“How the Southern Poverty Law Center Drew the Ire of Conservatives”
That was the Gray Lady’s headline yesterday regarding the Southern Poverty Law Center’s scheme that had it supporting violent hate groups “under the table” so the SPLC could raise money from dupes and saps to defeat them.
What do you think, the most flagrant “Republicans pounce!” example ever?
I am moving ever closer to a policy that will require a ban from the EA comment section for anyone who dares to insist that the mainstream news media isn’t consistently and despicably biased in its reporting. That position has shifted from the realm of spin, stupidity and partisan gaslighting into straight-up lying and signature significance.
Ethics Alarms 
The Gray Lady’s…um…diminished capacity suggests confinement to a proper care facility.
PWS
I am moving ever closer to a policy that will require a ban from the EA comment section for anyone who dares to insist that the mainstream news media isn’t consistently and despicably biased in its reporting. That position has shifted from the realm of spin, stupidity and partisan gaslighting into straight-up lying and signature significance.
What fascinates and distresses me is not that I do not under that the NYTs is a sort of ‘propaganda organ’ the design of which is to fulfill a sort of Maoist-like ‘cultural transformation’ and in its way to ideologically battle “the 4 olds” of the national constitution, but that it is very hard to find a source — a news publication — that fully defines what the ‘right path’ is. I do not so much mean a journal that provides a proper outlook, but one that expresses the best orientation.
It is a difficult topic to raise but ‘standard Conservatism’ is generally quite Liberal. And that is because (if I understand things right) America and Americanism are really radically liberal. America is a revolutionary Republic and the effect of that revolution means that radically liberalizing impulses were set in motion. They do not ever abate. Innovation, change, re-structuring, re-positioning, constantly considering social conventions and always tending toward revision of them.
How can you possibly define or even propose a Conservative outlook in the context of a nation whose destiny is upheaval?
The only way that an entire nation could remain ‘conservatively oriented’ is if the people, the greater number, were themselves holding to conservative principles inside of themselves. And the principle foundation for such a life lived that way is a religiously-defined life. And that means adherence to “the 4 olds”.
The problem? Every background or previous orientation as against modern liberalism always touches social ideology and political ideology that is (to varying degrees) non-liberal and anti-liberal. Take The Camp of the Saints. The context of the book (the author’s orientation) cones out of French anti-liberalism and semi-fascistic social philosophy. This is a fact. The radical Right in France was radically Catholic and radically conservative — as against a cultural tendency toward radical liberalism. And radical liberalism wins all the time. Who wants to hold to social conventions defined by a catechism?
This is why I keep saying (frustrated) that the radical tendencies in American culture simply cannot be stopped by a conservatism that is only slightly conservative to the prevailing radicalism.
Other than the reality that America and Americanism are really extremely conservative, spot on! True, the original Founders and their conception was radical indeed, but today such conventions as freedom of speech and Separation of Powers are well to the right of progressive craziness.
The Left makes more noise than the Right here, and the Right foolishly let the mold and rot of leftism get a foothold before to woke up. That doesn’t change the reality, though.
The SPLC drawing the ire of conservatives isn’t even anything new. I first heard of them before I started law school. I had no use for them then and I have no use for them now. When I first read the name I thought they might have been a privately established entity like a legal services corporation, providing affordable or free legal services to those in need, but it took me less than an hour to know they were just another liberal lawyers’ club, trying to remake this country in their image off the contributions of gullible donors. WTF has poverty law got to do with anti-death-penalty advocacy, unless it’s providing representation to some poor schlub who maintains his innocence (despite evidence to the contrary), but whose family has either run out of money or walked away?
When they first came to be and were suing the Ku Klux Klan and other violent racist organizations that had gotten away with far too much abuse for far too long, that was one thing. However, instead of changing over to winning hearts and minds after the era of institutionalized racism was (mostly) over, they decided to try to remake the nation in some unworkable idea of social justice…and turn a hefty profit while doing it. It’s bad enough that they became essentially social justice pimps, essentially saying the more you donate the more just we’ll make society.
However, they became essentially fake heroes, no different than soldiers who steal valor by displaying medals they didn’t earn or firemen who set fires so they can later show up and play hero. Never mind the fact that by doing this they are smearing rank and file conservatives by lumping them in with fake haters that they themselves gin up. Never mind also the fact that they are exploiting organizations like Antifa and the John Brown Gun Club who for all their rhetoric just want to knock a few heads while feeling justified, and putting not just conservatives, but innocent people, in danger by so doing. It would be ironic if an organization that started by suing wrongdoers was put out of business by those suing it for wrongdoing.
Not to go into another historical missive, but how much of history is made up of those who tried to stop wrongdoing becoming the very thing they claimed to oppose? Julius Caesar and his successors claimed they were opposing corruption in the Roman Republic…and all too soon fell into corruption themselves. The early Church claimed they were trying to lead away from moral depravity, only to become the biggest haven for perversion in history. The communists claimed that the state would wither away, only to maintain it by force. Black Lives Matter claimed they were all about social justice…only to be revealed as a giant grift.
It’s unfortunately human nature for these kind of enterprises to become corrupt, and also human nature for those who think they are heroes to look the other way, lest yet another Nebuchadnezzarian colossus be shown to have feet of clay and fall.