Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities - BY: Joe Schoffstall

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal, Alabama-based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization that has gained prominence on the left for its "hate group" designations, pushes millions of dollars to offshore entities as part of its business dealings, records show.

Additionally, the nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to its top directors and key employees while spending little on legal services despite its stated intent of "fighting hate and bigotry" using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is perhaps best known for its "hate map," a collection of organizations the nonprofit deems "domestic hate groups" that lists mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and is often referenced in the media. A gunman opened fire at the Washington, D.C., offices of the conservative Family Research Council in 2012 after seeing it listed as an "anti-gay" group on SPLC's website.

The SPLC has turned into a fundraising powerhouse, recording more than $50 million in contributions and $328 million in net assets on its 2015 Form 990, the most recently available tax form from the nonprofit. SPLC's Form 990-T, its business income tax return, from the same year shows that they have "financial interests" in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. No information is available beyond the acknowledgment of the interests at the bottom of the form.

However, the Washington Free Beacon discovered forms from 2014 that shed light on some of the Southern Poverty Law Center's transfers to foreign entities.

The SPLC's Form 8865, a Return of U.S. Persons With Respect to Certain Foreign Partnerships, from 2014 shows that the nonprofit transferred hundreds of thousands to an account located in the Cayman Islands.

SPLC lists Tiger Global Management LLC, a New York-based private equity financial firm, as an agent on its form. The form shows a foreign partnership between the SPLC and Tiger Global Private Investment Partners IX, L.P., a pooled investment fund in the Cayman Islands. SPLC transferred $960,000 in cash on Nov. 24, 2014 to Tiger Global Private Investment Partners IX, L.P, its records show.

The SPLC's Form 926, a Return by a U.S. Transferor of Property to a Foreign Corporation, from 2014 shows additional cash transactions that the nonprofit had sent to offshore funds.

The SPLC reported a $102,007 cash transfer on Dec. 24, 2014 to BPV-III Cayman X Limited, a foreign entity located in the Cayman Islands. The group then sent $157,574 in cash to BPV-III Cayman XI Limited on Dec. 31, 2014, an entity that lists the same PO Box address in Grand Cayman as the previous transfer.

The nonprofit pushed millions more into offshore funds at the beginning of 2015.

On March 1, 2015, SPLC sent $2,200,000 to an entity incorporated in Canana Bay, Cayman Islands, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records and run by a firm firm based in Greenwich, Ct. Another $2,200,000 cash transfer was made on the same day to another fund whose business is located at the same address as the previous fund in the Cayman Islands, according to SEC records.

No information is contained on its interests in Bermuda on the 2014 forms. SPLC's financial stakes in the British Virgin Islands were not acknowledged until its 2015 tax form.

Lucinda Chappelle, a principal at Jackson Thornton, the public accounting firm in Montgomery, Ala., that prepared the SPLC's tax forms, said she does not discuss client matters and hung up the phone when the Free Beacon contacted her in an attempt to get the most updated forms from the group in relation to its foreign business dealings.

Tax experts expressed confusion when being told of the transfer.

"I've never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts," said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm. "My impression based on prior interactions is that they have a small, modestly paid staff, and were regarded by most in the industry as frugal and reliable. I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with."

"It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas," said Casil. "I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts."

"It seems extremely unusual for a ‘501(c)(3)' concentrating upon reducing poverty in the American South to have multiple bank accounts in tax haven nations," Charles Ortel, a former Wall Street analyst and financial advisor who helped uncover a 2009 financial scandal at General Electric, told the Free Beacon.

The nonprofit also pays lucrative salaries to its top leadership.

Richard Cohen, president and chief executive officer of the SPLC, was given $346,218 in base compensation in 2015, its tax forms show. Cohen received $20,000 more in other reportable compensation and non-taxable benefits. Morris Dees, SPLC's chief trial counsel, received a salary of $329,560 with $42,000 in additional reportable compensation and non-taxable benefits.

The minimum amount paid to an officer, director, trustee, or key employee in 2015 was $140,000 in base salary, not including other compensation.  The group spent $20 million on salaries throughout the year.

The SPLC, which claims to boast a staff of 75 lawyers who practice in the area of children's rights, economic justice, immigrant justice, LGBT rights, and criminal justice reform, reported spending only $61,000 on legal services in 2015.

Following recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., the group raised a great deal of money.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told his employees that the company is donating $1 million to the SPLC and would match employee contributions two to one. Cook also placed an SPLC donation button in its iTunes store. The company is additionally providing a $1 million donation to the Anti-Defamation League.

