Why the SPLC is So Very Dangerous in the Obama Era - Putting the SPLC in Context
Commentary by Frank Conner Sep. 16, 2009

Recently, Jeff Davis, Steve Scroggins and Jim Dean of the Georgia Heritage Council wrote powerful articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center, describing it as a hate-mongering organization that unfairly attacks Southern conservatism. These articles have shown who some of the key players of the SPLC are; how they operate; and their true motivations. It is not a pretty picture.

But to understand how very dangerous the SPLC is---as part of a truly-frightening trend that is only now becoming apparent, we also need to put the SPLC into its proper context in American history; and that is the purpose of this article.

American History: the Culture Clash Between North and South

If you read the mainstream newspapers and news-magazines and history-books, and you watch American-history TV documentaries on PBS, the History Channel, and/or the TV networks, they teach you that American history is primarily a morality play—the story of the white Southerners perennially discriminating against the innocent blacks, and the brave Northern liberals forever rushing in to vanquish the evil Southerners and save the blacks. American history is presented that way because the liberals control the news-and-entertainment media, and the education establishment; and the liberals have a huge political axe to grind.

The real history of our country is that of a giant culture-clash that has been raging between the North and the South ever since they were English colonies. The North was settled initially by Englishmen who took London as their ideal model. The Londoners were used to living under lots of rules; and to labor-specialization; and to striving almost exclusively for financial success. City-dwellers are accustomed to having authorities of all sorts dictate to them how they will live almost every aspect of their daily lives; and they become anxious when such rules are absent. Therefore, the Northern governing-class built lots of big cities, and sought (and seek) to run America like a big city, with an all-powerful central government.

By contrast, the South took English country-living for its ideal model. The South revered Renaissance man--the well-rounded person with many skills, who could perhaps run a plantation and keep its books, ride well, fix broken machinery, play a musical instrument, and argue politics intelligently. The South believed that properly-raised people could run their own lives far better than could numbers of dictatorial government-experts giving them orders; and so the Southerners sought maximum personal-freedom and minimal laws. It was the Southerners who proposed the U.S. Constitution, calling for decentralized government with sharply-limited powers; and the North never forgave the South for that. And it is the Southerners' demand for freedom from government domination today that the Northern and Southern liberals really hate and fear so greatly, because it is contagious. The American public increasingly senses that big government doesn't work. And that is the real source of the continuing regional culture-clash.

The devotees of intrusive big-government badly needed an edge. How could they gain the moral high-ground for their viewpoint? By identifying the worst-off element of the society; arguing that its lowly status was the fault of limited government; and demanding that government become very large, to rescue the worst-off element. In the 1830s, after the transatlantic slave-trade had been outlawed and the Northerners could no longer lawfully earn huge fortunes by transporting slaves from Africa, and after most of the previously-transported slaves had been sold and settled in the South to work the plantations, the North then picked black civil-rights as their weapon with which to attack limited government and the South.

And so, in the 1860s, and the 1960s, and the turn of the 21st century, the Northern liberals (later abetted by the Southern liberals) used black civil-rights as their morally-superior excuse for attacking the conservative South all-out, by means of the printed word, and/or courts of law, and/or bayonets and bullets and shells. But in each case, after the North had used its control of the media and/or the courts and/or its superior materiel and manpower to vanquish the South, and was situated to benefit the blacks as promised, the Northern liberals then dropped the blacks like a hot potato. And that is the unmistakable trend which separates the rhetoric from the reality: the conservative South had been the North's real target all along; black civil-rights was just the North's convenient excuse for conquering the South. The liberal Northern WASPs had been bashing the white South with deadly consequences in the 19th century; but then, after the turn of the 20th century, liberal Northern Jews joined the attack.

American History: the Culture Clash Between the Northern Gentiles and the Russian-Jewish Immigrants.

Now we come to another important part of American history which is also carefully omitted from the mainstream history-texts: the immigration of the Jews to America, and the impact of that immigration. To make sense out of it, we must contrast the German Jews, who immigrated mostly in the 1840s, from the Russian Jews, who immigrated from the 1880s to the early 1920s.

