www.thornwalker.com/ditch/strakon_splc_sliming.htm

March 2, 2009
 

It can happen to you
 
Our sliming by the SPLC
 

By NICHOLAS STRAKON
Editor-in-chief, The Last Ditch

 

If you find this article to be of interest, please send a donation of $3 to TLD. More information appears below.

 
Imagine my surprise February 27 when I heard on the TV news at noon that the Southern Poverty Law Center had identified a "white nationalist" group called WTM Enterprises right here in my town of Roanoke, Indiana. The SPLC had released its latest list of "hate groups," complete with a map for the benefit of hate-tourists, and WTM Enterprises was on it.

What a coincidence that two outfits with the same unusual name exist in such a small town! WTM Enterprises is my sole proprietorship, and it's the business framework under which I publish The Last Ditch and do what little free-lance editing work I manage to attract. I founded it in 1994. I don't know when my white-nationalist neighbors started their identically named organization.

It is clear what I must do. To prevent confusion between my own business entity and the white-nationalist group identified by the SPLC, I am hereby renaming my WTM Enterprises. Henceforth let it be known as the Northern Poverty-stricken Freedom Center.

However, since I am only kidding, please continue to send any money you have lying around loose to WTM Enterprises. Make sure you get that p.o. box right, though. We wouldn't want donations meant for TLD to end up with those white nationalists across town.
 

Now I must wax serious, insofar as it is possible to be serious about such a travesty. Of course there's only one WTM Enterprises in Roanoke. C'est moi.

The SPLC, as if you didn't already know, is a richly funded, leftist, antiwhite group that specializes in attacking those who dissent from the System's party line on questions of race, ethnicity, and culture. It attacks those whom we in the freedom community would consider criminals and criminally minded, but it also attacks peaceloving people guilty only of thoughtcrime. Recent targets who fall into the latter category include Prof. Kevin MacDonald, the critical analyst of Jewish power; and E. Michael Jones, editor of the traditionalist-Catholic publication Culture Wars. In February 2008, the SPLC was able to intimidate Catholic University, of Washington, D.C., into cancelling a lecture series in which Jones was due to take part. So far as I've been able to determine, all it took was one little phone call.

In 2005, another little phone call from the SPLC — specifically, from the notorious Heidi Bereich — proved fatal to the career of our friend and contributor Kevin Lamb, who at the time, but not long afterward, was editor of Human Events. Mr. Lamb tells the story in an article at VDARE, "The Leftward Course of Human Events." In my commentary on the Catholic University scandal, I wrote: "Under our ... regime of Polite Totalitarianism, the SPLC hardly needs state power to restrict free expression (though it is easy enough to imagine what these creatures would do with state power if they had it)." You don't need to point a gun at a quivering rabbit to send it bouncing off into the tall grass.

According to its information page, the SPLC was founded in 1971 as "a small civil rights law firm." It is headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, which it calls "the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement." Its principal founder is Morris Seligman Dees.

Though I've never been too clear on what a "white nationalist" is, I've always been confident that I am not one. And that The Last Ditch is not a white-nationalist publication. To begin with, it seems difficult for an anarchist to be a nationalist of any kind, unless we're limiting our definition of "nationalism" to the sort of thing that the 18th-century German literatus Johann Gottfried von Herder proposed, namely, a linguistic and cultural community.

You may wish to take a look at Wikipedia's article on white nationalism, which classifies our friend Jared Taylor and our late friend Sam Francis as white nationalists. Now, I'm not sure that either man would quibble at being so described; I can't speak for them. Is my own protest that I'm an anarchist and therefore cannot be any kind of "nationalist" just a form of quibbling? After all, I'd certainly like to live in a white country (albeit one that was also a free country), and a reasonable man could probably have guessed as much from reading TLD.

But the equating of "white nationalism" with "hate" and the System's specal use of the word "hate" certainly raise my objections beyond mere quibbling, especially given my suspicion that the SPLC enjoys a cat's cradle of ties with the Organs of State Security and my virtual certainty that it disseminates its hate-list to local police agencies.

