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The Nation Rejoices As Another Left-Wing Smear Factory Suffers Mass Layoffs
A couple of weeks ago, I covered the large round of layoffs at the Left-wing activist group known as Media Matters.
Many conservatives celebrated the news because of course, Media Matters exists for the sole purpose of smearing the opponents of the Democratic Party. They misrepresent people’s words, stalk them on social media, and so on. But Media Matters’ dishonest attack on Elon Musk and Twitter appears to have been a bridge too far. Elon Musk fought back with a massive lawsuit, which Media Matters’ management cited as one reason for the layoffs.
For my part, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with Media Matters’ collapse because, as I said at the time, they essentially function as my PR agency. They keep clipping segments from my show and broadcasting them all over the place, apparently thinking they’ve found a “gotcha” moment. But really it’s always something that my own team was going to post online anyway. And they did all of this without taking or even requesting any compensation whatsoever from me. In fact, I never really even thanked them for the pro bono services they’ve provided dependably and frankly obsessively over the years. So Media Matters’ downfall was something of a bittersweet moment for me.
Fast-forward just a couple of weeks, and yet another Left-wing smear factory appears to be on the decline. This time it’s the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). And this is a collapse I will openly celebrate because the SPLC is a substantially more effective organization than Media Matters could ever hope to be — more effective at actually advancing Left wing goals. Less effective as a defacto PR agency for us. So the worst of all worlds. If Media Matters is the B-team of Democratic Party hatchetmen, the SPLC is the A-team. And by that I mean, they’re still evil, but they have a lot more influence.
Thankfully, on Thursday, the SPLC announced it’s laying off 60 workers, or roughly a quarter of its staff. The union at the SPLC — because for some reason a nonprofit has a union — has said the cuts will have a “catastrophic impact” on SPLC’s day-to-day operations.They won’t be able to save democracy and fight white supremacy anymore, we’re told.
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This is an important story for two reasons. First of all, we’re just five months away from Election Day. Two of the Democrats’ biggest propaganda outfits getting gutted at a pivotal time like this is a really bad sign for the party’s messaging efforts, and a great sign for the country. It also suggests that there might be a lot more internal discord within the party than we realized, which I’ll get into in a second. But the other reason this is an important story is that the SPLC has a direct line to federal law enforcement and Joe Biden’s DOJ.
We know that because the SPLC was one of the sources for the FBI’s memo last year proclaiming that, “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” has attracted “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” The FBI warned that these “radical traditionalist” Catholics, or RTCs, can be identified by their, “frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The memo concluded by noting that these radical Catholic terrorists, “present opportunities for threat mitigation.”
The FBI’s memo, which was written by the Richmond field office, then went on to directly cite the SPLC: “Following are the nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States in 2021 as defined by the Southern Policy Law Center, followed by the location of their organizational headquarters.” The FBI then copy-pasted a webpage from the SPLC.
In other words, the SPLC functions a bit like the FBI’s cutout. They produce agenda-driven “threat assessments” or whatever, and then the FBI — pretending the SPLC is some sort of impartial arbiter — cites the SPLC to go after groups that the Democratic Party doesn’t like.
When he was asked about this under oath last year, the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, said he was “aghast” that the agency had cited the SPLC. He said he immediately had the memo removed from FBI systems. Watch:
Christopher Wray says it was just one field office making an innocent little mistake, and that it won’t happen again. But no part of that statement appears to be true. The testimony you just saw was from March of last year. Seven months later, senators Chuck Grassley and James Lankford found that, “FBI Director Christopher Wray has yet to fully own up to the extent of the memo’s origins – even in congressional testimony. During a September FBI briefing to Senate staff, it was clear the FBI still relies on SPLC information.”
So the head of the FBI admits under oath that the SPLC is a garbage source. But the FBI is still apparently citing the SPLC in private briefings with the Senate. This is obviously a major problem — and it may constitute perjury by the FBI director — but it’s not really surprising. In an interview a couple of years ago, Wray admitted that the FBI also regularly works with another partisan and totally discredited Left-wing organization, the ADL. Here’s Wray speaking directly with the head of the ADL:
FBI director Christopher Wray admitted on a call with Jonathan Greenblatt that the FBI works directly with the ADL for tips and targeting of those they have labeled “anti-semites.” This can be as straight forward as someone criticizing Israel. pic.twitter.com/UiQBcPwwC6
— Henrik Palmgren ?? ᛟ (@Henrik_Palmgren) January 21, 2022
“It’s the FBI that works directly with the ADL every day,” says the head of the ADL. And the FBI director agrees, saying that the ADL apparently participates in law enforcement investigations.
