The paranoia of Mark Potok

TSO sent me this article last night from Reason entitled “The Paranoid Center” by Jesse Walker. It’s a fairly devastating piece about the use of paranoia that extremists like the Southern Poverty Law Center use to quell dissent in the current political debate. I found one part of the lengthy article particularly interesting. It’s in reference to the Department of Homeland Security report released earlier this year (on the third web page of the article);

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the threat of “rightwing extremism.” Depending on whose interpretation you prefer, the paper either defined extremism far too broadly or failed to define it at all. “Rightwing extremism in the United States,” the department said, “can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

The charitable reading of this passage is that it’s a sloppily phrased attempt to list the ideas that drive different right-wing extremists, not a declaration that anyone opposed to abortion or prone to “rejecting federal authority” is a threat. But even under that interpretation, the report is inexcusably vague. It focuses on extremism itself, not on violence, and there’s no reason to believe its definition of extremist is limited to people with violent inclinations. (The department’s report on left-wing extremism cites such nonviolent groups as Crimethinc and the Ruckus Society.) As Michael German, a policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote after the document surfaced, the bulletin focuses “on ideas rather than crime.”

Of course, that’s why our side got all upset about it – instead of mentioning dangerous extremist organization, the report, which was lifted almost verbatim from a Southern Poverty Law Center report published a year earlier attacked ideology. So the first thing TSO and I thought of, was to ask Mark Potok, who has been to TAH on occasion, about the SPLC’s reasons for perpetrating an attack on our ideas, rather than the real culprits.

Well, instead of enlightening us, Potok instead answered that he wouldn’t honor us with his opinion because we haven’t been that charitable to him and his organization – something about me calling them “greasy lawyers” or something. So we’ve been frozen out of the the SPLC loop. I feel a little like Fox News. Maybe Rupert Murdoch will buy me out.

Category: SPLC, Usual Suspects