On the map page I link to above, the SPLC says: "Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting, or publishing.... Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity." No such implication at all, eh? Thanks much, but, unfortunately, most ordinary people don't associate "hate groups" and "haters" with the loving of peace, justice, and freedom. Or with the righteous hating of war, injustice, and slavery, which is the kind of hating we practice here at WTM Enterprises.
 

I may have missed something, but to the best of my knowledge the only media outlet in my area that picked up on the SPLC news release was the Fort Wayne CBS affiliate, WANE-TV. That's the channel I was watching Friday. Now, I've taken shots at this "news" operation in the past. It was a WANE-TV news scriptwriter who described Joe the Plumber as "infamous," leaving me to ask, not for the first time, whether I was seeing evil at work or only illiteracy. Last week, in reporting the local government schools' rules for good conduct at this spring's graduation ceremonies, the scriptwriters had the WANE newsreader tell us that the awarding of diplomas will be delayed for those graduates "who refrain from tossing their cap or causing other disruptions." Warning: if you read that statement too carefully and try too hard to decipher it, your head bone may shatter.

WANE-TV news is only about as leftist as the mainstream — but that has veered far left over the past several decades, and the WANE news operation reflexively favors big and intrusive government. However, it's most useful to describe such licensed-media outlets as paladins and heralds of the System as a whole, in the System's character as a ruling alliance of "respectable" socialists and fascists. One vivid illustration of that is WANE news's frank praise for the imperial legionaries in Mesopotamia, who the scriptwriters routinely claim are "defending our freedom." Mind you, that propagandizing occurs in the midst of what is represented as straight news coverage. On at least two separate occasions, the news producers have simultaneously served two vital imperatives of the System — imperialism and race-mixing — by running features about the joyous homecoming of a heroic soldier to his multiracial family. (I'm tempted to describe WANE-TV news as a "mulatto-nationalist group.")

WANE assigned a young Negro reporter, Janice Allen, to cover the WTM Enterprises story. According to a second-party version of Allen's story [WANE seems no longer to have it posted. — Ed.],

NewsChannel 15 traveled to to [sic] the small town Thursday night to see what people had to say.

"It is a little bit shocking, but no big surprise, it's a small town," says Sean Hiebel, a Roanoke resident for eight years.

Another resident, Becky Beal says,"You're kidding, no way is my thought, I just can't imagine it."

The report lists WTM Enterprises as a White Nationalist group located in Roanoke. It also lists a Neo-Nazi group known as the White Aryan Resistance as being located in Warsaw....

The mention of us in the same paragraph with a "Neo-Nazi" group purported to be huddling and plotting somewhere in Warsaw is a deft touch, and one I certainly appreciated. (But don't you have to wonder whether that other group actually exists?)

The WANE-TV coverage may be divided into two parts. The first part reflects the worst type of uncritical news-release journalism. Apparently this news department has learned, or been instructed, to take the various pronouncements of an ideological group in distant Alabama not just seriously but indeed as gospel. Why? WANE-TV would not take quite as seriously a news release from WTM Enterprises or even from the National Policy Institute, which bills itself as "the right's answer to the SPLC." Why?

The second part of the coverage consists of the reporter's work out in the field. We can make a reasonable guess how Miss Allen couched her questions from the responses of the two Roanoke residents she quotes. We can guess, too, how she represented the authoritativeness of the SPLC. Moreover, we can guess that my two fellow townspeople (whom I'd never heard of, by the way) were well-primed by the culture to respond as they did.

Miss Allen didn't talk to me, though! And finding me isn't that much of a challenge. When I Google for "WTM Enterprises," the first listing on the first page leads the inquiring mind to my business page, www.thornwalker.com/ditch/wtme.htm, and my real name, Tom McPherren. My phone number is listed in the directories. Identifying me is not quite as hard as identifying Deep Throat, and finding me is not quite as hard as finding Osama bin Laden.

The next Google hit, on the first page of results, is TLD's home page.
 

