Hey, Where’s Mark Potok?

Longtime victims of the far-left smear machine known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as well as veteran SPLC watchers, will remember the name Mark Potok. Potok was for many years practically the public face of the SPLC, and for good reason: he was one of its most passionate, self-righteous, sinister, and ideologically rigid apparatchiks. Potok left the SPLC years ago but continued working to defame and destroy foes of the left. Now, however, oddly enough, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

The SPLC, which dogged decent conservative and patriotic individuals and groups (including me) for years, has crashed and burned, and turns out to have been artificially creating the “hate” it then bilked its donors for money to fight. In light of its spectacular fall, I’ve been thinking about Potok these days, and thought I’d reach out to him and see if I could get an interview.

I didn’t really think he would open up to one of his longtime targets and tell the world what he thinks about the mess the SPLC has now been revealed to be. But I didn’t expect to find that the formerly ubiquitous “anti-hate” crusader has just vanished like the morning dew. Gee, does he have something to hide?

Potok and I go way back. Here he is in a 2015 interview denouncing me for my efforts with Pamela Geller to stop the construction of a planned 16-story victory mosque at Ground Zero in New York City. True to form, Potok lies brazenly in this interview, claiming that the planned building was “neither at Ground Zero, nor a mosque,” when it was very much both.

Potok also showed up at my website, jihadwatch.org, and left taunting, sneering comments (which unfortunately have not survived) about how we were “spreading hate” by opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. The SPLC, of course, had hundreds of millions of dollars and we were (and are) just scraping by, so he could defame us to his heart’s content.

His heart was apparently contented with a lot of defamation. He once described the SPLC’s enduring ethos in arresting terms: “We see this [as a] political struggle. We’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups. We’re trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them.”

Potok and the SPLC came close, but they didn’t destroy me or my work. And so I thought that now that it is all over between the SPLC and me (although I have no illusions about the censorious left and its future plans), he and I could have, if he were willing, an illuminating discussion, rather like Ali and Frazier sitting down long after their famous bouts and talking it all over. Potok, however, is clearly not willing. Like a true Marxist, he has neither any patience for dissent nor any desire to engage with those who dare to disagree with him.

Still, I didn’t think he would be this hard to find. After he left the SPLC, Potok had a lavish website touting his freelance consulting work on the alleged threat of the so-called “far right.” That website is gone. In 2017, he told inquirers to reach him at the address [email protected], but emails to that address now bounce back with the information that “the email account that you tried to reach does not exist.”

All the material featuring Potok that is online is five or ten years old. I even searched for “Mark Potok death,” on the off-chance that I had missed his demise, but came up empty. And I do know, in fact, that he is alive: recently I found his LinkedIn account and sent him a message there, asking if he would be open to an interview. He promptly either blocked me or deleted his LinkedIn account: his page now says “This page doesn’t exist. Please check your URL or return to LinkedIn home,” but I’m not sure if that’s just what it says when someone is blocked.

This is all extremely strange. A decade ago, Mark Potok courted the spotlight. He was making appearances on college campuses all over, and pulling down hefty speaking fees. He was a darling of the establishment media. Potok left the SPLC long enough ago to mount at least a plausible claim that the organization was pure and honest when he was there and only became corrupt after he left. If, of course, that is true, or a remotely plausible case can even be made for it.

Instead, the once-ubiquitous crusader against “hate” has utterly vanished. Is that what people who have been behaving in an entirely honest and ethical manner do?

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