Traditionally, the Jews in most countries had been segregated into ghettos, and had studied only their own history and religion; but in 1783, a German Jew named Moses Mendelssohn began the German-Jewish Enlightenment by translating the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) into German, to try to persuade German-Jewish scholars to take an interest in contemporary Germany. It worked. Soon the German Jews became extremely knowledgeable about Western history, philosophy, religion, science, etc. So when German Jews emigrated to the U.S. in the 1840s, they dispersed around the nation; swiftly learned the groundrules for success in America; assimilated smoothly; and became valued members of the community.

Not so the Russian Jews. Also toward the end of the 18th century, in Russia, the Talmudic scholar known as the Vilna Gaon translated contemporary Russian science-texts into Hebrew. But this awakening encouraged the Russian Jews to focus Western views upon the plight of their own people, rather than to integrate into the wider society. And that policy, along with the increasingly-schizophrenic treatment of the Russian Jews by a series of eccentric and dangerous czars, converted many of those Jews into secular socialists. They became hardened, toughened people who distrusted any government which they themselves did not run or manipulate. Marxism was a German-Jewish invention, but Communism was adopted by the Russian Jews. By the 1880s, the czars were gradually starving the Russian Jews to death, and encouraging pogroms in which thousands of Jews were routinely murdered by Slavic Russians. And so, between 1880 and 1920, two million Eastern-European Jews emigrated to the U.S. Most did not speak English initially, and most did not possess marketable skills. Unlike the German Jews, they bunched up in New York City, and became highly visible there.

Before it became politically incorrect to note the differences in intelligence among the various races, most anthropologists who studied racial IQs considered the Ashkenazi Jews to be the most-intelligent people on earth, grading them 10 - 15 IQ-points brighter on average than the Gentiles of European descent. That superior intelligence is clearly reflected in the Jewish thirst for education. Although the Jews constituted less than 3.5% of the U.S. population in the 1920s, the children of (mostly) the Russian Jews flooded the Northeastern colleges and universities--in percentages ranging from 20% (Harvard) to 90% (City College of New York) of the total enrollments. And there they clashed head-on with the Gentiles.

The Russian Jews ignored America's groundrules for success; they decided that the Americans would simply have to adapt to the Jewish values; but that did not happen. The Northeastern colleges and universities were at that time preparing America's youth to be the leaders of tomorrow, with a balanced program of academic, social, and athletic activities. The Jewish students turned up their noses at this approach, focusing only upon the academic program. Their fellow students viewed them as very bright, but also excessively pushy and abrasive; and their standards of personal hygiene differed greatly from those of the American students. The word spread that these Jews were "not gentlemen." The Ivy League colleges began establishing quotas for Jewish students, and this approach swiftly ballooned into discrimination against the Jews at all levels of society and professional employment across the North: anti-Semitism. This turn of events infuriated the established German Jews, who were included in this discrimination; they invented the epithet "kikes" to describe the Eastern European Jews.

But rather than accept the American values--as every other immigrant group had done, the Russian Jews decided to continue operating as they had, and to fight back against the Gentiles. However, they would fight back indirectly. Taking a page out of the North's playbook, they would fight back by defending black civil-rights against the evil white Southerners. This would benefit the Northern Jews in three ways. First, it would give them the moral high-ground. Second, it would give them a common cause with the Northern Gentiles. Third, it would enable them to push for anti-discrimination laws, ostensibly to benefit the blacks, but in reality to outlaw the anti-Semitism in the North. The German Jews had little choice but to go along with this campaign.

In 1909, several wealthy Jews provided most of the financing and much of the organizational ability to set up and run the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Its first leader was a Jew named Joel Spingarn. The NAACP's executive director was always a highly-publicized black, but the organization was actually run by Jewish presidents into the 1970s.

In 1913, the main Jewish newspaper in New York, the Forward, began extensive coverage of the blacks as victims of the white Southerners, to create strong interest among New York Jews for the welfare of the blacks. By the 1940s, most Northern-Jewish intellectuals had signed on to support a Southern black-civil-rights movement.