That brings me to something else I find remarkable in the TV coverage: the lack of any mention of WTME's principal activity, publishing TLD. You may find it odd that the SPLC didn't make that connection to begin with. Wouldn't describing our Website make the whole thing more interesting? Wouldn't that make it more of a ... what's the technical journalism term I'm looking for ... story?

Retaining the media blackout on TLD permits the SPLC and the TV people to avoid mentioning our support for the free market, our demands for equal liberty for everyone, and our persistent work in laying bare the wickedness and dishonesty of the Empire's wars. One can see how they might want to keep all of that a secret, since it would muddy the whole "white nationalist" theme they've chosen as their focus. But when you think about it, the matter becomes even more remarkable.

In 2000, after the bombing of the imperial warship Cole in Yemen, I wrote in TLD that when thugs wearing their gang colors invade someone else's neighborhood looking for trouble, and find it, I am not inclined to be sympathetic. In 2001, when the turncoat FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for spying against the United State, I wrote a column titled "Two cheers for espionage" in which I regretted only that Hanssen carried out his work as the employee of a government (well, two governments, actually). In the pages of TLD I have called at least twice, and explicitly, for the defeat of imperial forces in Mesopotamia. I have expressed the desire, at least twice, that the U.S. legionaries in Mesopotamia not bother to come home unless they repent of their crimes.

If I'd written something similar in 1918, during the Wilson Tyranny, I wouldn't have had the chance to write it twice. Wilson's official bully-boys would have popped me into a federal prison tout suite, assuming his unofficial bully-boys hadn't already beaten me to death. Today, it's different. The writings I describe provoked no response whatever from our adversaries (no public response, at least). Some of our milder antiwar writings attracted negative letters to the editor, especially those that mentioned the Zionists; but my own fire vanished into the cold aether without igniting so much as a splinter of protest.

Today, it's frank discussion of racial differences, criticism of hostile alien cultures, defense of freedom of association, and opposition to minority-race privilege that make one an Enemy of the People. Treason has a whole new definition. And the weapons of choice against such treason are the tendentious distortion, the lying omission, the outright lie, and the conscientiously careless smear-job.

In 2007, a real reporter, the Rutland Herald's Gordon Dritschilo, covered an SPLC-claimed outbreak of "hate" in Vermont and elicited an eye-widening quote from the head of the organization's "Intelligence Project," Mark Potok. According to Dritschilo, Potok "said the SPLC does not attempt to confirm the validity of each [hate] listing...."

WANE-TV did not attempt to confirm the validity of WTME's listing, and now it appears that the SPLC may not have, either. So who did make the attempt? Did anyone? Pursuing that question is like venturing into an epistemological black hole.

I want to write that never before has a ruling ideological tendency been so mentally disabled — and there is some truth in that, but we must be careful to specify the disability. It is, I believe, sociopathy and the arrogance of power. A studied carelessness with facts and even outright lying are legitimate stratagems as long as they aid the march to power and the consolidation of power. The American Left has learned much from the epistemology of Marxism-Leninism, whereby "truth" is what is good for the Party and bad for the enemy on its way into the dustbin of history.

Carelessness and lying work well for our adversaries. They're not careful with the truth; they don't have to be. The continued success of that careless arrogance depends, of course, on the continuation of a mentally disabled population.
 

So much for our SPLC friends. The people at WANE don't deserve any additional comment, but since I'm as much a fan of irony as anyone, in leaving this matter I quote the WANE news promotional tag, airing a hundred times every day:

"Coverage you can count on."

March 2, 2009
(Revised March 3, 2009)

© 2009 by WTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.


If you found this article to be interesting, please donate to our cause. You should make your check or m.o. payable in U.S. dollars to WTM Enterprises and send it to:

WTM Enterprises
P.O. Box 224
Roanoke, IN 46783

Thanks for helping to assure a future for TLD!


Notice to visitors who came straight to this document from off site: You are deep in The Last Ditch. You should check out our home page and table of contents.