[Peter Brimelow writes: This is the internet posting of Jared Taylor’s cover story, under the title Who Are the Haters?—The American Way Of Crushing Free Speech, in the current September 2011 issue of his tree-based newsletter American Renaissance. Since it went to press, the SPLC has claimed another victim—a New York City school principal. See White Nationalists As The New Queers: What I Learned From Frank Borzellieri’s Firing, by Robert Weissberg.] 

Good government and a healthy society require the free exchange of ideas. That is why throttling it is the first priority of bigots and tyrants; their schemes depend on the suppression of truth. The purpose of the First Amendment, therefore, is to ensure that people of all views, no matter how disconcerting, have the right to be heard. It is through argument and explanation—by competing in the marketplace of ideas—that the truth is supposed to prevail.

This is why we all claim to revere the First Amendment, but for many Americans this is a sham. Most do not really care about freedom of speech. Even if they do not actively try to silence their opponents they are not much bothered when others do the work for them. They care about freedom of speech only for themselves and their friends.

How else do we explain the existence in this country of wealthy, powerful—respected—organizations whose job is to throttle debate? They do not try to refute views they oppose; they try to silence them. They even attack the livelihoods of people who say things they don’t want to hear. If Americans really believed in free speech, they would despise these organizations.

I am writing, of course, of groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Southern Poverty Law Center [$PLC to VDARE.com], and of smaller ones that even use threats of force to silence opponents. Despite their blather about "tolerance" and "diversity," they cannot tolerate dissent, and they hate real diversity of views. They fear free speech because they fear the power of ideas they cannot refute.

There are many ideas these groups try to suppress, but let us take just one: that it is natural and right for whites to prefer the company of other whites. In the past, virtually all Americans accepted this without question, and even today the overwhelming majority silently endorses this preference through its choice of schools, neighborhoods, churches, friends, and spouses. White flight and self-segregation are almost as widespread as ever, but the apostles of tolerance can’t stand it when someone points out that this is because it is natural and healthy.

Of all these groups, the SPLC tries hardest to ensure that no one ever publicly expresses this idea. It never explains why it would be natural and healthy for whites to prefer the company of non-whites. Instead, it devotes millions of dollars to keeping dissidents off radio and television, out of the print media, and invisible to the public. Its role is like that of communist or fascist censors: to snuff out and punish criticism of the reigning ideology. Who would have imagined that such an organization could prosper in America?

The organizations that hate the principles behind the First Amendment then have the gall to claim that anyone who disagrees with them is a "hater". Anyone who thinks whites deserve countries and communities in which they are the majority is a "hater". Anyone who concludes from the evidence that genes explain why the average Japanese is smarter than the average Haitian is a "hater". Anyone who notices that diversity weakens a country is a "hater". Anyone who thinks masses of Third-World immigrants are not helpful for America and should stay home is a "hater".

The purpose of all this hate-talk is to try to persuade Americans that anyone who takes these positions is a moral inferior—probably unhinged—and should be ignored. The SPLC makes an annual tally of American "hate groups" —many of them nothing more than PO boxes—and issues ominous warnings if it detects more "hate" than the year before.

For years, I have been one of the SPLC’s "haters". If it learns that I have been on a radio or television program, it calls the producers to berate them. If it learns I am to speak at a university or civic group, it contacts the organizers to tell them I should be denied a podium. It never argues that my facts are wrong or that my conclusions are illogical. It never offers opposing views in an open debate; that would run counter to its mission of suppression. It simply wants to gag me.

And I am just one of scores of people the SPLC favors with personal attention of this kind.

The great irony is that I and others who express similar views are a tiny voice of dissent in the face of monolithic orthodoxy. All the pillars of American society agree that diversity is strength, that race doesn’t matter, that everyone is equal, and that whites have no group interests. Since everyone agrees that we dissenters are wrong, it should be child’s play to refute what we say. We shouldn’t even have to be refuted. Our opponents should be pleased when we reach larger audiences, since it should be obvious to anyone that we are talking "hateful" nonsense.

Why, then, does the SPLC go to such lengths to silence someone like me? There can be only two reasons.

• One is that the SPLC knows I am right but hates the truth and wants to suppress it

This cannot be completely ruled out, since most of what I say is obviously true, and the rest is overwhelmingly plausible. Anyone who hated whites and hated America might agree that diversity is a weakness, but want to weaken America by promoting it. Since I oppose those things I must be silenced.

• The second, more likely reason is that the SPLC thinks I am wrong but thinks white Americans are such boneheads that I will trick them into agreeing with me.

Or that whites have been so recently rescued from frothing white supremacy, so loosely tamed by orthodoxy that at the merest hint from me they will start baying for blood.

Either explanation for SPLC behavior is based on hatred, contempt, or fear of whites. If what I say is right, I must be suppressed because the SPLC hates whites and wants to hurt them. If what I say is wrong I must be suppressed because whites are either hopeless dolts or a huge, potential lynch mob waiting for the slightest provocation.

You would think any organization would be ashamed to show such contempt for Americans. You would think the rest of the country would scorn it, and that it would wither and die—but no. These groups are bursting with money, and most of the media dutifully report it when the SPLC or the ADL thinks thus-and-such a person is a "hate-monger" and should be shunned. The media must share the SPLC’s disdain for Americans and for freedom of speech, and believe whites are so stupid and vicious they must be protected from hearing from the likes of me.

Of course, the Left still sheds tears over the "victims of McCarthyism" and can think of few things more shameful in post-war America than the Hollywood blacklist. How could a free country have persecuted people merely because of their politics? The vileness of it!

And yet these same tactics become irresistible to the SPLC, ADL, and similar groups when they find themselves with the power to persecute.

