WhatFinger


It's long past time to expose the SPLC as an arm of the radical left and Democratic National Committee

SPLC Lables AFA Conference 'Hate Group'



SPLC Hate Map
Following the American Freedom Alliance conference Sunday at which I was a speaker, the vile Southern Poverty Law Center published an article this week, "American Freedom Alliance Event Blames Immigrants for California's 'Destruction.'" The American Freedom Alliance's Sunday morning Los Angeles conference was titled, "From Gold to Dust: The Destruction of California." While the 2016 conference was focused on radical Islam, this conference topic was California's excessive regulations and taxation, with panels on education, environmentalism, one immigration panel, regulations and taxation, and one party state issues.
The SPLC cherry-picks several speakers as "anti-Muslim," while never providing context for this charge. I spoke at the event, and apparently escaped their scrutiny since I only addressed the crushing regulations strangling California businesses. Each panelist gave a ten-minute talk on the decline of California's civic institutions. However, my friend and colleague, education scholar Lance Izumi was named in the SPLC article, despite that he was there to speak about his new book, "The Corrupt Classroom," and had said nothing at all about immigrants. The SPLC wrote:
"Another speaker on the panel, Lance Izumi, of the Pacific Research Institute named the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in his speech, which was met with a chorus of boos from the crowd. Izumi took issue with the San Diego school board for working with CAIR on an anti-bullying measure as well as increased education about Islam in the public school system."

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Lance spent his 10 minutes discussing his new book, The Corrupt Classroom, in which he exposes the shocking situation in many American public schools, from teachers politicking in their classrooms to one-sided curricula to unsafe campuses to massive fiscal mismanagement, in which children are being indoctrinated,victimized or shortchanged in their learning. And Lance did address CAIR's involvement with the San Diego school board. In April 2017, the San Diego Unified School District adopted an initiative that provided special benefits to Muslim students, permitted the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to provide educational materials and revise curricula to promote a more positive and inclusive portrayal of Islam. And the SCUSD was sued by parents for this. The board rescind the anti-Islamophobia intiative and instead sought an anti-bullying measure that protected students of all religions. But CAIR tried to make the anti-bullying measure only about Muslim students. The SPLC provided no context. The SPLC even attacked the keynote speaker, Victor Davis Hanson:
"They [sic] keynote speaker for the event was Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institute fellow and author of Mexifornia, a book that romanticizes the California of old, when whites were a large majority of the state's population. Davis Hanson talked about how in parts of California, you can go 10 miles in another direction and it 'looks like you're in a different country.'"

Hanson was comparing the staggering poverty and super-wealth only blocks apart in many locals in California, and particularly Los Angeles. SPLC also said:
"Davis Hanson ended by saying, 'The state is regressing into a Third-World country.' He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, 'When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?'"
SPLC has labeled American Freedom Alliance a "hate group:"
"The August 20 conference began with AFA president Dr. Karen Siegemund and the 150 or so attendees gleefully celebrating the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center listed her group as an anti-Muslim hate group, in part due to the vile Muslim-bashing that took place at last year's gig."
Perhaps being on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Freedom Alliance can push even harder for Western and America freedoms currently being viciously eroded by groups like SPLC and CAIR. The mission statement for AFA states:
"The American Freedom Alliance is a non-aligned movement which promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals. The Alliance sponsors conferences, publishes opinions, distributes information and creates networking groups to identify threats to Western civilization and to motivate, educate and unite citizens in support of that cause."


I don't see the hate in that mission statement, given that Western Civilization IS under attack. Just look at Europe. Yet on the heels of the Charlottesville tragedy, the SPLC prepared a "hate map" and distributed it to all media, which all too happily used it as gospel, and repeated its contents on news stations across the country. Included in this "hate Map" are many Christian-based organizations, as well as groups that defend religious liberty. The SPLC claims:
"The SPLC is the premier U.S. non-profit organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists--including the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, antigovernment militias,Christian Identity. We're currently tracking more than 1,600 extremist groups operating across the country. We publish investigative reports, train law enforcement officers and share key intelligence, and offer expert analysis to the media and public."
"Nearly half of the groups attributed to the KKK, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and white nationalists seem to exist only in the imagination of the SPLC's Public Relations Guru and chief Hate Map cartographer, Mark Potok," according to Watching the Watchdogs. The SPLC makes claims and never provides any evidence. The SPLC needs to be sued by every group wrongly named in this hate map, and every group like AFA slandered by SPLC. Fortunately, a conservative Christian media group has slapped the Southern Poverty Law Center with a defamation lawsuit after being listed alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists on its "hate map," the Washington Times reported.

Earlier this year Liberty Counsel filed a federal lawsuit against GuideStar over the false and defamatory "hate group" label it placed on GuideStar's Liberty Counsel page, after being named by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "hate group." Predictably, the Sacramento Bee picked up on the SPLC "hate map" propaganda: "California ranks No. 1 in the nation with 79 active hate groups, six of which operate in Sacramento area, according to a new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and extremists in the U.S," the Bee wrote. "In the Sacramento area, the report cited six active hate groups: Golden State Skinheads, a racist skinhead group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group, the Pacific Justice Institute and Verity Baptist Church, both anti-LGBT groups, and As-Sabiqun and European-American Evangelistic Crusades, general hate groups." (emphasis added) The Pacific Justice Institute is fighting back: "The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a religious liberties defense organization, is demanding apologies and retractions from television and newspaper media outlets after PJI was listed alongside extremist white supremacist groups and linked to recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. No reporters reached out to PJI to verify their stories, which repeated information from the incendiary, discredited and far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)." It's long past time to expose the SPLC as an arm of the radical left and Democratic National Committee. It's interesting to note that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not on their list, despite calling for the killing of cops, and the violence and property damage they've perpetrated at pro-Trump rallies, and Conservative speaking events.

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Katy Grimes -- Bio and Archives

Articles with Megan Barth


Katy Grimes is an investigative journalist, Senior Correspondent with the Flash Report, ReaganBabe, and Senior Media Fellow with Energy and Environmental Institute. A longtime political analyst, she has written for The Sacramento Union, The Washington Examiner, Watchdog.org, The Pacific Research Institute’s CalWatchdog, The San Francisco Examiner, The Business Journal, E&E Legal, The Sacramento Bee, Legal Insurrection, Canada Free Press, and Laura Ingraham’s LifeZette, and can be heard regularly on many talk radio shows each week.


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