The Martin Luther King assassination was still fresh in the public mind in 1971 when a new civil rights organization was founded by three white men in Montgomery, Alabama, the city in which Martin Luther King had his first church and where he led the famous Montgomery bus boycott. The name the three men chose for their new organization was “Southern Poverty Law Center,” an undeniably awkward-sounding name by anyone’s reckoning. But it produced a hell of an acronym.
SPLC was an acronym that not only sounded exceedingly familiar to 1971 Americans, it came with a boatload of moral authority and the built-in good will of the vast majority of Americans. For years, the news had been full of stories about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), sometimes called the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference (SBLC), the organization founded by Martin Luther King and another Southern Baptist minister named Ralph Abernathy.1 Martin Luther King was the head of the SCLC when he was assassinated in 1968. Ralph Abernathy took over the SCLC upon Martin Luther King’s death and was still its leader when the SPLC was founded three years later and slipped into the mix.
So you had all these civil rights organizations seeking donations from the general public and all these acronyms and was it the SPLC’s fault if people got confused and sent their money to the SPLC when they thought they were sending it to Martin Luther King’s—now Ralph Abernathy’s—group, the SCLC?
One of the three white men who founded the SPLC was named Morris Dees, who had already made a bundle in direct marketing. Dees was so good at junk mail—at getting complete strangers to put their own money into envelopes and mail it to him—that he is in the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame.
The second white guy was a lawyer named Joe Levin.
On its website, the SPLC claims the third man associated with its founding was a well-known black civil rights figure named Julian Bond. On the Alabama Secretary of State’s website, however, the SPLC’s incorporating documents list the founders as Levin, Dees, and a man who seems to have done nothing more than lend his name to the new organization before disappearing—a young law student named Charles Abernathy. Yes, Abernathy.2
It is safe to say the SPLC was a grift from the get-go, and an especially odious one at that—cashing in on the sacrifice, pain, and hard work of the black Americans it claimed to be championing while siphoning off for its own enrichment millions of dollars sent by well-meaning Americans and meant for black civil rights organizations.
Over the decades, the SPLC shifted its grift from black civil rights to “fighting hate” and the money just kept rolling in. By 2018, the tax-exempt non-profit had a half billion dollars in assets—half of it off-shore.
A half billion dollars from “fighting hate?” How does that even work? Hate is a human emotion. It is part of being human. One can no more “fight hate” than one can “fight digestion.” So what does the SPLC mean when it says it is fighting hate? And why do people pay it so much money to do whatever it is it does?
If we stipulate that genocide is the highest expression of human hatred, then most people would probably say the worst outbreak of hate in human history was the Holocaust—the German Nazis’ genocide of six million European Jews in the mid-1940s. And, indeed, the SPLC pays a lot of attention to Holocaust hate. If you go onto the SPLC’s website and search the word “Nazi,” you will get 3,230 results.
But there was a much larger genocide that occurred just east of Germany, in Russia—a much more severe outbreak of human hatred. This was the Bolshevik genocide of 66 million Russian Christians that began 16 years before Hitler took power in Germany, actually intensified during WWII, and continued long after Germany surrendered. But even though the enormous outbreak of Bolshevik hate dwarfed the outbreak of Nazi hate, if you search the word “Bolshevik” on the SPLC website, you’ll get just 28 results. And most of those 28 are contained either in quotes by someone the SPLC is attacking or in denunciations of the “anti-Semitic canard” that the Bolshevik Revolution was Jewish.
It’s clear the SPLC isn’t “fighting hate” in any honest sense. If it were it would be at least as appalled at Bolshevik hate as it is at Nazi hate. But it isn’t. In fact, the SPLC gives the whole subject of Bolshevik hatred a wide berth. And it does its best to make sure everyone else does, too. If someone today wrote what appeared in the The American Hebrew on September 10, 1920 (before the horrors of what was going on inside Russia began leaking out), the SPLC would attack him as a liar, motivated by hatred of Jews:
That achievement [the Bolshevik Revolution], destined to figure in history as the over-shadowing result of the World War, was largely the outcome of Jewish thinking, of Jewish discontent, of Jewish effort to reconstruct . . . .
“What Jewish idealism and Jewish discontent have so powerfully contributed to accomplish in Russia, the same historic qualities of the Jewish mind and heart are tending to promote in other countries . . . .
I think the SPLC, itself, believes Bolshevism was Jewish. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t avoid the subject—or it would be neutral on the subject at least. In other words, I think the SPLC is a nest of straight up liars and holocaust deniers. But that isn’t exactly surprising. An organization that started as disreputably as the SPLC did is never going to be anything more than a dirty public fraud.
