How the Southern Poverty Law Center Faked an Islamophobia Crisis

At FrontPage Magazine, "Fake News About Fake Group's Report About Fake 'Hate'":

Look out!  It’s another fake Islamophobia crisis.

“Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report,” wails NBC News. “Watchdog: Number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015,” FOX News bleats. ABC News vomits up this word salad. “Trump cited in report finding increase in US hate groups for 2nd year in a row.”

The SPLC stands for the Southern Poverty Law Center: an organization with slightly less credibility than Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and without the academic degree in greasepaint.

And you won’t believe the shameless way the SPLC faked its latest Islamophobia crisis.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate group” sightings claims that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016.”

That’s a lot of folds.

And there is both bad news and good news from its “Year in Hate and Extremism.”

First the good news.

Casa D’Ice Signs, the sign outside a bar in K-Mart Plaza in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is no longer listed as a hate group. The sign outside the bar had been listed as a hate group by the SPLC for years. The owner of Casa D’Ice had been known for putting politically incorrect signs outside his bar. So the SPLC listed the “signs” as a hate group. (Even though there was only one sign.) Not the bar. That would have made too much sense.

Since then Casa D’Ice was sold and the SPLC has celebrated the defeat of another hate group. Even if the hate group was just a plastic sign outside a bar.

But the bad news, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is that anti-Muslim hate groups shot up from only 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016.

What could possibly account for that growth? Statistical fakery so fake that a Vegas bookie would weep.

President Trump is on the cover of the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report: a misnomer of a title from an organization whose intelligence gathering led it to list a bar sign as a hate group.

But there’s actually another phenomenon responsible for this startling rise reported by the SPLC.

The SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America as separate groups.

How do you get a sudden rise from 34 to 101 hate groups? It helps to suddenly add 45 chapters of one group. Act for America isn’t a hate group. It’s also just as obviously not 45 groups.

And it didn’t come into existence last year.

Act for America was only listed as one group in the 2015 list. It shot up to 45 now.

The SPLC this year listed the Los Angeles chapter of Act for America as a separate group. But the chapter has been around for quite a few years.

Furthermore Act for America boasts not 45, but 1,000 chapters across the country. Why list just 45 of them? Look at it from the SPLC’s perspective. Next year, it can add 200 chapters and claim that anti-Muslim hate groups once again tripled. And then it can do the same thing again the year after that.

That way the Southern Poverty Law Center can keep manufacturing an imaginary Islamophobia crisis.

Also added to the list is Altra Firearms: a gun store that ran an ad declaring that it wouldn’t sell firearms to Clinton supporters or Muslims. Like Casa D’Ice, this is another case of the SPLC demonstrating that it has no idea what distinguishes a store whose owner says politically incorrect things from a “group”.

The list has added Bosch Fawstin: an artist who was the target of the first ISIS terror attack in America during the assault on the Draw Mohammed cartoon contest. The SPLC announced that it was adding the Eisner nominated artist to its list of hate groups after he survived the attack.

The SPLC’s actions were obscene.

After the attack, Heidi Beirich, in charge of adding targets to the SPLC’s hate map, announced that she would be adding Bosch to the list because the Center now knows his location.

Indeed the SPLC makes a point of highlighting the locations of likely terrorist targets. And the Southern Poverty Law Center’s map of hate has been used by terrorists before.

Floyd Lee Corkins opened fire at the headquarters of the Family Research Council. The conservative Christian organization had been targeted by Corkins because of its appearance on the SPLC’s list.

"Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online,” Corkins later confessed to the FBI.

When Leo Johnson, the building’s African-American manager, attempted to stop Corkins, the SPLC shooter told Johnson that he didn’t like his politics and opened fire. The SPLC gunman had planned to kill everyone in the office, but Johnson’s heroic actions saved their lives. The African-American building manager was forced to undergo painful surgeries because of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate list.

Despite its role in the terror attack, the SPLC continues to target the Family Research Council.

