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Occupy the Southern Poverty Law Center




“We did go after the eco-terrorists,” he told me. “But that was because they’d adopted the same tactics as the abortion activists: vilification, the use of ‘Wanted’ posters, highlighting the names and whereabouts of people’s children and spouses.” And then he went on a long speech about “anti-abortion extremists” that had very little to do with what I was asking, but no doubt made him feel good. I met this with silence, so he said that, really, the SPLC only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology. 

“Isn’t that exactly what happened in Cleveland?” I asked. #more#“These five men, all linked with Occupy Wall Street, attempted to blow up a bridge as an overture to the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the name of anarchism. They also looked to blow up the Republican convention.”

“They were anarchists,” he repeated. 




“But Occupy is political,” I suggested.


“Fair enough.”

He felt the need to keep explaining, so I let him. We only ever cover left-wing groups when they have a right-wing component, he told me. For example, “when anarchist groups are infiltrated by those on the right; Neo-Nazis, that sort of thing.”

I asked whether this was a little like the way the French do masculine and feminine plurals; that if there are a thousand women and one man, it becomes masculine. In other words, that the SPLC covers a group if there is even a minute “right-wing” component. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. 

I left it there, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was a little bit of a syllogism going on; that being that “Left” equals “good,” and “Right” equals “bad,” and therefore anything “Left” couldn’t be “bad” unless it were infiltrated by the “Right.” In my time covering Occupy Wall Street I have seen anti-Semitism, black nationalism, class hatred, and threats of violence; there have been rapes, a few murders, and now some domestic terrorism. One would have thought that these things would be sufficient warrant for a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center to stand up and take serious note, but, as I learned yesterday, there’s one problem: They’re just “not set up to cover the extreme Left.”