For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold.
We are owed an expansive apology. That however would require sincere admission on the part of the aggressors that they did us wrong.
A vigorous scan through the legacy news from this past two weeks has not turned that up. Indeed, the parties at fault have circled the wagons instead of confronting the problem. They are attempting to make it out that the Department of Justice at the behest of President Trump is executing a campaign of persecution against a “storied civil rights organization,” as CNN on Facebook described Southern Poverty Law Center.
For those who have long watched Southern Poverty Law Center and the extraordinary influence it has with the media, the last few weeks have been positively beautiful to behold. That nigh-unassailable bastion of “anti-racist monitoring” has been indicted in federal court for funneling $3 million of its nonprofit coffers toward paying the very racial extremists it professed to stand against. The scheme could have sprung from the pages of a comic book: SPLC funding neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to actively hate people, so that SPLC could campaign against them. It’s basically akin to the fire department putting the torch to your house and expecting to be paid to put it out.
SPLC’s motives and actions could almost be laughable. But there is no hilarity in this situation. Not with SPLC having fought tooth and claw across the previous five and a half decades to establish itself as the definitive arbiter of “hate” in America. Which in the case of SPLC happens to be anything to the right of the Politburo. Conservative individuals and organizations, and especially Christians, however minimum the magnitude of their actions, have long been cast by SPLC as being “extremist hate mongers” to be abhorred. This, while Southern Poverty turns a blind eye to the violence and mayhem and even loss of life brought about by leftist groups such as Antifa and those inspired by Black Lives Matter.
No, there is not and never has been any intention by the Southern Poverty Law Center to legitimately monitor hate groups. The organization is just as Morris Dees and his confederates intended it to be: a weapon against liberty-minded people and groups that few would dare oppose without also being likened to racists.
And the legacy media agencies have been willing co-conspirators in Southern Poverty Law Center’s wicked agenda against innocent people. Too much so than to let them get away with less than condemnation.
For one giddy moment I thought of telephoning the station I grew up watching. It has been in the tank with Southern Poverty Law Center for decades. I wanted to talk to the general manager and ask him if there would be some disparaging or disavowal of SPLC that we could expect from the station for its years of close alignment with the organization’s modus operandi. But that would have come to nothing substantial.
Not that something shouldn’t happen with the media, however.
For decades, the legacy media has cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as the definitive resource on hate groups. Whenever “the Klan” re-emerged — which was always never much than misguided yokels digging out dirty white sheets from the hamper while surrounded by police informants — there was the left-leaning media waiting to jump on the story. And in recent years that media has ever been vigorous in associating “the Klan” with conservatives in general and President Donald Trump in particular (witness how the establishment press has relished connecting Trump to the events in Charlottesville in 2017).
That is not journalism. That is propaganda.
The mainstream liberal media exists within a bubble, beyond which is a reality that it cannot comprehend. That Southern Poverty Law Center apparently engaged in criminal activity is something that does not compute with most journalists and editors. In fact, it’s downright impossible for them to conceive of the notion. It comes down to emotions and vague intentions. SPLC didn’t really mean to break the law, those of the leftist media will try to persuade us with. “They were only doing good,” we will be told.
It’s very simple with such minds: SPLC was an absolute good and thus anything they stood against was an absolute evil. And even now, they will refuse to admit that an organization they had considered so righteous has actually been exceedingly nefarious in funding those very racists they have portrayed themselves as opposing.
But now the jig is up. And the media who were darlings with the Southern Poverty Law Center have been caught like a chicken in a tractor’s innards, as Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles more colorfully put it. There is no walking this back for the media. Innocent people lost their reputations, if not careers. Well-meaning and peaceful activists, especially Christians, were painted as violent extremists, a lie that the mainstream media perpetuated. Millions of individuals had their voices silenced as they were completely shut out on Facebook and Twitter regarding public debates on COVID and Joe Biden’s fitness for office, at the urging of Southern Poverty Law Center.
And in addition to these evils and many others, quite a number of commentators have argued that it’s altogether possible that Southern Poverty Law Center played a part in the assassination of Charlie Kirk following his being put on SPLC’s “hate list.” It certainly has motivated others, like the assailant who shot congressman Steve Scalise during baseball practice in 2017.
It is time that we pose a question of our own to the reporters and editors and managers of the traditional press: “Why should we trust you?” In the wake of the indictments against the SPLC — something that the legacy media would pounce upon evangelical Christians for mere allegation — how does any such news agency regain its own reputation? Because from where a lot of us are seeing things, the SPLC should be hung like a dead albatross from the neck of every journalist who referred to it as a credible source of information.
With the indictments, there has come a magnificent crack in the media’s stranglehold on American culture. Victims of SPLC for the past fifty years and more would do well to strike while its wounds are fresh, and hold the media inescapably culpable in its activism against the innocent.
If the guiding minds of the traditional media wish to get back in the good graces of the American people, then they would do well to acknowledge the part that they played alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center in destroying the reputations of good and innocent individuals and the groups that they represent. The legacy media will beg forgiveness, and then sincerely promise us that their agencies will proceed forward with more thoughtfulness and less blatant bias.
That is what an ethical and responsible people would do, anyway.
Christopher Knight blogs frequently at theknightshift.com and recently published his first book Keeping the Tryst: A Generation Xer’s Tale of Pop Culture, Faith, Madness, and Love.
Image: SPLC
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