Hate Farm Subsidies from the SPLC

Introduction

Comes now news that the SPLC has stepped on a rake. One of the earlier sensations that came to one was that of relief, as one reflected on the fact that schadenfreude is not expressly named as a sin in the New Testament. To be sure, there is a warning about something that is akin to schadenfreude in the Old Testament, and so I will make a point of being judicious and careful here.

But please remember that the point of restraining oneself in a moment like this is so that the Lord will continue to lay it on thick. These things always involve a delicate balancing act. So all of you conservatives out there . . . tamp down the glee. Control yourselves.

We are of course talking about the indictments that were just handed down by the Department of Justice. Now of course all the usual cautions apply—an indictment is not a conviction, etc. But because of the open and obvious grift that has been on display at the SPLC for years and years, and because of the situations that involved us here in Moscow directly, these indictments are not alleging anything that would be out of character at all. All of this really does fit into the “it figures” category.

And incidentally, because indictments like this don’t just drop out of the mezzanine, this indicates that Pam Bondi was not just frittering away opportunities during her tenure at the DoJ. Credit where credit is due.

So we therefore await the trial with some anticipation. We want the DoJ to roll all their cards. We are all agog. We are like children sitting at the top of the staircase on Christmas morning.

The Conservative Bohunkus

I will have more to develop around this theme at the conclusion of this piece, but I do want to set the stage.

The conservative movement in America is an endearing bohunkus, a loveable galoot. An affable bunch, we just want to get along and be left alone, and these taxes are a bit too much, and these regulations are also a bit too much, and so taking the average, our factory settings are slightly to the right of Dwight Eisenhower. Conservative thinkers who see all the issues, and how they interrelate, keep trying to convince this middle America that the next election matters more than mowing the lawn does. In this venture, they have been largely unsuccessful.

However, the left decided decades ago that this conservative right had to be fought on the basis of its oppressive racism and misogyny, always described as smoking upwards in ways that blacken the sun. And so they set out to demonize any candidate whatever, provided the Republicans nominated him. They call Trump a fascist, sure, but they did the same thing, without stinting, to the likes of Bush, McCain, and Romney. Anybody to their right, in the slightest degree, was a threat to democracy. He had to be, by definition, a raving racist, filled with seething contempt for women. They had to rally America against this tide rising hate. It was time to mobilize, people!

The marketing problem they had was that there was no rising hate. They had a real supply and demand problem. Their political strategy required that there be a swelling demand for knights to come forward in order to fight the dragons of racism. The problem was on the supply side . . . there were no real dragons of racism. And you cannot get the public, however gullible, to keep on buying you suits of armor when there are no dragons.

Inventive, and certainly up to the challenge, the SPLC began funding hate groups, and then they were able to use the activities of said hate groups as the basis for their remarkably successful fund-raising efforts. It turns out that the donor base on the left is filled with galoots also. So it happens that if you pay firefighters by the fire, you are tempting some of them to become arsonists. Once a third world country was trying to deal with a rat infestation, and they had the bright idea of paying a bounty to anyone who brought in a rat tail. The natural consequence of this, because incentives work, was that some folks took up rat farming.

And so we have the SPLC, hate farmers, subsidizing hate so that they can keep the farm profitable. And profitable it most certainly has been. In the section below, you will see me refer repeatedly to the SPLC as the world’s richest civil rights organization. So much has been obvious for a long time. What is becoming obvious now is their ingenious approach to ROI.

So I am going to do my very best James Lindsay imitation here. As we talk about the civil wars on the Right, remember . . . “it’s all an op, people!” From Candace—a Manchurian podcaster if ever there was one—to the KKK, we are dealing with leftist smoke and progressive mirrors. We are looking at the kind of Right that the Left would much rather be fighting. It does not exist in any kind of significant reality, and so they have to manufacture it themselves.

Let me take just a moment to remind you of our history with this band of shysters. Hello, darkness, my old friend . . .

An Old Adversary

We have had long experience with the SPLC, over twenty years worth. Let me share with you just a few snippets from a few of the imbroglios we have had with these guys. I do this in order to establish our bona fides as genuine recipients of the curated slanders emanating from the offices of the SPLC.

A couple of years later, there was a write-up of what we were doing out here in The New York Times by Molly Worthen, and the SPLC took it ill. As Worthen had behaved like an actual journalist, this was not to be borne, and so the SPLC took strong exception. Here is that skirmish back in 2007.

Jumping back a year, we had been brazenly lied about by them (2006).

So it was not as though they were leaving us alone. Then this came in 2009.

From the same year . . .

And a few years after that, the energetic Anthony Bradley displayed the exact manner in which conservative Christians would get played by the SPLC. They were the experts when it came to hate groups. What could be wrong with citing experts on hate groups?

The Achilles Heel of NETTR

And so we can now see, in stark relief, the limits of NETTR, the doctrine of “no enemies to the right.” As I have argued repeatedly, if you proudly announce that you will have no enemies to the right, you are simply declaring what flank the enemy should be sure to attack you on. And our enemy in all of this, remember, is the devil, and he is the father of lies (John 8:44). Got that? The father of lies. He is good at it. He is smarter than we are.

I think we can expect a good deal more of this stuff to come tumbling out. And even some of the click-chasing based bros are starting to have second thoughts—that “we bet on the wrong horse” sensation. Look for some anticipatory course corrections from them. “Now I have always maintained that it was not entirely the Jews.” Too late—they already bet on the bay and the mare, and . . .

When you look at the kind of “conservatives” that the SPLC was willing to subsidize, and the kind of conservative fronts that the feds were willing to field, it should kind of make you wonder why on earth you were willing to act that way for free.

My father taught me, “Always act. Never react.” If you never react, it is hard to become a reactionary. The hallmark of the revolutionary mind is impatience. The same thing is true over on the other side—the reactionary mind is also impatient. The revolutionary wants his new order now, and is willing to burn everything to the ground in order to get it. The reactionary wants to prevent that, which is fine, but he is just as impatient. He demands that everything be fixed immediately. Both the revolutionary and the reactionary are convenience store activists—they want their results the same way they want their coffee, which is to say, hot and now.

The reformer, by contrast, living in the light of eternity, and grounded in the Word of God, can afford to be patient. He can take a principled stand, and leave the results to God. He is not going to be dazzled, or snookered, or beguiled, by payments under the table from the commies.