In my new Taki’s Magazine column being “SPLC 2: The Search for More Money,” I present a summary of what investigative journalists have learned about the sainted Southern Poverty Law Center going back to the previous century.
There have been hints lately that the comic reality about the SPLC is starting to become less of an inside secret.
But there’s a long way to go. For example here’s an interview in Salon that’s not exactly Hard-Hitting:
Trump’s election has created “safe spaces” for racists: Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich on the wave of hate crimesYou can read Heidi’s views all over the place, so I’ll just recount some of Salon‘s “questions:”There’s a big spike in hate crimes, says the director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project — and “Trump is the cause”
by CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
You see a repeated effort to normalize Donald Trump and his politics. Why do you think that the news media has been so reluctant to talk directly about the white nationalists, such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka and Michael Anton, who are in Trump’s inner circle? …To which Heidi replies:You mentioned Steve Bannon. How do you think he and other white supremacists were able to rebrand themselves as the alt-right? …
The SPLC has issued some great reports on the wave of hate crimes in this country since and before Trump’s election. I have an intuition — and please feel free to correct me. There is the data that you compiled. Some would say at least 900 documented hate incidents. I’ve seen 1,000. Is that number too low or too high? Are we undercounting because so many of these incidents are not being reported? …
And then we have after World War I the Red Summer, the backlash against African-Americans coming back from World War I [and] the Great Migration; nationwide racial pogroms and ethnic cleansing. That history is not taught well in our schools. …
We do not have a crystal ball, but we do have a lot of data. We can look at trends. If someone were to ask you, “Heidi, what are you really, really afraid of?” Because Trump has been president less than two months. What scares you when you think about a year out, two years out, three years out? …
When I think about some of the things we were discussing, like global right-wing populist movements, it’s very hard to ignore the parallels to the 1930s in Europe. It’s that you can pick a vulnerable population, start attributing them as second-class citizens and end up with genocide. I’m not saying we’re anywhere near Nazi Germany. But I can’t ignore some of these patterns because of the extremists that we have in the White House, the kind of hate violence we’re having, with a president who doesn’t seem to care that much about it. These are really scary things. It has to stop.Don’t forget to read my new column at Taki’s: “SPLC 2: The Search for More Money.”