None of the so-called “Anti-Muslim hate groups” listed by the SPLC have shot anyone. The SPLC has...

Still more.

President Trump's Agenda Includes Hitting Back — Hard

From David Horowitz's new book, Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.

Excerpt from Big Agenda in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: https://t.co/ROAQl98P0V

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) February 19, 2017

Ironically, it was a billionaire businessman who broke the mold in the 2016 presidential campaign and brought a new voice into Republican politics. Donald Trump took up the cause of the forgotten working class, promising to restore America's industrial prowess and bring back the jobs that a corrupt elite with a globalist outlook had negotiated away in reckless trade deals that sent Americans to the back of the bus and squandered the prosperity they had created over generations.

Equally groundbreaking was Trump's bluntness in confronting the corruption of both parties for participating in a rigged system that left their constituencies out in the cold. The failure to secure the borders was a national disgrace in which both parties were complicit. In focusing on the criminal aliens who had not been blocked at the borders and were not deported, he broke the silence imposed by the politically correct party line. In calling Clinton a "crook," a "liar," and the enabler of a sexual predator, he took her off the pedestal on which her gender and the Democrats' fantasy of a Republican "war on women" had placed her. By speaking out against the Democrats' rape of the inner cities and their treatment of their black constituents as second-class citizens, Trump burst a bubble that had protected Democrats from the consequences of their actions and opened the ranks of the Republican Party to "people of color."

Trump's readiness to go for the Democrats' jugular rallied Republican voters frustrated by their leaders' long-running deference to Democratic outrages and their willingness to keep their party on the defensive. It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a "movement." It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats' collectivism and in defense of individual liberty. Perhaps Trump's most significant innovation as a Republican candidate was the moral language he used to indict his Democratic opponent. Previously, Republicans would have been too polite to call their opponents liars and crooks - even when the evidence clearly showed that they were. If their opponent was a woman, they would never have dreamed of using such language, so deferential were they to the stringent rules of political correctness. Trump broke free of this constraint. But Republicans need to take this a step further and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance with which they can characterize their opponents and level the political playing field.

That theme is individual freedom. The economic redistribution that progressives demand is not "fairness," as they maintain. Socialism is theft and a war on individual freedom. Compulsory public schools are not a service to minorities and the poor but are infringements on their freedom to choose an education that will allow them to pursue the American dream. Obamacare is objectionable not only because its mandates drive up the costs and diminish the quality of health care, as Republicans have argued. Far more important is that government-controlled health care takes away the freedom of individuals to manage their own health and secure their life chances. Onerous taxes and massive government debt are not accounting problems; they are a war on the ability of individuals to work for themselves instead of the government and are therefore an attack on individual freedom. This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda...

Most excellent.

RTWT.

How Bureaucrats Are Fighting Voters for Control of Country

From Matthew Continetti, at Free Beacon, "Who Rules the United States?":

Who Rules the United States?: How bureaucrats are fighting the voters for control of our country https://t.co/FKo760mAiu pic.twitter.com/QxtRlb7Txd

— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 18, 2017

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to "drain the swamp" in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation's capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. "What truly matters," he said in his Inaugural Address, "is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people."

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year's election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. "I can't think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this," a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women's March.

But here's the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief...

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "Obama's Shadow Presidency."

President Trump Invites Supporter on Stage During Florida Rally

Amazing.

How half this country feels about @realDonaldTrump.

Pure love and gratitude ❤🇺🇸💙#LoveTrumpsHate pic.twitter.com/efeqXEtQV8

— Steph (@steph93065) February 19, 2017

Why Isn't Norma McCorvey's Obituary Trending at Memeorandum, or Anywhere Else?