J.P Morgan Chase vowed to add a $500,000 donation for the group's "work in tracking, exposing, and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations."

The Washington Times reported that CNN ran a wire story following the Charlottesville events originally titled, "Here are all the active hate groups where you live" using SPLC's list of 917 groups.

Brad Dacus, the president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento-based group that defends "religious freedom, parental rights, and other civil liberties without charge," was listed on the "hate groups" list.

"Why is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing this? It's simple. They want to vilify and isolate anyone that doesn't agree with their very extremist leftist policy and ideology," Dacus told the Times. "This isn't about defending civil rights; this is about attacking civil rights."

"I am shocked that CNN would publish such a false report on the heels of the Charlottesville tragedy," added Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit that provides pro bono assistance and representation, which is also featured on SPLC's list. "To lump peaceful Christian organizations, which condemn violence and racism, in with the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists is offensive. This is the epitome of fake news and is why people no longer trust the media."

CNN later changed its headline to, "The Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups."

"The SPLC is an anti-conservative, anti-Christian hate group that the media have given pretend legitimacy to. One glance at their 990 tax forms is a reminder just what a fund-raising super-power it is," Dan Gainor, vice president of Business and Culture at the Media Research Center, told the Free Beacon. "Its assets are over $328 million in 2015 and went up $13 million in just one year. It doesn't need new liberal money. It could operate for at least six years and never raise a penny. It's like a perpetual motion machine for fundraisers."

The SPLC has also been hit with a number of lawsuits over "hate" defamation claims in recent days.

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not return a request for comment on its foreign financial dealings by press time.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/southern-poverty-law-center-transfers-millions-in-cash-to-offshore-entities/

Violent “Color Revolution” in America? Attempted Overthrow of Trump? Threatens to Shred Fabric of American Society - By Larry Chin

Manufactured Civil War, Guided Anarchy

What is now unfolding in America is a process of engineered dissent which is controlled by the corporate elites. This process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against racism, social injustice and US led wars. 

This article by Larry Chin analyzes how the elite opponents of Donald Trump are manipulating public opinion with the support of the mainstream corporate media. Through staged protest events funded by corporate foundations,  the unspoken objective is to create profound divisions within American society. These divisions preclude the formation of  a meaningful and united protest movement.

The objective of these staged protest movements against Trump is not to support democracy. Quite the opposite. It is to ensure complete control over the US State apparatus by a competing faction of the corporate establishment. Where is the civil rights movement? Where is the US antiwar movement?  Rarely are these engineered protests against US led wars. 

A grassroots and united movement against the Trump presidency and the Neocons, against war and social injustice is what has to be achieved. But this will not occur when several of the organizations which are leading the protest against Trump are supported and funded by Wall Street. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research 2017

***

A race war and a civil war are being incited by the US political establishment and Deep State opponents of Donald Trump, in order to foment violence towards Trump’s removal from the White House. The events in Charlottesville,  together with “Russia-Gate” are being used as a “defining moment of crisis” and a pretext to justify Trump’s overthrow.

Turning American streets into war zones

America has never faced chaos of this nature in modern times: manufactured domestic political terrorism disguised as civil unrest, masking a coup. The stated goal of the agitators is “mass insurrection”and “all forms of violence” to make the country “ungovernable”

Just as the global “war on terrorism” is a criminality and treason disguised as “freedom fighting” and “the defense of liberty”, this war against Trump, labelled as the “new Hitler”, is part of an unfolding domestic terror operation, which ironically utilizes the propaganda techniques of Hitler and the Third Reich (Goebbels), not to mention the anarchist playbook of Saul Alinsky (and, by extension, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom are Alinsky disciples). (See  also Ben Carson quoted in the Washington Post,  “Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky and Lucifer, explained”, July 20, 2015)

From the violence and propaganda brainwashing to the manipulation and destruction of culture and history (statues and monuments, etc.). what is unfolding is a repeat of familiar institutional terror.

Goals are achieved through the weaponization and mobilization of indoctrinated and deceived masses as well as grassroots activists, coupled with mind-controlled authoritarian thugs.

The larger “resistance” features a toxic combination of professional paid anarchists, brainwashed “social justice warriors”, and deluded protestors who are misinformed and invariably ignorant as to who is supporting and funding the “protest movements”. There is no rational conversation to be had, no reasoning, in such an atmosphere of ginned-up hysteria.

This large-scale extortion aims to devastate the United States from within, forcing Trump out of office. An already deeply divided and confused nation with an already shredded social fabric will be torn apart.

The mainstream corporate media, the engineers of delusion and mob-manipulating propaganda, is ginning it up, creating mass hysteria and mental affliction.

