Tag: Southern Poverty Law Center

Yesterday’s NOW

National Organization for Women, NOW, Toni Van Pelt,, sexual assault, hate speech, Southern Poverty Law Center

Once upon a time, the National Organization for Women winked to President Bill Clinton and scorned his accusers Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and others. This all came back to me while discussing powerful men sexually harassing and assaulting women, at Townhall yesterday.

NOW’s current president, Toni Van Pelt, spoke with the Washington Examiner regarding recent allegations against liberal Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). Not to be outdone by the group’s partisan or pusillanimous past (take your pick), Van Pelt offered, “We could ask all of the men in Congress to resign, is that what you’re asking me?”

She added, going all in, “You know that mostly all men do this kind of thing to women. It’s like saying there’s a good airline or a good bank, saying there’s some entity out there that is not sexist.”

Say what?

“That’s gender bias and stereotyping of the most egregious kind,” writes ethicist Jack Marshall at his Ethics Alarms blog. “I just expect the champions of equality, fairness, mutual respect and civility to believe in and live by the principles they claim so indignantly and self-righteously to be fighting for.”

And not scapegoat all men.

Yet NOW’s Madame Defarge declares: “They all should resign, every man in every industry.”

Marshall knows how to categorize such talk: “Under the definition of ‘hate group’ used by the Southern Poverty Law Center — ‘any group with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people’ — Toni Van Pelt, speaking on behalf of her organization, has demonstrated that the National Organization for Women belongs on its list.”

Blaming an entire sex, while excusing the actual abusers . . . should end NOW.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags hate speech, National Organization for Women, NOW, sexual assault, Southern Poverty Law Center, Toni Van Pelt

crime and punishment folly general freedom nannyism privacy property rights responsibility

The New Ortho-Doxing

Halloween, Southern Poverty Law Center, lynching, doxing, racism, hate speech

“What a nice Halloween,” my wife remarked as we turned out the lights.

Well, not in nearby Oakton, Virginia, where Jamie Stevenson walked past her neighbor’s home last Saturday and saw “a racist display.”

“She knew it was a Halloween decoration,” the Washington Post reported.

Heedless, she contacted her homeowners association, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the perpetrator: “What you appear to be displaying is an effigy of a black person being lynched. As your neighbor and a person of color [Stevenson is Asian], I find this racist . . . deeply offensive. I’m sure this is not your intent.”

“It is not my intent to offend anyone,” was her neighbor’s immediate and predictable response to her email. Shockingly, he had never noticed that his “Monster in the tree had darker skin.”

So, on a rainy Sunday, he took it down.

One might think that, with Stevenson’s sensitivity, she wouldn’t perform her own social media lynching — or doxing — against her neighbor. But on Monday, acknowledging that no offense had been intended and with the offending display removed, Stevenson still posted “a flier” on Facebook with a photo of an actual 1889 lynching next to the picture she had snapped of her neighbor’s Halloween display, declaring: “RACISM and HATE have no place in our neighborhood.”

She called for a boycott of her neighbor’s free Halloween candy . . . and handily provided his home address.

“[W]hen you point out racism, people have a choice to make,” she insisted. “They either acknowledge it and have to do something about it, or they deny it and are complicit in it.”

Or then again, neighbor, maybe you’ve got racism on the noggin and folks are only complicit in sharing a traditional joy with the neighborhood kids.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags doxing, Halloween, hate speech, lynching, racism, Southern Poverty Law Center

crime and punishment First Amendment rights ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Wolves Crying Wolf

By any means necessary, BAMN, protest, free speech, fascist, first amendment, censorship, violence

People have a right to defend themselves. Right? Especially against rape and murder.

“This is not about free speech,” Yvette Felarca yelled to the crowd at the University of California-Berkeley, gathered weeks ago to “shut down” a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial Breitbart editor.

Felarca, a national organizer for By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)*, the militant group with the incendiary name, argued that Milo wasn’t “interested in any genuine debate.”

She continued, “But what they’re really trying to do is they’re trying to assert their power, threaten us, intimidate us, rape us, kill us! This is real. This is life and death.”

Given such sentiments, it is hardly surprising that the protest turned violent — leaving people beaten, bloody on the pavement, and racking up $100,000 in property damage.

Not to mention causing the cancellation of the talk sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans. Felarca called this a smashing success. Asked by reporters how she could justify violence to squelch speech, Felarca simply dubbed Milo “a fascist.”

Yesterday, in my Townhall column, “Hate Is Our Business,” I addressed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s just-released report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” The report continued the SPLC’s habit of calling entirely peaceful conservative and religious organizations “hate groups.”

The man who shot a security guard at the Family Research Council in 2012, but was thankfully blocked from further mayhem, used the SPLC’s “Hate Map” to target their office.

In its reports, the “progressive” SPLC completely ignores BAMN and violent left-wing groups. And by crying wolf in mislabeling non-violent organizations as “hate groups,” it provides the unhinged — BAMN, Antifa, and lone-wolf lunatics — very dangerous ammunition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ms. Felarca also has a day job, as a public school teacher at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in the Berkeley Unified School District. That has generated some controversy.

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