The problem with these types of arguments lies in the fact that either side can make up whatever they want, given the inherent nature and cognitive dissonance of wing nuts in general.
Example: Sgt. Glenn Miller of the 'Greensboro Massacre' infamy and recently shootings at a synagogue endorsed Obama for President, and did so in 2008 as well, I think. Therefore, the Nazi support the Democratic Party...
Nazi Killer, Glenn Miller, Endorses Obama/Farrakhan
Nazi Killer Glenn Miller Endorses Obama Farrakhan
There you have it! Concrete evidence Obama supports Nazism and murdering black people!!! ...
As for 'hate groups', most of them exist only in the minds of conspiratards and the imagination of hucksters like Morris Dees and the SPLC staff:
An interview with Laird Wilcox:
The Social Contract - An Expert on Fringe Political Movements Reflects on the SPLC s Political Agenda - An Exclusive Interview with Author and Researcher Laird Wilcox
An Excerpt:
TSC: The SPLC recently issued a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” which asserts that “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office.
Wilcox: They’re suggesting a link between Barack Obama’s election and an alleged behavior that is by no means established. This is the post hoc fallacy where because one event follows another it is alleged to be somehow causally related. There’s nothing to support it. It’s also an example of dishonest framing, where an attempt is made to construct meaning by associating an event with a false cause. Some people will buy into this kind of thinking but it’s not too hard to see through if you think about it.
If the SPLC was actually going after racial violence they would go after the racial and ethnic gangs. Many of the gangs are racially based and the killings often reflect that fact. In southern California, hispanic gangs have been driving blacks out of some neighborhoods for years. Imagine if whites tried to do that. Some months back the SPLC did note one hate crime conviction involving gangs, but these incidents have occurred far more often than white racist groups attacking anyone. The SPLC is very choosy in what it complains about. This kind of selective attention and biased reporting simply illustrates their unscrupulousness.
It’s pretty hard for them to deny that the SPLC is a political operation that is trying to tar right-wingers and conservative Republicans with a racist and extremist smear. Privately, they will admit this and leftist groups cheer them on. I’ve never met the SPLC writer Mark Potok, although he used to interview me when he worked for USA Today. I know people who have interviewed him—including several academics who have written extensively on fringe political movements. In private he concedes that there’s no overwhelming threat from the far right and in public says something altogether different. He may be an OK guy on a personal basis, but professionally he is just a shill. It’s his job. That’s what he’s paid for.
...
Wilcox: This is a long story, but I’ll try to make it brief.
In the process of collecting material for the Wilcox Collection, I compiled and published two main research guides: The Guide to the American Left and The Guide to the American Right. These were published annually from 1979 to 2000. They were intended for researchers, academics, writers, and libraries, which is how they were marketed. They consisted of directories of organizations and serials, and a large annotated bibliography of books and monographs, on the groups and movements represented in each book. I was pretty careful in putting these together. I always had to see something that established that the groups existed and that they had a valid mailing address, for example, and if there was any ambiguity about their political orientation I would inquire about it. I had quite a bit of correspondence with some groups. Even there, I wrote a disclaimer noting that whether they were “left” or “right” was only an opinion and that anyone who cared should check this out for themselves. A lot of the listings were one- or two-person outfits, kind of like hobbies or Mom-and-Pop operations, or just somebody equipped with a post office box. This was particularly true on the right. I pointedly tried to be as fair as I could and I think I largely succeeded. The Southern Poverty Law Center acquired my guides and incorporated many of my listings in theirs, but there was a huge difference: their lists had no addresses so it’s very difficult to actually check them out. The SPLC has listings I had never heard of and I know this area pretty well. Even my own contacts in various movements had never heard of some on SPLC’s list. After 1995, I had calls from police agencies trying to locate some of the SPLCs “hate groups.” They couldn’t find them either. I concluded that a lot of them were vanishingly small or didn’t exist, or could even be an invention of the SPLC.
There was another phenomenon I noticed. Several racist groups published large numbers of local post office box listings, as in local chapters. When I tried to check these out I found that many of them were false—the box was closed after one rental or that the mail was forwarded elsewhere. I think a lot of these never existed or were just some guy renting different post office boxes. I also received tip-offs that some of the right-wing groups I had listed were really intelligence-gathering operations with no objective membership, some by federal or state agencies and some by groups like the SPLC, which admits having informants throughout the far right. By the 1990s, these were becoming increasingly common. Even local anti-racist activists will frequently operate bogus groups just to see who responds—a Kansas City activist ran a hoax operation from a post office box in Sugar Creek, Missouri, an area suburb, for several years.
One of the reasons I stopped publishing my research guides, aside from burning out on the whole subject, was that I could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the organizations. The web finished this completely. A single person with web page skills can create a very impressive “hate” operation that exists nowhere except in cyberspace. The whole issue of “lists” is full of smoke and mirrors.
The democrats certainly need hate groups, like the Ferguson rioters, La Raza, and the 'New Black Panthers', while the right wingers don't need them, they already have plenty of mainstreamed racist hate groups on the left to point to, and don't need to make any up these days.
