It’s hard to say what’s worse: the outrageousness of the Southern Poverty Law Center in pinning the label “white nationalist” and “extremist” on anyone who bucks the prevailing politically correct narrative, or the credulity of the mainstream media in treating the SPLC as a neutral source.
As you probably know by now, Bell Curve author and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, invited as a guest speaker to discuss his latest book about class divisions, Coming Apart, on March 2 at Middlebury College in Vermont, was blocked from speaking by a horde of militant student protesters, who also assaulted and sent to the emergency room a female Middlebury professor who had live-streamed an interview with Murray (a fall-back plan from the scheduled lecture). Well! Here is the March 4 report from the Associated Press:
Seemingly not to be outdone by the AP’s use of “white nationalist” not once but twice to characterize Murray, the Washington Post, which posted the AP story, used “white nationalist” not once but twice in its online caption for an AP photograph posted above the story:
That’s four uses of the term “white nationalist” before the reader even gets to the story’s fourth paragraph.
A story posted the same day by Washington Post reporter Peter Holley stated, “The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Murray a white supremacist and a eugenicist.”
The Post, at least, gave Murray a chance to respond. Murray, who has a doctorate in political science from MIT and who co-authored The Bell Curve (1994) with the now-deceased Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein, pointed out that he had been married for 13 years to an Asian woman and has two Asian children, so he could hardly be called a white supremacist. (The Bell Curve used social-science research to point out that “American society has become cognitively stratified.” The book’s noticing that scores on IQ tests vary by ethnic groups earned Murray 23 years’ worth of hatred by the politically correct.)
The AP and the Washington Post are not the only media to take whatever the SPLC says as gospel truth. Right after the November 8 election the New York Times announced its launching of a new column it titles “This Week in Hate,” chronicling a supposed jump in “hate crimes”—nearly always, by the way, featuring alleged white perpetrators and minority victims, almost never vice versa—after the election of President Trump. Guess what outfit appears to be the Times‘s chief source? Why, the SPLC, of course! Here are some salient quotes from a Dec. 28 op-ed about the new column:
Besides using Beirich as its only quoted source, the Times linked to no fewer than three SPLC “Hatewatch” reports linking Trump’s election and his campaign remarks about limiting immigration to a supposed hate surge.
The SPLC’s Hatewatch” is quite upfront about its lack of interest in the hate activities of, for example, the militant “anti-fascists” who trashed the University of California-Berkeley campus in February in order to prevent Milo Yiannopolous from speaking there. Hatewatch “monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right,” its web page says. Another SPLC page lists “extremists,” both individuals and groups, and it is there that Murray appears, along with such disparate figures as David Duke, Holocaust denier David Irving, and David Horowitz, the Communist-turned-conservative editor of Front Page.
Also on the list—the extremist-group list—is the Family Research Council, a traditional-values organization that has long opposed same-sex marriage, which means that in the eyes of the SPLC, its mission is “to denigrate gay people.” In 2012 a gay-rights volunteer was so fired up by the SPLC’s description that he burst into the council’s Washington, D.C., office and shot the office manager.
The idea that the SPLC offers neutral expertise on extremism is laughable. It has been a fund-raising Colossus for decades (see my WEEKLY STANDARD article, “King of Fearmongers,” April 15, 2013) thanks to its genius at apocalyptic direct-mail, in which the Klan and other “hate groups” are always one donation away from taking over the country. Reporters should be ashamed of treating it as an arbiter of respectability.
