SPLC Hate – I

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The Southern Poverty Law Center is the current king of describing hate in the United States of America. But does it do a good job? If the SPLC isn’t fit for purpose, the rot won’t start in listing inappropriate groups. It will inappropriately deal with certain brands of hate or hate ideologies.

One of the pages on the SPLC website describes hate ideologies. According to the SPLC, there are 20 different ways that Americans hate including the catchall group “General Hate”.

I didn’t realize hatred was expressed in so few ways. But is hate really expressed in so few ways? In the SPLC telling, whites hate blacks and blacks hate whites. That’s a pretty common result of lived experience. If you receive enough hate, people respond with a hate of their own. The idea that hate only flows in one direction is unnatural and unexpected. You would think that most every long-standing expression of hate would have return fire headed the other direction but that’s not always how the SPLC sees it.

Misogyny and Misandry naturally pair but only Misogyny (Male Supremacy) gets an entry. Misandry is invisible.

Phineas Priesthood naturally pairs with Black Bloc as both are not organizations per se but labels describing violent political actions. Black Bloc is invisible to the SPLC.

Anti-Muslim ideology naturally pairs with Muslim extremism. Muslim extremism is invisible.

Neo-Confederate longing for the antebellum South naturally pairs for anti-southern bigotry that discriminates against the accent or the address. But the latter is invisible.

Stuffing hate ideologies down the memory hole is something that the SPLC seems to have significant experience at. How do they pick the ones that are not mentioned?

I wonder.

9 thoughts on “SPLC Hate – I”

  1. Back in the day (about when Goldwater was running for president) the ADL used to worry about “hate groups” and publish books with scarifying titles like DANGER ON THE RIGHT. You would find pro-freedom groups classified with the likes of the KKK. The funniest was one that inclu7ded the libertarian pacifist and anarchist Robert LeFevre with George Lincoln Rockwell’s Nazis. The stupidity has only grown worse.

  2. No wonder. But of course you meant – rhetorically.

    The SPLC is an old brand that represents an organization whose essence has changed and is now in the racket stage of its life cycle. Many people don’t realize that the name stands for something other than what it once stood for. The name is therefore useful as a fund raising tool to generate donations from the naive, the gullible, and from institutions that wish to purchase political indulgences.

  3. the black Israelites had a splinter group, Yahweh ben Yahweh, which was led by hulon Mitchell, in my hometown in the 80s, the jersey city mayor, fulop, a far cry from bret schindler, is mostly known for targeting jared Kushner by denying tax abatements on property,

  4. I might have detected a slight bias in the SPLC’s analysis. On their “Black Nationalism” page they judge the degree of danger and offer reassurances that there’s just no comparison to “white nationalist hate groups”

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/black-nationalist

    Black nationalists, however, should not be confused with the many non-racist African-American organizations that work for social justice and the elimination of institutional racism in America. In addition, they should not be seen as equivalent to white supremacist groups – such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis – in terms of their history of violence and terrorism. And, unlike white hate groups, they have made virtually no inroads into the mainstream political realm and have virtually no supporters among elected officials.

    A leading example of a black nationalist group is the Nation of Islam led by Louis Farrakhan. He has never backed away from the group’s fundamental tenets, espoused by the group’s previous leader, Elijah Mohammed, that white people are inherently evil ”” that they are “blue-eyed devils.”

    Whoops… https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/31/medias-ugly-david-duke-louis-farrakhan-double-standard/

    Obama posed for a photo with the man who claims white people are a “race of devils” and said Hitler was a “very great man” at a Congressional Black Caucus gathering in 2005

    Oh, wait, the SPLC clears it up at the bottom of the page, “The racism of a group like the Nation of Islam may be the predictable reaction to white supremacy.” Well that explains everything.

  5. so keith Ellison, current atty general of Minnesota, and fmr vice chair of the dnc, isn’t a major figure, good to know,

  6. Johnathen – Ultimately, the fix for rackets of the type you describe is to take over their information transmission role and to do it better. One way to do so is by aggregating the SPLC data with alternates to form a hate superset that does not leave groups out and allows for those who rightly protest their inclusion a superior way to correct errors quickly.

    But before we get there, we have to start at the foundation and the foundation of a hate-watch is the ideologies they do or do not watch. The hypersensitivity the SPLC has against nonviolent Catholic groups who reject Vatican II and the much different attitude that passes on remarking on figures and groups that believe all men are rapists whenever they have ordinary procreative sex is not objectionable because of the criticism of Catholics. It’s objectionable because accusing half the planet of being felons for acting in the only way possible to continue the species is not a benign point of view.

    Grurray – I’ll get to that, but it’s an add on point for me.

  7. They have been harder on Catholic splinter groups than one would expect. I don’t know of any such groups that are violent or engage in some sort of discrimination. However, those groups have by history included Holocaust deniers, so that may be why they get the fishy eyeball now.

    Or the SPLC might just hate religious groups more easily. There’s that.

  8. When the SPLC was started, there were a lot of white supremacy/anti-civil rights/anti-integration outfits with what appeared to be an alarming number of adherents. Now, thankfully, not so much. So they could do one of two things: Pronounce the problem mostly solved and go on to other things, or, widen their definition of hate to produce the illusion of an ever growing problem and keep the money machine going. Recent disclosures make it clear that we’re talking real money, hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hard to guess which choice they made.

    There has never been any shortage of individuals/organizations convinced that they have a duty to instruct the rest of us. Starting one more won’t change that. There will never be some sort of UL label for ideas. In that case, it will remain up to each of us to determine what we believe and with whom we will associate and to live with the consequences.

    Every time we have tried to delegate this to some other entity, it has ended badly. Not just with Hitler, Lenin and Mao; look at the ongoing convulsions of the Catholic Church. It would be hard to think of any of its ideals that we aren’t seeing daily evidence of betrayal.

  9. I subscribe to anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, and anti-Moslem ideologies. Could I get a “Official Hater” T-shirt from SPLC?

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