Example: Sgt. Glenn Miller of the 'Greensboro Massacre' infamy and recently shootings at a synagogue endorsed Obama for President, and did so in 2008 as well, I think. Therefore, the Nazi support the Democratic Party...
Nazi Killer, Glenn Miller, Endorses Obama/Farrakhan
Nazi Killer Glenn Miller Endorses Obama Farrakhan
There you have it! Concrete evidence Obama supports Nazism and murdering black people!!! ...
As for 'hate groups', most of them exist only in the minds of conspiratards and the imagination of hucksters like Morris Dees and the SPLC staff:
An interview with Laird Wilcox:
The Social Contract - An Expert on Fringe Political Movements Reflects on the SPLC s Political Agenda - An Exclusive Interview with Author and Researcher Laird Wilcox
An Excerpt:
TSC: The SPLC recently issued a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” which asserts that “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office.
Wilcox: They’re suggesting a link between Barack Obama’s election and an alleged behavior that is by no means established. This is the post hoc fallacy where because one event follows another it is alleged to be somehow causally related. There’s nothing to support it. It’s also an example of dishonest framing, where an attempt is made to construct meaning by associating an event with a false cause. Some people will buy into this kind of thinking but it’s not too hard to see through if you think about it.
If the SPLC was actually going after racial violence they would go after the racial and ethnic gangs. Many of the gangs are racially based and the killings often reflect that fact. In southern California, hispanic gangs have been driving blacks out of some neighborhoods for years. Imagine if whites tried to do that. Some months back the SPLC did note one hate crime conviction involving gangs, but these incidents have occurred far more often than white racist groups attacking anyone. The SPLC is very choosy in what it complains about. This kind of selective attention and biased reporting simply illustrates their unscrupulousness.
It’s pretty hard for them to deny that the SPLC is a political operation that is trying to tar right-wingers and conservative Republicans with a racist and extremist smear. Privately, they will admit this and leftist groups cheer them on. I’ve never met the SPLC writer Mark Potok, although he used to interview me when he worked for USA Today. I know people who have interviewed him—including several academics who have written extensively on fringe political movements. In private he concedes that there’s no overwhelming threat from the far right and in public says something altogether different. He may be an OK guy on a personal basis, but professionally he is just a shill. It’s his job. That’s what he’s paid for.
...
Wilcox: This is a long story, but I’ll try to make it brief.
In the process of collecting material for the Wilcox Collection, I compiled and published two main research guides: The Guide to the American Left and The Guide to the American Right. These were published annually from 1979 to 2000. They were intended for researchers, academics, writers, and libraries, which is how they were marketed. They consisted of directories of organizations and serials, and a large annotated bibliography of books and monographs, on the groups and movements represented in each book. I was pretty careful in putting these together. I always had to see something that established that the groups existed and that they had a valid mailing address, for example, and if there was any ambiguity about their political orientation I would inquire about it. I had quite a bit of correspondence with some groups. Even there, I wrote a disclaimer noting that whether they were “left” or “right” was only an opinion and that anyone who cared should check this out for themselves. A lot of the listings were one- or two-person outfits, kind of like hobbies or Mom-and-Pop operations, or just somebody equipped with a post office box. This was particularly true on the right. I pointedly tried to be as fair as I could and I think I largely succeeded. The Southern Poverty Law Center acquired my guides and incorporated many of my listings in theirs, but there was a huge difference: their lists had no addresses so it’s very difficult to actually check them out. The SPLC has listings I had never heard of and I know this area pretty well. Even my own contacts in various movements had never heard of some on SPLC’s list. After 1995, I had calls from police agencies trying to locate some of the SPLCs “hate groups.” They couldn’t find them either. I concluded that a lot of them were vanishingly small or didn’t exist, or could even be an invention of the SPLC.
There was another phenomenon I noticed. Several racist groups published large numbers of local post office box listings, as in local chapters. When I tried to check these out I found that many of them were false—the box was closed after one rental or that the mail was forwarded elsewhere. I think a lot of these never existed or were just some guy renting different post office boxes. I also received tip-offs that some of the right-wing groups I had listed were really intelligence-gathering operations with no objective membership, some by federal or state agencies and some by groups like the SPLC, which admits having informants throughout the far right. By the 1990s, these were becoming increasingly common. Even local anti-racist activists will frequently operate bogus groups just to see who responds—a Kansas City activist ran a hoax operation from a post office box in Sugar Creek, Missouri, an area suburb, for several years.
One of the reasons I stopped publishing my research guides, aside from burning out on the whole subject, was that I could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the organizations. The web finished this completely. A single person with web page skills can create a very impressive “hate” operation that exists nowhere except in cyberspace. The whole issue of “lists” is full of smoke and mirrors.
The democrats certainly need hate groups, like the Ferguson rioters, La Raza, and the 'New Black Panthers', while the right wingers don't need them, they already have plenty of mainstreamed racist hate groups on the left to point to, and don't need to make any up these days.
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