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The Spectacle Blog

Extreme Irony Alert! (Or, Springtime for Potok and Irony)

By Robert Stacy McCain on 10.12.09 @ 1:13PM

Your head might explode if you consider the source of this quote:

"Completely false allegations incubate in the fringe and jump within days to the mainstream, distorting any debate or progress we can have as a society."

That's Mark Potok, quoted in today's Washington Post. Considering that Potok has spent more than a decade trying to convince gullible liberals that everyone to the right of Joe Biden is a crypto-fascist goose-stepper, your coffee-spewing laughter is understandable.

Potok covered the 1992-93 Waco standoff and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing for USA Today. That experience apparently convinced him that when you scratch a Republican, a dangerously violent militia crackpot bleeds. Potok's paranoia landed him a job at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the $170 million outfit that smart liberals recognize as a flimsy scam to frighten stupid liberals out of their money.

The SPLC began when Morris Dees recognized the lucrative potential of the '72 McGovern campaign's mailing list. Exactly when the SPLC jumped the shark has long been a subject of debate, but it was certainly at some point prior to their identification of columnist Don Feder (!) as a menace to society.

Potok's ironic quote appears in a story that portrays Michelle Malkin as a menace to society, and reasonable people have begun to notice the Potokian pattern. Basically, if you're a conservative and you haven't been denounced by Mark Potok yet, you need to stop goofing off and get to work. I've been on Potok's Menace To Society List since May 2000, when I published a feature article based on an interview with Kanas author Laird Wilcox:

"There is an anti-racist industry entrenched in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics, whose identity and livelihood depend upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization."

That quote is from Wilcox's book, The Watchdogs, which among other things explains what he describes as the "links-and-ties" method by which the SPLC and similar outfits create the false impression of ironclad connections between groups and individuals based on incidental associations.

Wilcox is himself a veteran researcher of extremist "fringe" movements, whose records comprise The Wilcox Collection On Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas Library. Unlike Morris Dees, however, Wilcox doesn't have the McGovern donor list or an ax-grinding agenda against Republicans, so he never gets quoted by the Washington Post.

View all comments (10) | Leave a comment

Emily Litella| 10.12.09 @ 6:03PM

Who is this Pingback fellow and why does he keep posting the same thing? Who wants to read the same thing all the time? And why doe he always post two, three, four posts in a row?! Does he have Alzheimers and can't remember he posted? Does he just like reading his own posts? Can someone please stop him?

Emily Litella| 10.13.09 @ 7:36AM

Oh! Well! Never mind.

Dixie Pixie| 10.12.09 @ 6:31PM

To:Emily

Thank you for your post. I too have wondered who ( pingback ) is and what he thinks he is doing. Personally, I can do without his posts as I can type Spectator.org. Maybe he does it to help ( Liberal Reader ) and Funnel-Head ( Bob ) find a path back to their most recent posts. Your guess is good as mine. I also would like to hear his explanation. Hopefully he will see both of our post and reply.

Campy| 10.13.09 @ 5:47AM

Em & Dix,
Pingback is an auto link-back program to notify authors (bloggers) when their story is linked elsewhere; not really a person. Hope that helps.
C

Richard Keefe| 10.13.09 @ 6:17AM

Excellent analysis of the PR mouthpiece of one of the most profitable "non-profits" in the country.

Potok is compensated with more than $143,000 donor dollars a year to produce his fund raising propaganda, up $4,500 donor dollars from the previous year.

His boss, multimillionaire Mo Dees, is now compensated with more than $350,000 donor dollars a year, which includes the $20,000 donor dollar raise he so generously gave himself.

See pages 11 and 40 of the SPLC's most recent tax return. (http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLC990_2007.pdf)

In addition, Mr. Dees also receives $10,000 a pop for his frequent speaking engagements. In January, 2009, Dees agreed to speak before a black civil rights group in Michigan at their Martin Luther King memorial dinner. When the group could not scrape up the ten grand to pay Dees they had to cancel the event.

Multimillionaire Dees could not even throw them a freebie in honor of MLK Day.

No dough? No Mo.

(http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2009/01/mondayking_celebration_cancele.html)

With this kind of money at stake, including the $170 MILLION donor dollar hoard in the SPLC's "Endowment Fund," you'd find "hate" behind every rock and tree too.

Lisa| 10.13.09 @ 12:32PM

In light of the 1965 change in our immigration laws and what I've been noticing the US CENSUS projections and what will the SPLC and the ADL do when Whites are, in effect, no longer around?
Or is that their mission statement?

Jimi| 10.13.09 @ 1:24PM

The Southern Wealthy Law Center is just that, a shakedown outfit like Jesse Jackson's. Why they get press I'll never know, a bigger bunch of crackpots cannot be found anywhere.

24AheadDotCom| 10.13.09 @ 3:02PM

It might be worth pointing out that some Republicans and the like occasionally sound like Potok and use variants of their lines to support massive/illegal immigration. For instance, LGraham's "tell the haters to shut up" and many many more.

If anyone gets a chance, ask them about their indirect link to a foreign government:

http://24ahead.com/s/southern-poverty-law-center

links of london Rings| 10.21.09 @ 1:33AM

It was a very nice idea! Just wanna say thank you for the information you have shared. Just continue writing this kind of post. I will be your loyal reader. Thanks again.