Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Enemies List’ a Fantasy

If this is the sort of people the SPLC brands "enemies", maybe I should use their list to find prospective friends.

Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Enemies List’ a Fantasy

Catherine Bleish is a 26-year-old libertarian who was a Ron Paul delegate to the 2008 Republican National Convention. She is a leader of the Liberty Restoration Project which, among other things, opposes the federal “War on Drugs” and denounces the Patriot Act as “an assault against the civil liberties of Americans.”

Perhaps you disagree with those views, but is Bleish dangerous?

The Southern Poverty Law Center seems to think so. In a special report called “Meet the ‘Patriots’” issued last week, the SPLC named Bleish as one of 35 people “at the heart of the resurgent movement.” The report — which also names WorldNetDaily publisher Joseph Farah and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media — describes the movement thus:

In the last year and a half, militias and the larger antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement have exploded, accompanied by the rapid expansion of other sectors of the radical right. … [T]he so-called Patriots [are] people who generally believe that the federal government is an evil entity that is engaged in a secret conspiracy to impose martial law, herd those who resist into concentration camps, and force the United States into a socialistic ‘New World Order.’

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If Bleish is considered a “conspiracy theorist,” that’s probably because of her group “Operation: De-Fuse,” which depicts the Department of Homeland Security as part of a “police/surveillance state” that is “militarizing and federalizing our police forces.”

Bleish and others say that this isn’t conspiracy theory, but conspiracy reality. The name of Operation: De-Fuse is a reference the DHS “fusion centers” such as the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which issued a controversial 2009 report identifying Ron Paul supporters and pro-life activists (as well as fans of Rambo movies and Tom Clancy novels) as potential terrorists.

“Militia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political groups,” the MIAC report said. “It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material.”

If DHS is identifying third-party political movements as threats, is it irrational for supporters of those movements to consider the DHS a threat?

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Over the years, the SPLC has steadily expanded its list of “far-right” menaces to include mainstream conservatives — the American Enterprise Institute, David Horowitz, the Bradley Foundation and Dinesh D’Souza, among others — and as National Review’s Mark Krikorian recently noted, the SPLC accused his Center for Immigration Studies of “spreading bigotry.”

So what about this grab-bag of names on the SPLC’s “Patriot” list? Is it really possible that a single “movement” could include Joseph Farah, Michelle Bachmann, Cliff Kincaid and Alex Jones? Andrew Napolitano, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Red Beckman? I put that question to SPLC director of research Heidi Beirich.