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.