Heidi Beirich was, for many years, the editor of the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog and one of the most accomplished poison pens in the country. On September 24, 2020, I had the opportunity to depose her under oath. So I asked her what was the difference between Bolshevik hate and Nazi hate? How did she explain her organization’s relentless focus on the one hate while it completely ignored the other? She had no answer, of course, and finally said she couldn't answer because she didn't know Russian history.
So here you have a woman whose greatest skill is in destroying the reputations, careers, families, and lives of others, who has, in fact ruined many hundreds—maybe thousands—and who will seize on someone’s statement that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement and will use that statement without hesitation to destroy them with the smear of anti-Semitism. Yet she is too ignorant of Russian history to understand what it is about Bolshevik hate that makes it the kind of hate the SPLC doesn’t seem to mind.
Luckily, Florida is not the kind of place where people feign ignorance. In Florida, if you see there is a problem with people saying Bolshevism was a Jewish movement, you don’t let ignorance stand in the way of passing a law. You just make it anti-Semitic to blame Jews for what Jews do.
Don’t believe it’s that simple? Under paragraph (a) in Section (7) of Florida Statute 1000.05.,
“Examples of anti-Semitism include:
Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real
or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or
group, the State of Israel, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.”
See? A law making it anti-Semitic to blame Jews for what Jews do.
Many Americans, who are used to being able to say what they think without fear of being locked in a cage, understandably feel confused by our new totalitarianism. The following practice slogans may help make things more clear.
Is it an act of anti-Semitic discrimination if you are handing out flyers and your flyer says: (yes or no?)
Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
In North America, whites owned slaves.
In North America, Jews dominated the slave trade.
George Bush and Dick Cheney were responsible for 9/11.
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were responsible for 9/11.
George Soros.
If you answered “yes” to 1, 4, 6, and 7 you’ve got a solid grasp of the nuances of the issue and can probably visit Florida without risking a prison term.3
The widespread ignorance in the world of the role Jews played in the Russian catastrophe of the 20th Century is pretty clearly intentional. The history is being hidden. There are several possible reasons for this.
One possible reason might be to avoid a ferocious gentile backlash riding a world-wide wave of historical reckoning.
Another possible reason might be to keep the gentile world defenseless by keeping it incapable of recognizing the approach of the next genocide. This one seems unlikely until I look at this guy, then it seems certain. If this is the reason, then every time the SPLC makes an accusation of anti-Semitism, it is engaging in the most hateful hate speech imaginable.
A third possible reason for keeping the Jewish role in Bolshevism hidden can be discovered by looking at the word “anti-Semitism” itself, which arose out of the Russian rabbinate and first appeared in the wider world in 1880.
The gentile view of the word “anti-Semitism” is a kind of dumb resentment. They grasp the built-in disadvantage of being subject to a deadly charge that may be levelled at anyone in the world except a Jew, and to be guilty of which requires nothing more than the accusation of such by any Jew. But they are unable to remove the disadvantage because they imagine anti-Semitism is real—a real and terrible thing. Most of them lack the independence of thought to be able to answer a charge of anti-Semitism with a shrug and a “So?”
But the idea of anti-Semitism—and the word that expresses it—was not created for the gentile. It was invented by the Russian rabbis and was for use in their struggle against their real enemy—assimilation. The idea of anti-Semitism was, first and foremost, intended for the Jews over which the rabbis exercised control. Anti-Semitism was presented to Jews as a kind of mental illness that lies in various stages of latency in all gentiles. Unless the Jew remained captive in his shtetl, the rabbis told him, he would be at the mercy of sudden and unpredictable waves of savage and irrational gentile hatred.
Anti-Semitism is a corralling myth. It rests on the twin falsehoods of perpetual Jewish victimhood and universal gentile wickedness. If the truth of the Jewish role in the enormous crimes committed against the Russian Christians during the 20th Century became widely known and openly discussed, the anti-Semitism myth would disappear like smoke in the air. The barrier between Jews and humanity would be removed and Jews could join in the great story of mankind rather than being in eternal opposition to it.
Another active organization with a similar acronym was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The last name Abernathy occurs only once in every 14,285 American families.
Florida’s HB 741 2019 defined anti-Semitism and made religion a protected class. HB 269 2023 made it a third degree felony to publish political speech about which a member of a protected class claims to feel threatened, with hate crime enhancements providing for up to ten years in prison. Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to Israel to sign both bills.
Excellent, compelling, and very reasonable argument. Well said. Thank you!
May I ask under what auspices and circumstances did you have the opportunity to depose Heidi Beirich? Is there a transcript of that deposition online? That would be so interesting to read.