The deeply conventional Leftoids who run The Huffington Post must be wondering how they allowed a Wild Card like Vanderbilt’s Black Professor Carol Swain on board.

Twice in a week she has broken out to denigrate one of the Left’s greatest assets, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Anathematization by this group of thugs is generally treated by the MSM as the equivalent of an Ex-Cathedra Papal pronunciation—the average MSM hack will not talk to the denounced (such as us).

As Ellison Lodge noted, Carol Swain complained about the $PLC’s lack of interest in ”PantherGate” and then valiantly went on to define the problem:

what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN's award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters. There is a name for what has happened. It is called "mission creep." Mission creep occurs when an organization strays beyond its original purpose and engages in actions antithetical to its goals.

Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.

Mission Creep and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Misguided Focus August 10 2009

Now she has become even more aggressive: Mediocre Grade for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Latest Report August 13, 2009

Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a new report titled, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias." In my humble opinion, it deserves a C minus for its glaring lack of rigor. Instead of providing readers with a systematic analysis and hard data supporting its warning about a growing threat, the SPLC's report was chocked full of vague generalities and unnamed sources. Most importantly, it made no serious effort to distinguish between individuals exercising their constitutional rights and groups that might actually pose a threat to society.

VDARE.com thinks well of Carol Swain. After publishing a notably open-minded book on white nationalism, she turned her attention to immigration, holding a conference at Princeton, and then publishing the papers in book form. In doing so she bravely withstood pressure to exclude Peter Brimelow from the conference and book, which was valuable and quite a success.

Carol Swain has an unusually independent mind. I remember fondly her outraging a couple of liberals in a discussion of the aftermath of Katrina by offering:

These horrid events highlight a critical need for people to be guided by moral and ethical principles such as those found in the Ten Commandments … It is a spiritual poverty as much as a material poverty that explains the desperation of many black people and their failure to fully overcome the vestiges of the past…

She made similar comments on the Jena Six.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a group of viciously partisan ethnically-motivated polemicists. Their being unquestioningly deferred to as judges of political decency is ludicrous. While it is refreshing to see them at last attacked by Rush Limbaugh , Lou Dobbs and others, condemnation by a disinterested authority like Carole Swain, may be in the long run be more damaging. It is certainly more dangerous for her.

Applaud Carol Swain.