Wolves in Watchdog Clothing: SPLC & Fellow Travelers – Commentary by Jim Dean

Dear Folks,

In Laird Wilcox's 1998 seminal book The Watchdogs, his first sentence reads, 'Any criticism of so-called "anti-racist" watchdog activists is not without its dangers...there's a dark side to the Watchdog mindset that itself requires scrutiny.' Morris Dees' Southern Poverty Law Center is the poster boy example of such a group using the watchdog mantra as a smokescreen for its own hate campaign against America.

The initial lead off article on this series was written as a general recap of the SPLC story which has been well documented in voluminous if not widely known archives. It is a story of deception, hidden agendas, and extreme hatred for all those who disagree with those agendas. In our following articles we will delve deeper into many of the key aspects of the SPLC's history, methods, motivations, and the tactics that it uses in its own institutionalized hate campaign. These tactics are very similar to those used by the myriad of Communist front groups here in the U.S. They basically involved using a racism smokescreen to attack traditional Americans.

We will reveal the reason why the Soviet penetration of the Civil Rights movement was kept secret for so many years, because it would have exposed the FBI's top spy during the Cold War, Morris Childs, the long time Secretary of State of the Communist Party USA. He was personally entrusted with handling the direct Soviet funding of the CPUSA. No American president ever knew who he was until he retired under threat of exposure and was decorated along with his second wife in a secret White House ceremony by Ronald Reagan.

There are also national security concerns involved. The Southern Poverty Law Center has diverted some of our country's limited counter intelligence resources on bogus wild goose chases. At this critical time it leaves us all more vulnerable to enemies who are delivering a steady, ever-increasing amount of carnage and body counts. This diversion of our Intel resources has been an under-the-radar discussion topic for many years. The public has been kept in the dark about it, and vulnerable, for domestic political considerations.

The biggest shame in all this is that our media, academia, and even law enforcement institutions have been facilitators in the SPLC's hate work through their work in publicizing the 'front' aspect of the Dees crowd's work. The old Soviet Union and another country deeply involved in espionage here were just thrilled to see our limited counter-Intel resources diverted to chasing domestic bogeymen...a classic intelligence coup.

When you finish reading this series I believe you will understand that these phony anti-racism groups and their old communist buddies have run their operations similar to a foreign intelligence force. There goals were classic communist ones...targeting, penetrating and co-opting organizations and institutions to assist not only in promoting their hidden agenda work, but also protecting that hidden agenda from being exposed by carefully cultivating powerful protectors here.

One of the first archival sources exposing the hypocrisy of Morris Dees and his SPLC is the Montgomery Advertiser's Pulitzer Prize nominated 9-part investigative series ("Charity of Riches") from 1994 (see also Egerton, John: "Poverty Palace: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Got Rich Fighting the Klan" --- The Progressive 52 [July 1988] pp.14-17). We will be covering all of that in detail. These stories alone should have destroyed the public credibility of the SPLC forever. But it did not because the protectors mentioned above went to work like they were supposed to do. You will learn in this series not only how that happened, but how it continues to this day.

My focus today will be on the SPLC's communist affiliations...their associations, tactics, and goals. These connections have been virtually ignored or hidden by the facilitating groups mentioned above. I have studied communism all of my life. There is a great deal of material available on the Communist Party USA's long activities and a ton of declassified material, both U.S. and Soviet records.

In Atlanta we have some resident experts such as Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, one of our country's top U.S. Communist group experts. Harvey was gracious enough to do two seminal Heritage TV shows on his books The Secret World of American Communism, and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. He also wrote The Heyday of American Communism.

Another major resource I will be using in this series to detail Communist tactics is my personal library of ex-Communist autobiographies. They include Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Louise Fischer, and Howard Fast to name a few. Later will come the biographies that reveal the constant menace of communist penetration and cooption, to the highest levels.

