By Thomas Mitchell
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently published a report
loosely based on the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch in Bunkerville
titled “War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American
Radical Right.”
It was duly reported by the press without a smidgen of skepticism.
“The Bundy standoff has invigorated an extremist movement that
exploded when President Obama was elected, going from some 150 groups
in 2008 to more than 1,000 last year,” the report declares breathlessly
on its opening page, without an ounce of documentation or attribution.
“Though the movement has waxed and waned over the last three decades,
anti-government extremists have long pushed, most fiercely during
Democratic administrations, rabid conspiracy theories about a nefarious
New World Order …”
SPCL is a multimillion-dollar leftist organization built on direct
marketing and scare tactics, having little to do with poverty or law. It
touts itself as “a nonprofit organization that combats hate,
intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation.” Yet it
spreads hate and intolerance with vile innuendo and base speculation.
It also inflates its hate group count by counting every chapter in every
state as a separate group.
In a press release announcing the “War” report, SPLC’s Mark Potok
claims, “The Bundy ranch standoff wasn’t a spontaneous response to
Cliven Bundy’s predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type
action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and
more dangerous movement.”
This conclusion is based entirely on an interview with a single
person, 30-year-old Ryan Payne of Montana, who the report claims told
“counter snipers” where to position themselves behind concrete and
pavement barriers. Basically, as shown in photographs in the report and
in numerous newspapers, a man with a rifle peeked between barriers on a
highway overpass. In one photo there is one rifle and a half dozen
cameras. No mention is made of the photo taken by Bundy family members
of Bureau of Land Management snipers atop hills.
As for the claim that the support for Bundy was not spontaneous, the
report contradicts its author by pointing out that Payne spontaneously
drove though the night from Montana with a friend after becoming enraged
by a YouTube video of BLM agents using a Taser on one of Bundy’s sons.
The standoff between the BLM and the armed supporters ended on April
12. The agency had shown up with hundreds of heavily armed agents to
confiscate Bundy’s cattle, which had been grazing without permits on
federal land in Gold Butte for 20 years.
Though the SPLC says 900 of Bundy’s cattle had been rounded up and
placed in pens, media reports place the number at less than 500. SPLC
also notes that the BLM packed up and left, citing a “serious concern
about the safety of employees and members of the public,” not mentioning
that the BLM had not secured any place to take the confiscated cattle
and had no choice but to let them go, as Clark County Sheriff Doug
Gillespie has confirmed.
The report also makes numerous redundant references to the presence
at the ranch of Jerad and Amanda Miller — who later ambushed and killed
two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian who tried to stop them —
suggesting an ideological affinity. The report did not mention that the
couple was told to leave the ranch or that they had also attended a
leftist Million Mask March in Indiana.
SPLC’s definition of hate groups is broad, sweeping in groups that
question amnesty for illegal immigrants and church groups that oppose
gay marriage. None of the so-called hate groups on its list is on the
left of the political spectrum. There are groups with the phrase tea
party or patriot in their names but none with occupy or pro choice.
SPLC was founded in 1971 by direct mail marketer Morris Dees.
According to the organization’s 2012 IRS report, the latest available,
it had assets of more than $290 million, receiving more than $37.5
million in contributions and grants that year.
Writer Potok was paid $163,000, while Dees fetched more than
$350,000, as did President and CEO Richard Cohen. Eight other staffers
were paid between $100,000 and $200,000 each.
As for tolerance, Potok told a hate crimes conference in 2007,
“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so
on … I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these
groups, to completely destroy them.”
Ah, tolerance.
Thomas Mitchell is a longtime Nevada newspaper columnist. You may share your views with him by emailing thomasmnv@yahoo.com. Read additional musings on his blog at http://4thst8.wordpress.com/.
I commented on the errors in the SPLC report here.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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