On Thursday, President Trump signed a congressional resolution about the events that took place in Charlottesville, VA, in August:
Resolution … expressing support for the Charlottesville community, rejecting White nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups, and urging the President and the President’s Cabinet to use all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups.
Great idea, right? No sane person supports the Klan and neo-Nazis, and this should put an end to the spurious brouhaha over Trump’s post-Charlottesville remarks.
But there is more going on here. The key element of this resolution is not its reference to “White supremacists, White nationalists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis.”
The key element is the “other hate groups.”
The Klan and the neo-Nazis — in reality as opposed to Leftist fever dreams — are insignificant and negligible forces. Their influence and numbers are so negligible that it is safe to say, even after Charlottesville, that this resolution was most likely not about them at all. This resolution is all about those “other hate groups,” and here again we see the hand of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC has become notorious for classifying legitimate organizations that dissent from Leftist ideology as “hate groups.”
The SPLC recently refused to classify Antifa as a “hate group.” It is noteworthy that the resolution Trump signed does not refer to Antifa or to any other violent Left-fascist groups, but only to the putative racist and neo-Nazi threat.
Reacting to the manifest unfairness of the SPLC’s list, 47 leaders who are unfairly classified as members of “hate groups” recently published an open letter to the media, asking journalists not to refer to the SPLC as if it were a reliable arbiter of what does and does not constitute a “hate group.”
That letter, of which I was a signer, read:
The SPLC is a discredited, left-wing, political activist organization that seeks to silence its political opponents with a ‘hate group’ label of its own invention and application that is not only false and defamatory, but that also endangers the lives of those targeted with it.
The letter added:
We believe the media outlets that have cited the SPLC in recent days have not intended to target mainstream political groups for violent attack, but by recklessly linking the Charlottesville melee to the mainstream groups named on the SPLC website, we are left to wonder if another Floyd Lee Corkins will soon be incited to violence.
Corkins was the Leftist fanatic who, inspired by the SPLC “hate group” list, went to the offices of the Family Research Council intending to shoot its officials and smear their faces with Chick-fil-A sandwiches. He shot the building manager, who nonetheless was able to stop him before he killed anyone else.
The letter calling on journalists to stop referring to the SPLC as a reliable source also stated:
To associate public interest law firms and think tanks with neo-Nazis and the KKK is unconscionable, and represents the height of irresponsible journalism. All reputable news organizations should immediately stop using the SPLC’s descriptions of individuals and organizations based on its own obvious political prejudices.
Indeed. But now that Trump has signed this resolution, the question is larger than simply one of news coverage.
Perfectly legitimate organizations are falsely classified as “hate groups” and lumped in with the KKK and neo-Nazis by that well-heeled hate and smear machine. And the resolution states “all available resources” of the United States government will be used against such “hate groups.”
Keep in mind the fact that when this resolution refers to “hate groups,” the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t have any competitors. Its “hate group” list is the only one around. It’s the only one government officials will be able to refer to when they begin to put teeth into this resolution.
That means that groups opposing jihad terror and unrestricted immigration, and defending traditional values could, on the basis of this resolution, be targeted and destroyed. Now that it has become clear that a great many people who are still entrenched in the Washington bureaucracy are diehard Obama loyalists who align perfectly with the SPLC’s political agenda, this is a very real possibility.
This resolution is more of the Left using Charlottesville as its Reichstag Fire moment, to crush all dissent.
Trump shouldn’t have gone along with this. But once again, the swamp appears to have drained him.
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