They will include the late Armand Hammer (Occidental Petroleum), a top Soviet spy for all if not most of his life and who ended up a political and financial mentor of the Gore family. And then there is Harry Hopkins, a top WWII nuclear spy for the Soviets. There are many others.

These deeply personal books provided an in-depth look into the psychology of the Communist mind, its total surrender, complete lack of remorse, and denial of anything and everything conflicting with their extremist reality. It will take a few articles to begin laying this all out for you but you will then easily begin to see these patterns in the Morris Dees crowd, and their fellow travelers.

You might ask why all this framing and background is needed for an expose on the Southern Poverty Law Center. The answer is simple. All past communist infiltrations and co-options were made easier by their target audience's inability to connect the dots to see how they were being ruthlessly used. At the Georgia Heritage Council we have always labored not only to lay out our views and opinions, but to provide you our source material so you can determine for yourself who is shooting straight... the Dees folks or us.

And we will be using quotes from both the Left and the Right as there are good sources on both sides who understand the threat of our common problems. The old Commies have morphed into a variety of new entities with new names, but the same Communist goal.

"The conflict between communism and freedom is the problem of our time. It overshadows all other problems. This conflict mirrors our age, its toils, its tensions, its troubles, and its tasks. On the outcome of this conflict depends the future of all mankind..." --George Meany, President, AFL-CIO

I know you are wondering what the communist links are for the SPLC. We shall start off with just two easy ones and move on to more later. They are Chip Berlet, and Daniel Levitas (of ACLU fame -- he exposed the klan plot to require voter photo ID in Georgia -- thank goodness the federal courts saved us from such a return of Jim Crow! which might cramp the style of voter fraud advocates like ACORN.). Berlet and Levitas are old time communist org activists. They shed that skin, exploiting gullible Americans for the Communist cause, when the old Soviet Union collapsed.

The new game in town became hustling 501c3 tax free donated money for the 'anti-racism' racket which Morris Dees had shown to be a gold mine if worked right. The media facilitation branch was already well oiled and in place. Dees did not mind these post communist folks providing some background noise to keep the hyped up myths alive about the KKK, militias and right wing armies taking over America. Levitas is author of The Terrorist Next Door: The militia movement and the radical right. Dees' SPLC cash register rolled in tens of millions and the echo chamber from Levitas, Berlet, et al, was welcome.

These Communist retreads are now standard fare on the second tier college and media circuits for NPR, Democracy Now and the occasional network shows...just enough to polish up their resumes as so-called racism/KKK/white-supremacist experts. And we will peel the onion on how interlinked all these folks are in hiding their past communist org affiliations along with the Morris Dees and SPLC dirty laundry.

America has always had cheap hustlers out there exploiting people on all kinds of issues, on the Left and the Right. The disgrace here is how these phonies are given the red carpet treatment as examples to our young people, college students, and even law enforcement people. They are actually historically among America's greatest haters and enemies, hiding in plain sight.

I will close with one of my favorite quotes from Richard Crossman, who wrote the introduction to ex-communist convert Arthur Koestler's The God that Failed (many used ones available online). Crossman was a British MP and served on General Eisenhower's staff during WWII as an expert on Germany in charge of enemy propaganda:

"But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents can really understand the values of Western Democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one."

My subsequent articles in this series will lay out in detail the cozy affiliations that the SPLC has had with these RetroCommunists. They will reveal how the SPLC has adapted and shared tactics, platforms, and fundraising sources/strategies to rip the fabric of traditional America to shreds under the guise of improving it. Their real goal is its complete destruction and elimination so they can replace it with their New America. They have used a bogus/hyped up anti-racism, white-supremacism, militia and now veteran terrorism boogeyman as the classic Communist front tactic to penetrate and coopt our domestic institutions to leverage their attack on America.

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." ---Josef Stalin (1879-1953)

Jim Dean is the producer of Heritage TV and a member of the Georgia Heritage Council. He is a member of the Military Order of World Wars and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.