By Chuck Baldwin, Constitution Party 2008 Presidential candidate
http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1237
In a report on its web site dated April 2010, entitled “Meet The Patriots,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) profiled “36 individuals at the heart of the resurgent [patriot] movement.” (In reading the list, I counted only 35 “patriots” and 5 “enablers” for a total of 40. I’m not really sure how the SPLC came up with “36.” Perhaps their ability to count is commensurate with their ability to appreciate patriotism and liberty.) The SPLC (founded by Morris Dees) sees itself as America’s guardian against “right wing militias” and loves to label conservatives and libertarians that it doesn’t like as “extremists.” The SPLC is one of the most ultra-liberal organizations in the country and should be dismissed as a group of paranoid leftists, not worthy of thought or mention.
The sad truth is, however, our federal government has chosen to exalt the SPLC to the position of being its “go to” source for information regarding “potential domestic terrorists” and similar characterizations. As a result, the information and reports disseminated by SPLC wind up in police reports and bulletins all over the United States. As an example, the SPLC had its fingerprints all over the infamous MIAC report. One could even question whether the SPLC is merely a front organization for Big Brother.
Therefore, it is highly likely that the report negatively profiling 40 American patriots will find its way into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fusion centers and be distributed to police agencies all across the country. So, should the 40 people who find themselves targeted by SPLC expect some kind of government/police attention? Are we really that close to Nazi-style persecution in America? If the SPLC has its way, the answer seems to be a definite yes.
I remind readers that in the book, Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust (page 3), there were five steps to Hitler’s plans for the destruction of European Jews. Step 1: Identification/registration of the targeted group as a public menace. Step 2: Ostracism of the targeted persons. Step 3: property confiscation. Step 4: Concentration of members into geographical locations. Step 5: Annihilation. In this latest report, SPLC seems quite willing to accomplish steps 1 and 2.
Here are the 40 names that are targeted in the SPLC report (and guess who is listed at the very top? Yours truly):
1. Chuck Baldwin, Pastor, Radio Broadcaster, Syndicated Columnist, 2008 Constitution Party Presidential nominee.
Keep reading….
http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1237
Nice
Peter, thanks for the links, very eye opening indeed!
How does it fit, in your view?
*should be under the banner “seditious behavior”
The people listed sound be under the banner “seditious behavior”!! (look it up) it fits…
“1) his insistence that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified; and”
A guy named Ron Benson did extensive research on this issue which included visiting each state capital which was alleged to have ratified this amendment and he claims that most of the state legislatures either did not ratify it or changed the wording of the amendment (which would disqualify it since what they did ratify was not the same as the amendment).
Regardless of whether it was ratified or not, the Superme Court ruled that the income tax was a foreign revenue tarriff and that they definition of income for the purposes of the internal revenue code is a corporate profit.
However, whether or not the amendment was ratified and whether or not the income tax is being applied constitutionally, there is a much greater arguement against the income tax and that is that all taxation is theft.
“2) the conviction (that is apparently shared by Ernest Hancock) that the militia-movement connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is a government conspiracy:”
Judging by the evidence that I’ve seen the OKC bombing probably was a government conspiracy.
Anyone who thinks that governments don’t engage in conpiracies is naive.
I made a mistake on a name above. Should say Jon Roland.
“Bob Roland is a Libertarian Party member in Texas.”
Whoops, should say Jon Roland.
This list is absolutely ridiculous and illustrates why the SPC has little credibility.
By they way, it should be pointed out that Paul Venable is black.
Bob Schultz is a former Libertarian Party member and was a Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of New York back in the ’90s.
Bob Roland is a Libertarian Party member in Texas.
I’m pretty sure that Red Beckman was the founder of the Fully Informed Jury Association ( http://www.FIJA.org ). If he didn’t found it then he was at least involved in it.
Peter Gemma, thank you for digging up that background info on the SPLC.