Keeping people out of the public eye is not enough for the apostles of tolerance and diversity. The SPLC tries to have "haters" fired from their jobs. This goes beyond suppression of dissident views. Trying to ruin someone financially is not "politics" or "advocacy", however thuggish. The SPLC wants to hurt people.

A good example of this was the 2005 SPLC attack on Kevin Lamb, who was the managing editor of the allegedly conservative Human Events for nearly three years. Entirely in his free time, he edited The Occidental Quarterly, which publishes articles the SPLC doesn’t like.

An SPLC employee called up the management of Human Events to complain that Mr. Lamb was a "white supremacist", and Mr. Lamb was fired that day. "Three years of collegial respect simply vanished instantaneously over accusations that were never questioned," he says.

In 2003, another man lost a public relations job at the English-language advocacy organization, US English, when the SPLC called to complain that he had written for dissident publications, including American Renaissance.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, who has written about Jewish influence and behavior in ways that displease the SPLC. It called him one of the "13 worst people in America" and "the scariest academic" in the whole country. When this wasn’t enough to get him silenced, in 2006 the SPLC sent an employee all the way to the Long Beach campus to try to stir up trouble and get Prof. MacDonald fired. He still has a job only because of tenure, a system set up to protect unpopular views from the whimsy of university bureaucrats.

This year, the SPLC launched a similar attack on me. Since I am not part of an organization like theirs, with $216,000,000 in the bank and $400,000-a-year salaries, I sometimes work as an interpreter of Japanese. For more than 10 years, a US State Department website has advertised my services. The SPLC recently found out about this and warned the Department that I was a vicious "hater", and that it should take my name off its website. 

Interpreting Japanese does not help spread one word of whatever "hate" the SPLC thinks I serve up. It helps feed my family. Nothing more. The SPLC wants to starve my family, just as it wanted to starve Kevin Lamb, Kevin MacDonald, and others it attacks. This is not principled disagreement or political debate. It is pure aggression.

I cannot fathom the mentality of people who want to starve me and my family because they don’t like what I say, but we have seen plenty of their kind. They filled the ranks of the KGB and the Gestapo. Theirs is the mentality that leads to single-party rule, to reeducation camps, and to bullets in the back of the head. These people have learned nothing from the last 100 years. It’s a pity they missed their true calling as agents of the East German secret police.

Every society has a few contemptible people, but healthy societies hold them in contempt. Instead of the scorn it deserves, the SPLC is taken seriously by newspapers, politicians, and even "conservative" organizations. What a mockery this makes of American pretentions to freedom and fair play.

The SPLC calls me a "hater" and wants to take the bread out of the mouths of my children. Who are the real haters?

Founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center has parlayed wild, direct-mail threats of "racism" and "xenophobia" into hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. The Direct Marketing Association knew what it was doing when it inducted its founder, Morris Dees, into its Hall of Fame in 1998. The SPLC is now based in a sparkling, six-story, bomb-proof headquarters its critics call "the poverty palace" .

Mr. Dees always wanted to be rich. Millard Fuller, his first business partner, says that when they started out, "Morris and I . . . shared the overriding purpose of making a lot of money. We were not particular about how we did it . . . ." [Fighting 'Hate' for Profit and Power: The SPLC's Political Agenda Up Close, By John Vinson, The Social Contract, (Spring 2010)]

Mr. Dees found that fighting "hate" could make him rich. In 1978, the money was rolling in so fast that he promised that when the SPLC accumulated a nest egg of $50 million, it would stop spending money on fund raising and would live off its capital. When it had tucked away $55 million, however, Mr. Dees decided it would take $100 million for him to feel comfortable.

According to the Center’s latest tax filings it is now sitting on over $200 million, but it is still raising money as hard as ever. Last year, it spent $5.76 million scaring yet more cash out of people, twice as much as it spent on what was supposed to be its main purpose: paying for legal services for alleged victims of civil rights abuses.

The bodies of the victims of the Norway mass killing in July were barely cold before Mr. Dees was using the massacre to grub for donations. Nothing beats churning out dire warnings about the rise of fascism and white supremacy that only a fat check for the SPLC can quell.

Even the Center’s own employees are dismayed by its greasy obsession with money. Once the Center’s entire legal staff resigned because Mr. Dees kept shrieking about "racism" rather than work on things the lawyers thought were important for blacks: homelessness, voter registration, and preference programs. The libertarian magazine Reason has written that "the Southern Poverty Law Center…would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise funds." [Fearmongering at the SPLC, By Jesse Walker, March 3, 2010]

In 1994, the SPLC’s hometown paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, published an investigative series on the center’s deceptive fund raising, and learned that 12 of 13 current and former black employees complained of discrimination. That same year, when Mr. Dees was asked if he needed an affirmative action program to get a little more diversity in management, he made a surprising admission: "Probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs." [The Church Of Morris Dees, By Ken Silverstein, originally published in Harpers, November 2000]

Laird Wilcox, who has long been an observer of political fringes, both right and left, argues that if the SPLC really cared about racial violence, it would target criminal gangs. Hispanics in particular are notorious for driving blacks out of their territory, sometimes killing them at random, but the SPLC is more worried about white people who study racial differences in IQ.

Mr. Wilcox says this about the center:

"It has specialized in a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation, a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves." [An Exclusive Interview with Author and Researcher Laird Wilcox, The Social Contract, Spring 2010)]

Plenty of people now see through this gang of frauds, but it has enough money to do mischief for years.

Jared Taylor (email him) is editor of American Renaissance and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. (For Peter Brimelow’s review, click here.) His most recent book is White Identity. You can follow him on Parler and Gab.