DAVID MARCUS: Liberals' get-Trump 'fine people' hoax was way worse than we thought
In Scooby-Doo episodes, there is a classic moment where the gang unmasks the criminal they have caught, only to discover it is the least likely person it could be. As if, say, one tore the white hood off of a Klan member, only to find the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lurking underneath.
In this case, cartoon art really does imitate real life.
For nearly a decade now, conservatives have been fuming over the 2017 "Charlottesville hoax," in which the news media took President Donald Trump’s rather bland statement that there were "fine people on both sides" of the Confederate statue debate, and, by lying, morphed it into support for White supremacy.
Trump, it turns out, was never praising the racists behind the specifically odious Unite the Right rally. However, the SPLC was allegedly paying thousands to the organization to supposedly investigate it.
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Thus, the hoax was born.
The word "hoax," which entered the English language in the late 18th century, is almost certainly a contraction of the earlier term "hocus," as in "hocus pocus," which is a good way to think about the malicious deception of the SPLC.
It really has been quite a magic show over the last few decades, as every time it starts to feel like America has turned a corner on racism, the "experts" at the SPLC shout "hocus pocus" and pull some neo-Nazis out of their hat.
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The problem, as we are learning through the Department of Justice’s grand jury indictment of the civil rights organization, is that SPLC leaders were paying these bigots to appear. Now that the gaffe is exposed, you just can’t unsee it.
At best, the SPLC has been stacking the deck so that every time the American media pulls a card, it is the ever-present "ace of racism." At its worst, this funding of bigotry could have gotten one of their own killed.
Heather Heyer, 32, was murdered that day in Charlottesville when a bigot drove his car into a counterprotest. Today, we must ask whether she could still be alive if the SPLC not been funding her killer’s organization.
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The problem here is not just that the money from the SPLC props up racist outfits, as bad as that is. The bigger issue is that a financial incentive has been created for their "informants," not just to report criminal activity, but to stoke it.
Much the way that foreign influence operations can secretly fund anti-American podcasters by flooding their platforms with bot farm clicks, the SPLC was allegedly secretly lining the coffers of the ever-dwindling number of racist groups in the U.S.
According to the indictment, one "informant" who helped to organize the Unite the Right rally, was paid an astounding $270,000 between 2015 and 2023, which means the payments were continuing even after Heyer’s tragic death.
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Think about the perverse incentives the SPLC may have created here: a quarter of a million dollars is a lot of money, and these informants knew that the only way to keep the cash spigot on was to keep discovering, or inventing, more alleged racism.
Trump was correct that there are "very fine people" of good faith who disagree about Confederate statues. But in 2017 in Charlottesville, it turns out there were also very bad people, namely, the tiki-torch-carrying bigots and the SPLC. Only now do we know they may have been in cahoots.
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Today would be a good day for the liberal news media to admit once and for all, they have been lying about Trump’s "very fine people" remark. But that won’t happen. It is too central to anti-Trump mythology. It is, after all, why Joe Biden says he ran for president.
Sometimes, it takes a hoax to expose a hoax, some hocus pocus of one’s own to combat the magic trick. With the revelations of the SPLC funding its prey, the whole show has fallen apart before our eyes.
It wasn’t just "very fine people" that was a hoax, it was the whole damn thing.
You have to hand it to the SPLC, the apparent scam worked for years. In some quarters, it still does work, but the mask is now well and truly off, and the funding of radical racism surely must now stop.
The SPLC and its propping up of bigotry had a good run. Its leaders would have gotten away with it too, if not for the meddling Justice Department.