Also in 1913, a Jewish organization called the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded to "stop…the defamation of the Jewish people." Significantly, the specific issue around which it was formed was not a typical Northern example of anti-Semitism, but instead an extremely-rare one in the South, when an angry mob in Atlanta killed a Jew named Leo Frank who had been convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl.

In the 1930s, the activist Jews temporarily found an even-better enemy than the white Southerners, in the person of Hitler. By casting themselves as the good guys and the Nazis as the bad guys in the eyes of the American public, they were able to begin curbing Northern anti-Semitism. As a part of that campaign, the ADL began spying on various pro-Nazi organizations in the US--sometimes legally, and (according to various lawsuits) sometimes illegally. When WWII began, the ADL turned that material over to the FBI, thus becoming a domestic-spying extension of the US government.

Liberal Jews paid for and supported fully the Southern black-civil-rights movement of the 1950s - 1960s (which could not have happened without that support). The result was powerful federal laws protecting the blacks (and the Jews) against discrimination. So the Jews had won their war, but they did not then stop attacking the South. The ADL continues to hide behind the black-civil-rights banner while attacking Southern-conservative organizations and institutions today--as being inexcusably racist by their very existence. The activist Jews' real objective this time around is "hate speech" laws--which are slowly making progress; and the conservative South continues to be their handy kneejerk-reflex target. Basically, the activist Jews have done to the white South what the Northern Gentiles had done to the Jews--turned the Southerners into outcasts; but they have done it in the name of black civil-rights.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Mimics the Activities of the ADL—But with a Different Motive

Morris Dees, who is Jewish, obviously patterned his SPLC after the ADL, but--according to his initial partner--for a very different reason: to make a lot of money. His objective was to create the image of the SPLC as a hard-charging defender of left-wing causes, and then seek heavy donations from liberal Jews to fund it lavishly.

Founded in 1971, the SPLC initially made its reputation as a staunch defender of black civil-rights, by suing the almost-defunct KKK and putting it out of existence. That was enough to get the donations flowing in fast and furiously. But what to do for a follow-up? The SPLC tried mightily to make a case that lots of disaffected white Southerners were forming militias to overthrow the US government by force of arms. But that just wouldn't fly, so the SPLC--still focusing primarily upon conservative white Southerners--had to make mountains out of molehills wherever it could.

The previous articles here by Jeff Davis and Steve Scroggins and Jim Dean have catalogued the ways the SPLC has gone about doing this—cynically smearing peaceful Southern-historical organizations as "hate groups" so as to conjure up enough fake dragons for the SPLC to "slay"--such that it can then persuade its wealthy liberal Jewish donors in the Northeast and Los Angeles to send it large sums to enable it to keep on fighting the good fight. And to create the necessary official trappings for its activities, the SPLC donates its ideologically-motivated smears of legitimate Southern-conservative organizations to law-enforcement agencies around the nation; and many of them appear to accept this blatant ideological propaganda as gospel. This situation would of itself identify the SPLC as an evil and extremely-dangerous left-wing organization outrageously attacking the conservative South purely for ideological and personal gain; but recent events have catapulted the machinations of the SPLC into a threat of such magnitude that Middle America simply cannot allow it to continue unabated.

The SPLC Teams Up with the Unabashedly-Black-Racist Obama Administration

In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency on the premise that if the nation elected him, that would prove conclusively that the nation was no longer racist; and he could then bring America together again. Whether or not he had his fingers crossed behind his back while he was speaking, Sen. Obama caused the majority of the American public to believe that (1) he would not govern in accord with his black-racist background; (2) he would not govern in accord with his hard-left voting record in the Senate; and (3) his election would finally cause the news media to cease guilt-tripping white America nonstop for being "racist." Peace would reign in America for the first time in decades.

But when President Obama took office, he began singing a very different song. He named a black man named Eric Holder as his attorney general, to run the Department of Justice. Mr. Holder swiftly made plain his feelings about whites. In a speech during Black History Month, he called the white Americans "a nation of cowards" for not openly discussing racial issues--while knowing full well that the liberal establishment (including the news media) will try to crucify any white American who deviates even slightly from the liberal party-line that all blacks are innocents, and that all whites are guilty of racism unless proven innocent.