She's not trending because leftists couldn't care less about "Jane Roe," of the Supreme Court's notorious Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

Leftists don't care because they used McCorvey like so many sanitary napkins stuffed down the throats of conservative activists. McCorvey was used, chewed up, and spit out. She had become a pro-life activist who spent the last couple of decades seeking to overturn the decision that bore her name. For that, McCorvey became essentially a non-person, no longer useful to a movement responsible for at least 50 million abortions since Harry Blackmun hellish ruling outlining a "woman's constitutional right" to terminate a "fetus" in the first three months of pregnancy. It's been a holocaust of "unwanted" pregnancies ever since.

McCorvey's death is frankly big news, important news. But you wouldn't know it by looking at Memeorandum, which is covered with all kinds of stories detailing treasonous leftist designs to bring down the democratically-elected government of Donald J. Trump.

Here's the New York Times' obituary, "Norma McCorvey, 'Roe' in Roe v. Wade, Is Dead at 69."

And at Memeorandum, crickets:



Her obituary's not trending on Twitter either.

She was thrown away by the left like a piece of trash. And that tells you something about the non-value of human life to anyone who proclaims they're a "progressive."

Report: Senior White House Officials Favor John Bolton for National Security Adviser.

At Instapundit, "I’D BE QUITE HAPPY WITH THAT MYSELF."

Me too.

PREVIOUSLY: "Trump to Interview Candidates for National Security Advisor."

(No word yet as to Trump's pick.)

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies." (Not posted yet.)



And at Theo's, "Cartoon Round Up..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – L’Chaim."

Obama's Shadow Presidency

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Well-funded Organizing for Action promises to crack conservative skulls to halt the Trump agenda":

Former President Obama is waging war against the Trump administration through his generously funded agitation outfit, Organizing for Action, to defend his monumentally destructive record of failure and violent polarization.

It is a chilling reminder that the increasingly aggressive, in-your-face Left in this country is on the march.

Acclaimed author Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post:

Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

What is Organizing for Action? It is a less violent version of Mussolini's black shirts and Hitler's brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Castro brothers used to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents.

OfA isn't, strictly speaking, a new group. After the 2008 election, the group, then known as Organizing for America, was a phony grassroots campaign run by the Democratic National Committee that sought to replicate the community organizing techniques Obama learned from the teachings of his fellow Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky. OfA was created in large part because the White House could not legally use the 13 million e-mail addresses that the Obama campaign compiled in 2008.

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Edgar (D-Penn.), sounded the alarm about OfA in 2013, suggesting the group was dangerous to democracy. "If President Obama is serious about his often-expressed desire to rein in big money in politics, he should shut down Organizing for Action and disavow any plan to schedule regular meetings with its major donors," he said as president of the left-wing group Common Cause. "Access to the President should never be for sale."

"With its reported promise of quarterly presidential meetings for donors and 'bundlers' who raise $500,000, Organizing For Action apparently intends to extend and deepen the pay-to-play Washington culture that Barack Obama came to prominence pledging to end," Edgar said. "The White House's suggestion this week that this group will somehow be independent is laughable."

But Edgar’s admonitions were ignored and since then Organizing for Action has thrived and grown rich, just like the Obamas.

As FrontPage previously reported, Obama has rented a $5.3 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres. Michelle Obama will join the former president there as will the Obama Foundation. To stay on track, Obama wants his former labor secretary, Tom Perez, to win the chairmanship of the DNC in a party election later this month. “It’s time to organize and fight, said Perez who appears to be gaining on frontrunner and jihadist Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “We must stand up to protect President Obama’s accomplishments,” adding, “We’re going to build the strongest grassroots organizing force this country has ever seen.”

No ex-president has ever done this before, sticking around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in Washington to obstruct and disrupt the new administration.

Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, Sperry warns, has “a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.”

On its website, the group claims that there are “5 million Americans who’ve taken action” with OfA, and that those individuals “are part of a long line of people who stand up and take on the big fights for social justice, basic fairness, equal rights, and expanding opportunity.” Among its key issues are “turning up the heat on climate change deniers,” comprehensive immigration reform (which includes mass amnesty), “telling the stories of the millions who are seeing the life-saving benefits of Obamacare,” fighting for “a woman’s health care” which is “a basic right,” and redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those who didn’t.

