According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the group linked to the Family Research Council shooting last summer, “right-wing patriot groups have increased by 813 percent [1]” since 1995. A HuffPost Live segment linked that rise to Fox News, Lou Dobbs and other conservatives.
The SPLC didn’t detail its list, but it has questionable credibility. The SPLC is also the same organization that claims there are “1,007 active hate groups in the United States in 2012.” That list prominently features mainstream conservative groups.
The site’s “Featured Profiles” [2] include the Family Research Council, American Family Association and Frank Gaffney Jr., of the Center for Security Policy. It introduced that section with this: “Extremists in the U.S. come in many different forms – white nationalists, anti-gay zealots, black separatists, racist skinheads, neo-Confederates and more.”
In a HuffPo Live segment, [1] reporter Alicia Menendez marveled at the increase. The segment went on to bash conservatives, “all that hate they’ve sucked in from Fox News,” Lou Dobbs, of Fox Business, and others. Menendez asked SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok about the rise in patriot groups, “Looking at your report, what’s driving this increase?”
Potok went on then to, of course, blame the racist and xenophobic tendencies of conservative groups, saying:
“Well look at that bar chart, and you see, of course, that there’s a spectacular rise at really the end of 2008. Uh, you know, what happens at the end of 2008? Well, we elect our first black man president and the economy collapses, more or less, all at once. … It very much includes what that black man represents, and that is, a major demographic change going in the country at large. The idea that the Census Bureau’s predicted, that non-Hispanic whites will fall below 50 percent of the population by about the year 2043.”
Potok then added how conservatives blame the federal government for inevitable cultural and social changes in our society. Bringing up same sex marriage, he called the movement simply, “a huge cultural change for some people to absorb.”
Menendez smugly agreed and went on to “point out” a listener comment:
“The core beliefs of most of the people in most of these groups are White supremacy and Christian dominion. Those values are not patriotic in the 21st century America. They might be considered patriotic if they were in early 20th century Germany.”
Yes, so, patriotism = Nazism now, got it.
The conservative bashing went on by other liberals present, including Patrice O’Neill, PBS executive producer for the anti-immigrant violence documentary, “Not in Our Town.” After showing pictures of Mexican families from the documentary, O’Neill asked, “How could you look at that family and want them to be harmed?”
Menendez brought it back to scared conservatives. “Invasion is a word we often hear in the context of immigrants. Coming to our country, taking our goods, and clearly that’s nonsense. And yet you have to lay a foundation for people to understand that their communities are changing and that’s OK.”
She then read a user comment on air, saying: “These American right wing 'patriot groups' are the new urban terrorists, and THEY merit observation... thank GOD for groups like the SPLC that not only watches their activities, but also advocates for Americans of modest means.”
Amazingly, radical left-wing groups like the SPLC actually work with law enforcement. Potok admitted, “We train 6-8,000 police officers a year, and share some information with them, in terms of information exchange.”
The Huffington Post even used a banner from the SPLC “hate map” page as the title image for the story. This hate map is what the Family Research Council shooter used to target [3] the conservative, Christian group for its stance on homosexuality.
If the SPLC already was the cause for violence against a conservative group, its partnering with law enforcement has disturbing implications on the future of what conservatives could be punished for as a “hate crime.”