When facts are stranger than fiction, pundits will say, “You can’t make this stuff up.” But actually, you can make this stuff up — that turns out to be the Left’s modus operandi.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a malignant organization that smears decent conservatives, has been caught red-handed — le mot juste — financing the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists to stoke racist activities. It then fraudulently used the outrages it ginned up to con donors out of money to keep its “anti-racism” fight going. Nothing more closely follows the classic trajectory of a movement declining into a business and ending up as a racket.
A grand jury has indicted the SPLC on fraud charges, and one hopes it will be punished as severely as the law allows, that all its donors abandon it forever, and that its deceitful face will never be seen again scrutinizing America’s failings with vulpine anguish. Such an outcome could not be inflicted on a more deserving group of con artists who, for example, labeled Catholic doctrine hate speech.
The SPLC paid an agent provocateur, whom it euphemistically labeled an “informant,” who infiltrated the fatal “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. This secret agent did not just inform against organizers’ activities but actively stoked hatreds, posted racist messages, and organized transport for marchers to the rally.
In the resulting Charlottesville mayhem, a right-winger ran down and killed an anti-racism counterprotester with his car, a crime for which the Left, including elected Democrats, attacked conservatives for years. It was from this rally that Democrats squeezed the apparently indestructible falsehood that President Donald Trump said the neo-Nazis included “very fine people.” And it was this rally that Joe Biden claimed inspired him to enter the 2020 presidential race to fight for the tolerant soul of America.
The idea expressed by Biden and other Democrats that domestic white supremacy was a greater danger to the republic than foreign jihadis always seemed tendentious and absurd.
Much of the turbulence and dysfunction of our politics since the first year of the Trump presidency, not to mention the catastrophe of Biden’s presidency, which at first tottered and then collapsed, was thus partly the product of a malicious hoax.
That grim day in Charlottesville, for example, colored the context of what happened to George Floyd, a black drug abuser who, in the summer of 2020, died under the knee of a white police officer. It triggered riots across America against systemic racism. It buttressed bogus claims of the 1619 Project, a false history of America as an irredeemably racist nation, a lie still taught in public schools. It has done immense damage.
FROM RIVERS OF BLOOD TO THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS
The notion that America was saturated in dangerous right-wing white supremacy always seemed deeply suspect, for it did not accord with what observant, open-minded, and thoughtful conservatives could see. Sure, there were some angry and individually dangerous bigots, but their numbers seemed insignificant, and their fantasies would have seemed laughable and unimportant if their opinions were not so unseemly.
Many of us could tell that the giant specter of “white supremacy” created a false picture of America. We knew this to be one of the most tolerant countries in the world. But the sight of Nazis with their tiki torches was chastening. Was white racism, we wondered, worse than we’d realized? Actually, no, it wasn’t. It was, once again, the Left.