Jon Roland has been the most gentlemanly and scholarly member of the 2006, 2008, and 2010 LPUS Platform Committees. His constitution.org site has an impressive amount of content. He is a constitutionalist minarchist, and has a social-contractarian originalist notion of a citizen militia, of which he says all able-bodied citizens are members. The views of his that I find most quirky are
1) his insistence that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified; and
2) the conviction (that is apparently shared by Ernest Hancock) that the militia-movement connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is a government conspiracy: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/mcveigh2.htm
FYI, the list
1. Chuck Baldwin, Pastor, Radio Broadcaster, Syndicated Columnist, 2008 Constitution Party Presidential nominee.
2. Joe Banister, former IRS special agent, tax protester.
3. Martin “Red” Beckman, tax protester
4. Catherine Bleish, head of the Liberty Restoration Project.
5. Chris Broughton, Second Amendment advocate, member of “We The People” group.
6. Bob Campbell, head of American Grand Jury.
7. Robert Crooks, Army veteran, retired commercial fisherman, anti-illegal immigration proponent.
8. Joseph Farah, CEO of World Net Daily
9. Gary Franchi, producer of “Camp FEMA: American Lockdown,” national director of RestoreTheRepublic.com.
10. Al Garza, head of the Patriot’s Coalition, an anti-illegal immigration group.
11. Ted Gunderson, retired FBI agent.
12. John Hassey, “The public face of Alabama’s militia movement in the late 1990s,” says SPLC.
13. Alex Jones, Radio Talk Show host.
14. Devvy Kidd, “prolific columnist, blogger, and public speaker.”
15. Larry Kilgore, telecommunications consultant, former US Senate candidate from Texas, pro-secession advocate.
16. Cliff Kincaid, syndicated columnist and author, editor of AIM Report (Accuracy in Media’s publication), founder and president of America’s Survival, Inc., a UN watchdog group.
17. Mark Koernke, associated with the now-defunct Michigan Militia.
18. Richard Mack, former Graham County, Arizona, Sheriff, author, and public speaker.
19. Jack McLamb, former Phoenix, Arizona, police officer, author, and public speaker.
20. John McManus, former member of the US Marine Corps, president of the John Birch Society.
21. Daniel New, father of Michael New (the Army medic who refused to wear a UN uniform), author, public speaker.
22. Norm Olson, founder of the now-defunct Michigan Militia.
23. Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
24. Stewart Rhodes, Army veteran and Yale Law School graduate, founder of Oath Keepers.
25. Jon Roland, computer specialist, founder of the Constitution Society.
26. Luke Rudkowski, founder We Are Change.
27. Robert “Bob” Schultz, founder of We The People.
28. Joel Skousen, editor, World Affairs Brief.
29. Jim Stachowiak, Radio Talk Show host, “Longtime militia organizer,” claims SPLC.
30. John Stadtmiller, founder, Republic Broadcasting Network.
31. Orly Taitz, California attorney, a leader in the push to make President Obama disclose his US birth certificate.
32. Amanda Teegarden, executive director of Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise.
33. Mike Vanderboegh, anti-Obama health care activist.
34. Paul Venable, former candidate for the Idaho House of Representatives.
35. Edwin Vieira, Jr., attorney, author, proponent of constitutional State militias, lecturer.
36. Michele Bachmann, US Representative from Minnesota.
37. Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel TV host.
38. Paul Broun, medical doctor, US Representative from Georgia.
39. Andrew Napolitano, attorney, former State judge in New Jersey, Fox News Channel legal analyist, lecturer.
40. Ron Paul, former member of the US Air Force, medical doctor, US Representative from Texas, 2008 Republican candidate for President.
your friend is a diplomat …
You forgot the claims of sexual harassment at SPLC offices being prevalent. And probably a few other things.
A friend of mine who used to teach law at the University of Alabama for many years, is a leftist, and knows Dees pretty well, says he believes Dees is a slimeball, or words to that effect.