Additionally, in his testimony before the Senate regarding S 909—the current federal hate-crimes bill, Mr. Holder said that blacks and other "victim" groups need protection under the law far above and beyond that given to ordinary whites, because in the past those groups had been discriminated against. And after Mr. Holder took office, the Justice Department arbitrarily dismissed a rock-solid case that the department had brought against two black members of the New Black Panther Party under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for intimidating voters at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia on Election Day 2008 by scaring voters with a weapon, uniforms, and racial slurs. By his words and deeds, Mr. Holder has demonstrated unequivocally that he intends to provide one level of justice for whites, and another for blacks and other minorities. Evidently Mr. Holder and Mr. Obama view their current positions of power as the logical springboards from which to pay back the whites for any past indignities--real or imagined.

President Obama also named Janet Napolitano to run the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Ms. Napolitano went on CNN and stated that when Mexicans illegally cross the U.S. border, they have not committed a crime. (From this we can gain a good idea as to how carefully the Obama administration intends to protect our borders.)

Then, on 7 April 2009, Ms. Napolitano's DHS sent out a report titled, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," to law-enforcement agencies all around the nation. This report, consisting largely of SPLC propaganda, warned that because of the economic downturn and the election of a black president, returning U.S. military veterans and other conservatives who are concerned about taxation, or about illegal aliens pouring unhindered across our southern border, or about gun-control laws, will likely join rightwing extremist groups and become future terrorists; therefore, the law-enforcement agencies should keep a very close watch on such people.

In other words, virtually all conservatives--but particularly the Southern conservatives--are guilty in the eyes of our current federal government of the crime of being conservative, as defined by the SPLC and other leftwing organizations with political axes to grind, and blessed by the Obama administration. When called on that, Ms. Napolitano said that the DHS would study the situation; but as of now, five months later, Ms. Napolitano has not repudiated either the report or the SPLC. Presumably we can expect a lot more of the same in the future.

"The SPLC and ADL attempts to politicize American police in a way not seen in history since the reign of Stalin or Hitler are threats to our Republic, our nation, and the the freedoms and security of all American citizens." --William Gheen, ALIPAC.us 7/30/09

"The report appears at best sloppy and unprofessional and at worst a representation of political bias being passed off as intelligence analysis by DHS." --Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R, WI), in 4/15/09 letter to Janet Napolitano

Organizations such as the ADL and the SPLC no longer have any legitimate grounds for vilifying and penalizing the conservative white Southerners as "racists;" so now--as extensions of the black-racist Obama administration--they are officially damning us as potential terrorists. Right now they are merely assassinating our characters. But if some crazies take a shot at President Obama or bomb another federal courthouse, then the mighty Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security (and the U.S. news-media) will rise up in their mighty wrath and smite us with everything they've got. Basically, the ADL and the SPLC are busily converting us into Obama's scapegoats. If they succeed, we will occupy the same position in Obama's America that the German Jews occupied in Hitler's Germany. It is exceptionally ironic that liberal/radical Jewish-run organizations are deliberately putting us in that position.

It is time for the South's conservative Southern-patriot organizations--the SCV, the LoS, and the UDC--to warn the South of the extreme danger posed by our self-proclaimed deadly enemies, the ADL and the SPLC; and to organize a grass-roots movement to pressure our representatives and senators in Congress to put the boots to the ADL and SPLC as official law-enforcement intelligence-agencies. Otherwise, the Southern conservatives will be sitting ducks.

Frank Conner is the author of "The South Under Siege 1830 - 2000/A History of the Relations Between the North and the South." You may contact him at frankconner@numail.org or order the book from Amazon.com

Related Links
SPLC's Reputation as Frauds & Conmen Grows - J.A. Davis & Steve Scroggins 8/21/09

Homeland Security Veteran's Smear - Jim Dean, GHC 8/27/09

Wolves in Watchdog Clothing: SPLC's Fellow Travelers - Jim Dean 9/10/09

SPLC Smears the Sons of Confederate Veterans...again - J.A. Davis, GHC 9/14/09

Uncle Mo vs. Uncle Jo - X-Files parody

Blathering Storm by Morris Dees - X-Files parody

SPLC advises DHS In Secret Meeting - April 2009 - X-Files parody