OfA communications director Jesse Lehrich told Memphis-based WREG that the “grassroots energy that’s out there right now is palpable.” The group is “constantly hearing from volunteers who are excited to report about events they’re organizing around and all of the new people that want to get involved.”

Organizing for Action is drowning in money, by nonprofit standards.

By the end of 2014, OfA, which was formally incorporated only the year before, had taken in $40.4 million, $26 million of which was raised in 2014, according to the organization’s IRS filings. OfA’s big donors are members of the George Soros-founded Democracy Alliance, a donors’ consortium for left-wing billionaires devoted to radical political change. Among the DA members donating to OfA are: Ryan Smith ($476,260); Marcy Carsey ($250,000); Jon Stryker ($200,000); Paul Boskind ($105,000); Paul Egerman ($100,000); and Nick Hanauer ($50,000).

OfA also runs a project called the Community Organizing Institute (COI) which it says partners “with progressive groups and organizations to educate, engage, and collaborate.”

Organizing for Action describes COI in almost lyrical terms...

Still more.

Scott Greer, No Campus for White Men

I love this.

Out March 14th, at Amazon, Scott Greer, No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination.

Trump to Interview Candidates for National Security Advisor

Ambassador John Bolton's in the mix. I love that guy, especially the walrus mustache, heh.

Trump to interview four security adviser candidates on Sunday https://t.co/2DegUjExRG

— Capital Journal (@WSJPolitics) February 19, 2017

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery

*BUMPED.*

I'm getting up to speed on all the recent hardcore leftist literature on Native Americans. As you can see with some of my other blogging (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, for example), radical research on indigenous people is a hugely popular and growing vein among the hate-America left.

In any case, at Amazon, Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.

Social Justice vs. Heterosexuality

At the Other McCain, "Social Justice vs. Heterosexuality (and the Problem With ‘Male Feminists’)."

Worked in a little bit of Hayek here. https://t.co/VOYzS8yamU @FriedrichHayek

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 19, 2017

BTW, if a WV-based writer wanted to rip into Huntington University, I could offer suggestions. @donsurber https://t.co/VOYzS8yamU pic.twitter.com/H6NTsLJgi6

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) February 19, 2017

Campus Leftists Create New Generation of Conservatives

Don't know Charlie Peters, but he was tweeted by Matt Drudge:

PAPER: Culture of intolerance creating new generation of conservatives... https://t.co/z4nBNyVxSs

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) February 17, 2017

Nina Agdal is Maxim's Cover Girl for March 2017

Following-up from yesterday, "Nina Agdal Uncovered in Mexico (VIDEO)."

At Drunken Stepfather, "NINA AGDAL MAXIMIZES FOR MAXIM OF THE DAY."

Supermodel @NinaAgdal is Maxim's March 2017 cover girl. https://t.co/ptPrS8GDu6 pic.twitter.com/hjayHZrjAo

— Maxim (@MaximMag) February 14, 2017

The Leftist 'Deep State' Attacks and Undermines President Trump's Administration

It's much worse than it's portrayed at this NYT piece, although at least the Old Gray Lady broached the issue.

It's a bureaucratic revolt against the legitimately-elected government of Donald J. Trump.

Leftist Traitors: As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America. #MAGA https://t.co/6kPSgPnNyf

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 17, 2017

James M. McPherson, Tried by War

*BUMPED.*

It's President's Day Weekend coming up, a three-day holiday weekend --- which is cool.

I'll have some President's Day blogging to go with it, heh.

Thanks for your support!

At Amazon, James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

Douglas Brinkley, Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

At Amazon, Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound

At Amazon, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

Barbara Palvin Stunning in Curaçao (VIDEO)

Via Theo Spark:

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet

At Amazon, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.