DR. BEN CARSON: I know how bad the SPLC was, it came after me and put me at risk
For years now, the only question worth asking about the Southern Poverty Law Center has been whether the SPLC had become a cynical grift for the radical left … or a hate group itself. The latest findings from a Justice Department investigation indicate it’s both.
The Justice Department’s 11-count fraud and money-laundering indictment of the SPLC last week may have shocked the country. But it did not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the organization’s long descent into alleged corruption — least of all those of us the SPLC slandered.
In 2014, the SPLC added me to their list of dangerous extremists, for the "hate crime" of being a Black, Christian conservative. They called me a bigot knowing that it was false and knowing that it would put my family and me in danger.
They knew that because two years prior, a gay-rights activist opened fire at the conservative Family Research Council after te SPLC falsely branded them a hate group. But the SPLC didn’t care. Because — as we see now — spreading hate was the SPLC’s core business all along.
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According to the indictment, the organization doled out more than $3 million to real hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. They allegedly bankrolled the "imperial wizard" of the United Klans of America and one of the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Most Americans would call a supposed civil rights organization secretly financing White supremacist violence disgusting. To the SPLC, it was an investment. The following year, their revenues almost tripled from $51 million to more than $130 million.
What the indictment shows is that the SPLC is not an anti-bigotry organization at all. It’s a bigotry profiteer. It profits off the leftist narrative of invisible "systemic" racism, rampant KKK terrorism and imagined violent homophobia. While the rest of the country recoiled in horror at what happened in Charlottesville, Va., the SPLC was secretly cheering.
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Despite the SPLC’s Cash for Klansmen program, the United States is the least racist country in the world. In the 21st century we are mostly living Martin Luther King’s dream of a colorblind society. That’s a tremendous achievement for a nation that had so far to come on that score in the last century.
In fact, there is so little bigotry in America today that the SPLC reportedly had to fabricate it. To hate-hustling grifters like the SPLC, moral progress poses an existential threat. If they ever admitted the truth, they would lose their money and their power. So, they perpetuate their lucrative lie.
It’s the same scam the left has run for years now. Congressional Democrats knew "Russiagate" was a hoax before they impeached President Donald Trump for it. Liberal public health officials knew COVID-19 was a manmade virus leaked from a Chinese lab when they said it came from a food market.
They knew President Joe Biden was mentally impaired when they swore up and down he was sharper than ever. They knew Obamacare would kick people off their health insurance when they promised, "if you like your plan you can keep your plan." They know unborn babies aren’t "clumps of cells." And they know today that "trans women" aren’t women.
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They lie about these things because they care more about power than they care about the truth. They can’t beat conservatives in honest, good faith debate. So, they resort to weaponized rhetoric that demonizes dissent. They kept it up even after Trump survived multiple assassination attempts. And even after TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk didn’t.
The mainstream media never calls out the left’s lies — they amplify them. So, the left will never stop lying on their own. They have to be stopped. That means holding leftists accountable when their lies cross the line from sins to alleged crimes. That’s what the Justice Department’s SPLC indictment is about trying to figure out.
The First Amendment protects dissent and debate. It does not protect fraud, or incitement or slander. The SPLC will have their day in court to decide where its actions landed.
Now that the president has survived yet another would-be assassination, disinfecting our national discourse of the left’s criminal dishonesty is more urgent than ever.