SPLC?
* Baltimore Sun says: “Its business is fundraising, and its success at raking in the cash is based on its ability to sell gullible people on the idea that present-day America is awash in white racism and anti-Semitism, which it will fight tooth-and-nail as the public interest law firm it purports to be” (http://kentuckyannatruenews.blogspot.com/2009/03/splc-dees-fraud-expose-baltimore-sun.html)
* SPLC’s hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, won a journalism award for a series of investigative articles on the unethical fundraising practices of Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center (“A complex man: Opportunist or Crusader?” February 14, 1994). The articles noted that in a ten year period (1984-1994), SPLC spent some $40 million—two thirds of its income—on its own expenses. The newspaper quoted Pamela Summers, a former SPLC legal fellow, as saying: “What they are doing in the legal department is not done for the best interest of everybody [but] is done as though the sole, overriding goal is to make money. They’re drowning in their own affluence.”
* The Progressive magazine (July, 1988) reported that: “Dees served in 1958 as state campaign manager for segregationist attorney general candidate McDonald Gallion and also worked for George C. Wallace. In 1961.” According to Progressive journalist John Edgerton, when some civil rights activists were beaten by a white mob at a Montgomery bus station, Dees and his law partner took the case of one of the men charged—and the legal fee was paid by the Ku Klux Klan.
* Jim Tharpe, Deputy Metro Editor of The Atlanta Constitution noted of SPLC: “There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the thirteen black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the center, which was a shocker to me.” (http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=about.Panel%20Discussion:%20Nonprofit%20Organizations%20May%2099) [note: scroll down the column]
* a March 2007 article in Harper’s magazine noted: “The Center earns more from its vast investment portfolio than it spends on its core mission, which has led Millard Farmer, a death-penalty lawyer in Georgia, to once describe Morris Dees, the SPLC’s head, as ‘the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement’ (adding, ‘I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye’).”
* The Humanist magazine asserts “The SPLC campaigns for laws that will effectively deny free speech and freedom of association to certain groups of Americans on the basis of their beliefs. Six times a year, the SPLC’s letter boasts, the center reports its ?ndings to over 6,000 law-enforcement agencies; then, with no discernible irony, it goes on to justify its Big Brother methods in the name of tolerance.” (“Is the extremist right entirely wrong?” by Barbara
Dority, November-December, 1995.)
* Wes Prudin, Editor in Chief of the conservative the Washington Times has this to say of the SPLC and Morris Dees: “White guilt can be manipulated with black pain, but it
has to be done carefully. It’s a sordid scam. Some people would call what Morris Dees does a hate crime, but it’s a living, and a very good one.”
Works fine in my firefox.
Sorry I’ve been making them non-clickable lately, one of the computers i have the most access to lately makes live links in dashboard a real pain. For whatever unfathomable reason, the sysadmins here have disabled ctrl+letter shortcuts, and standard browser top copy/paste does not work with the link dialogue box in dashboard when composing posts.
I can hard-code it, but it’s more of a pain.
If anyone who writes here wants to fix my links to make them live, feel free.
Otherwise, anyone interested will just have to copy and paste them.
Catherine Bleish of the Liberty Restoration Project & Operation Defuse is also on the list…
Actually, on second thought, I think Bannister and Kidd are only small-l libertarians I don’t know if they’ve been involved in the party other than as convention speakers.
Link – It worked in my firefox. The names I immediately recognized with ties to Libertarians are:
2. Joe Bannister
9. Gary Franchi of Restore the Republic, Aaron Russo (z”l) group
14. Devvy Kidd
18. Sheriff Richard Mack, former elected L
40. Ron Paul
Most of them appear to be affiliated with the Constitution Party or just generally right wingers.
Link does not work in Firefox. Are there any Libertarians on the list?
The SPLC needs to focus solely on racist and violent groups, not go after everything that’s Right of the spectrum, or Libertarian.