can’t accomplish that by talking about actual murders
carried out by Islamic extremists. Besides, what’s more dangerous: A Muslim
unloading a semi-automatic weapon at a military base while shouting “God is
great” in Arabic? Or American citizens “raging against the machinery of the
federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies”?
Of course, that’s a rhetorical question. We all know that Americans are
dangerous, especially when seeking to guarantee their constitutional rights.
Among the “signs of growing radicalization” that SPLC spokesman Mark Potok notes
in his “Rage on the Right” report is “Politicians pandering to the
antigovernment right in 37 states [that] have introduced ‘Tenth Amendment
resolutions,’ based on the constitutional provision keeping all power not
explicitly given the the federal government with the states.”
Apparently, supporting the Constitution is now considered radical.
So too is quoting the Founding Fathers. As one sign of the growing
“radicalization” that threatens America, we are told by Potok that armed men
have attended speeches by President Obama “bearing signs suggesting that the
‘tree of liberty’ needs to be ‘watered’ with the ‘blood of tyrants.’ ” What
Potok fails to mention is that the source of the quotation is Thomas Jefferson
— yeah, THAT Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence,
third president of the United States, HIM.
What Jefferson said in full was, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” It is hard to argue with
the sentiment unless you are a defender of tyrants, but taken out of context, it
is easy to use as a means of “personalizing” Tea Party protesters as dangerous
right-wing kooks.
This kind of “scare tactic” would be more alarming if it came from a source
other than the Southern Poverty Law Center, but that group’s credibility has
already long since vanished. Even a writer for the left-wing Huffington Post
wrote a scathing rebuke of the SPLC for its lack of interest in the Obama
administration’s decision to drop charges against members of the New Black
Panther Party who had tried to intimidate voters in Philadelphia in 2008.
Carol M. Swain wrote last year that, “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.”
She concluded, “...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. The unrelenting attacks on Mr. Dobbs and
others are shameless. The once venerable organization wages war against
conservative individuals, principles, and organizations. How unfortunate for
America. How unfortunate for the organization’s founders.”
Nor is Swain a voice on the right who can be marginalized as yet another
neo-Nazi racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. She is a black woman who is
a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, and has
written a book entitled “The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to
Integration.”
Yet from her vantage point as an expert on race relations, she has no trouble
seeing through the polarizing tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her
summation is the best final word:
“Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has
become one.”