This is the same ADL that sent out a memo warning about “extremist” parents at school board meetings who dare to question “COVID-19 mandates” and “Critical Race Theory.” (You might remember that Merrick Garland’s DOJ then began investigating these school board meetings, coincidentally enough). This is the same ADL that published a definition on its website saying that it’s impossible to be racist against white people. According to a definition that was on the ADL’s website for several years, racism means, “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color.”
I could give many more examples, including the ADL’s political targeting of Elon Musk on behalf of the Democratic Party, or their various calls to censor conservative commentators and their lies about the so-called “great replacement theory.” The point is that this is not an organization that a nonpartisan FBI would ever dream of working with. But we don’t have a nonpartisan FBI, so instead, the FBI director is openly bragging about working directly with Left-wing activists. He only apologizes when he’s caught. And then he goes right back to doing the same thing.
Decades ago, back in the 70s, you could make a plausible case that the FBI should be working with groups like the SPLC. They were founded initially, supposedly, to fight various forms of discrimination in court — with the goal of alleviating the root causes of Southern poverty, particularly in the black community. But about a decade in, the SPLC decided to give up the idea of solving southern poverty — which as you may have noticed, is still quite pervasive. And instead, the SPLC morphed into a smear factory. They’ve gone after pretty much everyone with a position on abortion or immigration or Islamic extremism that they disagree with.
Some of the allegedly radical and hateful groups identified by the SPLC include such well-known domestic terror organizations as The Federalist Society, PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Immigration Studies, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, and the Family Research Council (which an SPLC follower targeted in an attempted mass murder back in 2012). These are all mainstream conservative organizations, as you probably know. But that didn’t faze the SPLC. They’ve also targeted people like Ben Carson, Dennis Prager, and Franklin Graham. Ben Carson, for example, appeared on the SPLC’s hate list because he holds the radical, unthinkable view that marriage is between one man and one woman — you know, that tenet of Christianity that’s also been a universal view for pretty much all of human history. (They later halfheartedly apologized for the hit on Carson, saying their smear job labeling him as an “extremist” didn’t meet their nonexistent “standards”). Not surprisingly, the SPLC also has a page on their website dedicated to exposing and cataloging the crimes of the dangerous extremist whose show you’re watching right now.
But all those attacks pale in comparison to SPLC’s efforts to defame Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz. They appeared in the SPLC’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” for the crime of denouncing violent Islamic extremism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the leading human rights activists alive, and she suffered female genital mutilation at the hands of actual extremists, but according to the SPLC, she has no right to criticize Islamic extremism. These claims were so absurd that the SPLC pulled its “field guide” on extremism entirely. They also publicly apologized for calling Nawaz an extremist and paid several million dollars in a settlement.
Again, this is the group that the FBI apparently still relies on for investigative information. That’s why we should all celebrate the fact that the SPLC has been gutted. It may mean fewer coordinated Left-wing assaults on pro-life organizations and pro-life activists, for one thing.
Unfortunately, like Media Matters, or any other form of highly invasive and malignant cancer, the SPLC probably will not go away entirely. It’s not shutting down, at least not right now. And they don’t appear to be having financial issues either, since they’re historically very well-funded — and they reportedly still receive donations from liberals who think defaming innocent people is some kind of public service. That’s according to the SPLC’s union, which tweeted yesterday:
Today, [SPLC] – an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for ‘hoarding’ donations – gutted its staff by a quarter. SPLC’s decision has a catastrophic impact on the organization’s work in support of immigrants seeking justice and its mission to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance human rights through support of educators.
So there’s a bit of infighting going on at the SPLC. And that post does raise an interesting question: If it’s true that the SPLC is financially sound, why are they firing a bunch of employees? Over at Hot Air, David Storm theorizes that SPLC is laying off the far-Left fringe of its workforce because they’ve become unruly. That would explain why the SPLC’s union is lashing out at the SPLC right now on Twitter:
As the Democrats rely more on radical activists,” Storm writes, “they can lose control of the messaging and direction. Younger folks who are now getting hired genuinely believe the world is on fire, that White Supremacy is on the rise, that settler colonialists are oppressing the natives, and that the borders must be open. The people at the top generally use the issues to collect money to help Democrats and slander Republicans. Suddenly they are facing revolts. I suspect that is part of what is at work here. The SPLC isn’t going broke, so it’s likely that they are dumping the most troublesome employees under the guise of a restructuring.
If that’s the case, then unfortunately, SPLC will probably stick around. But at least, like Media Matters, they’ll have to orchestrate their smears from now on with a lot less manpower. That means I’ll have fewer unpaid PR representatives going forward, spreading clips of my best moments all over the Internet. And yes, that’s a bummer, for me at least. But it also means that, without the SPLC running at full capacity, Joe Biden’s DOJ will have a harder time cooking up fake justifications to harass their political enemies. And with just a few months to go until the election, that’s unquestionably a big win for the “democracy” that Media Matters and the SPLC pretend to care so much about.
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