The Southern Poverty Law Center is at it again.
At the hundred-day mark of President Trump’s administration, the center has released a report that purports to expose the rampant “white nationalism” the president and his “alt-right” advisors have unleashed upon the nation.
Instead of judging President Trump’s actual record, the report rehashes left-wing conspiracy theories and tired Democratic National Committee talking points. Dressed up in somber but hilariously misplaced language, the report reads more like an article from The Onion than anything of actual substance. It is replete with lies, overstatements, calumnies against upstanding Americans, Soros-approved talking points, smears, and a militant close-mindedness typically found on elite college campuses. The report is a testament to the depths to which anti-Trump forces have sunk to try to overrule the will of the people who put Trump into office.
The SPLC’s report opens by speaking of the “themes of a campaign that had electrified” white nationalists across the nation. We are led to believe that it is racist to have discussions about our crumbling infrastructure, one-sided “free trade” deals, rising crime in major cities, mass acceptance of unassimilable numbers of illegal immigrants, lack of attention to American interests abroad, and a political class that couldn’t care less about the common good of their fellow citizens. Apparently, the nearly 63 million Americans who found cause to vote for and continue to support Donald Trump are white nationalists because no other explanation makes sense to the geniuses at the SPLC.
This is the pathetic nature of the “arguments” found in this piece. And the more one digs in, the worse it gets.
The report slanders individuals such as Steven Bannon, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and Michael Anton. Their claims regarding Gorka are borderline libelous, as they engage in the baseless calumny that he is “associated with Neo-Nazis in his native Hungary.” This reductio ad Hitlerum gained traction in the fever swamps of the Left because Gorka wore a medal during the inauguration called the Order of Vitéz (or Vitézi Rend), which had been awarded to his father (and many other Hungarian nationalists) for fighting communism. Sorry to break it to the SPLC, but this award represents something far bigger than the person Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian who was associated with the Nazis during World War II.
Readers are expected to believe the Trump administration’s effort to deport “undocumented immigrations [sic] charged ‘with any criminal offense’ or who ‘pose a risk to public safety or national security’” is evidence of “white nationalist” policies. Readers are supposed to be appalled because the administration now publishes “a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants.” But in issuing such commonplace orders (also known as enforcing the law or doing his job), Trump has simply taken a cue from President Bill Clinton, who in his 1995 State of the Union said:
All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
Under the SPLC’s rubric, Clinton would qualify as a stone-cold white nationalist. And so would at least 59 percent of Americans who, in a recent Gallup poll, say they worry a “fair” or “great” amount about illegal immigration.
If the vast majority of Americans are irredeemably racist, why would so many foreigners want to come here? Wouldn’t it be unjust to invite more immigrants to suffer racial discord and institutional oppression? The SPLC is silent about this and other basic logical inconsistencies.
align=”left” Laughably, the SPLC routinely trots out its “Hate Map,” which tracks actual Neo-Nazi organizations along with mainstream conservative groups, such as the Family Research Council, as purported evidence for the claims that litter the new report. What’s wrong with the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies according to the SPLC? Their opposition to unrestricted immigration earned them a place on SPLC’s list of “hate groups.” In other words, the proof that FRC, FAIR, and CIS are “hate groups” is that the SPLC says they are. This is the extent of their reasoning skills.
Though it might put a damper on fundraising, the SPLC would do well to heed the advice of former President Obama, who during a recent interview cautioned against labeling supporters of restricting immigration as automatically racist.
The SPLC’s report cites actual white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke, who generally approve of Trump, and judges the president guilty by association. But like Ronald Reagan, Trump has repeatedly denounced the support of that infinitesimally small group of individuals (see here, here, here, here, and here). Only an organization with a tunnel vision focus on taking the president down at all costs would continue to make such spurious assertions.
Laughably, the SPLC routinely trots out its “Hate Map,” which tracks actual Neo-Nazi organizations along with mainstream conservative groups, such as the Family Research Council, as purported evidence for the claims that litter the new report. What’s wrong with the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies according to the SPLC? Their opposition to unrestricted immigration earned them a place on SPLC’s list of “hate groups.” In other words, the proof that FRC, FAIR, and CIS are “hate groups” is that the SPLC says they are. This is the extent of their reasoning skills.
The SPLC also finds evidence of latent white nationalism in accusations that mainstream media outlets peddle “fake news”—a claim that President Trump has used to great effect prior to his election and throughout the early days of his administration. But the SPLC might be shocked to learn that Americans trust Trump’s White House more than the national media, by a margin of 37 percent to 29 percent. In fact, 48 percent of Americans think the media has been unduly hard on Trump compared with its treatment of previous (liberal) administrations. Is the SPLC really willing to argue that these Americans, many of whom also voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, are secretly white nationalists as well?
“100 Days in Trump’s America” is Exhibit A of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Launching wild accusations and using scare tactics, the SPLC has found it profitable to widen the divide between Americans by inciting hatred and violence among citizens. Morris Dees, the SPLC’s founder, lives a lavish lifestyle and and the coffers of the SPLC are flush with cash.
Fortunately, Americans have had it with the bullying tactics of hard-Left organizations like the SPLC. They know that Trump’s first 100 days—to the extent that such a measurement even matters—have been an overwhelming success. He has issued a vast array of executive orders that have overturned much of Barack Obama’s legacy, nominated now-Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, begun enforcing immigration laws, which has already put a major dent in the number of illegal immigrants coming across our border, put forward an ambitious tax plan, expanded offshore oil drilling, and strategically deployed American power in Syria and Afghanistan that has shown the world that America will not hesitate to secure its interests.
Let’s hope that the next 100 days are even better.
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