What is taking place is not simple protests from supporters of a losing political faction, but a domestic terrorism operation planned and executed by the establishment majority—supported by neoliberals as well as neoconservative Republicans—in defense of their system against perceived existential threat from anti-establishment movements. Mob violence has always been a weapon of the oligarchy. It was inaccurate and tactically stupid for Trump to call this insurrection “Alt-Left”. It is in fact a mainstream establishment operation, which uses “left”, “progressive” and antifa symbols to pursue its political objectives.

The ultimate objective is to create social divisions which prevent the development of a real and independent mass protest movement against the seats of corporate power.

This “chaos agenda”is a “color revolution”. The elites and Deep State figures behind today’s American anarchy are the same ones that funded and orchestrated “color revolutions” around the world, the toppling of Ukraine and the installation of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Svoboda regime, unrest in Turkey, the destabilization of Syria, the European refugee crisis, and the Arab Spring. What worked overseas is now being applied within US borders.

The Purple Revolution began the night Trump won the presidential election that foiled the installation of Hillary Clinton. This warfare has escalated and intensified in the months ever since, culminating with Charlottesville.

The increasingly failing Trump/Russian hack narrative is being replaced by a variation on an old theme: Nazis. “Trump is a Nazi”. Nazis must die.

Trump’s repeated denials and long history of standing against Nazis, the KKK and white supremacists, and having nothing to do with them, are to no avail.

Antifa

The mainstream media predictably fails to report the fact that Antifa anarchist groups are responsible for the majority of the continuing political violence, including Charlottesville, Boston, and the Battle of Berkeley, enabled by police stand-downs and incompetence. Local police forces, university police, and local mainstream media in heavily liberal cities (such as Berkeley) openly back the Democratic Party’s anti-Trump agenda and act in support of the anarchists.

Masked, armed authoritarian anarchists, provocateurs and terrorists are referred to blandly in mainstream media accounts as “counter-protestors”,when in fact they are the instigators and shock troops of the larger national coup, and vastly outnumber Trump supporters (not all of whom are “right-wing). These violent groups, operating under the banners of “peace and justice” in fact embody the opposite.

Antifa: a violent movement rises

Antifa: seeking peace through violence (CNN)

These supposedly leaderless domestic front groups, including Antifa, Black Bloc, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Disrupt J20, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) and others can all be traced to the Democracy Alliance, elite “civil society” foundations, establishment politicians, Democrats and Republicans, and assets of the Deep State. The connections between the Washington establishment and the myriad anarchist groups are well known. Moreover,  these domestic front organizations –many of which include within their ranks grassroots progressive activists– are invariably funded (directly or indirectly) by corporate establishment foundations.

These various groups whose instigators mobilize “a progressive grassroots” have been combined and mobilized into one coordinated anti-Trump agitation apparatus. Like the terrorist networks that they are, they function like any other CIA covert operation, each cell inculcated from the others, with plausible denial in place for the organizers and leadership.

The Justice Department has done virtually nothing about these groups, while CIA-connected media such as CNN devote puff pieces to puff pieces in support of Antifa’s “peace through violence” agenda, and then scrubbing the (accurate) title post-facto for more favorable publicity.

Charlottesville

Charlottesville was not a spontaneous eruption of violence but the new stage of civil war.

The Charlottesville Clash: Protest and Counter-Protest, Politicized Media Propaganda

The white nationalist events were long planned. The removal of Confederate statues led to the incitement. While this was the largest gathering of various white nationalist groups in recent history, these relatively small, fringe, politically insignificant groups are routinely monitored and/or infiltrated by the FBI. The idea that US domestic intelligence and law enforcement, and Virginia and Charlottesville authorities were not fully aware of, and ready for, any possibility of violence is preposterous. Permits were granted.

There is compelling evidence that the police stood down. (Also see here) The venue was turned into trap, a kill zone, with alt-right nationalist participants crammed inside barricades, surrounded at chokepoints by Antifa.

It is no coincidence that Charlottesville was set up in virtually the same fashion as the spring 2017 Battle of Berkeley, where outnumbered Trump supporters gathering for an event were also trapped behind barricades and surrounded by Antifa, and forced to fight off attacking mobs. In Charlottesville as well as Berkeley, hours of open street warfare were allowed to take place unabated by the police.

(see also the following related report White nationalist fires gun into crowd, police do not move (New York Times)

While chaos in Charlottesville erupted on all sides, many accounts strongly suggest that the Antifa forces instigated the violence. Also demanding investigation is evidence of orchestration and stagingand other highly suspicious anomalies.

The presence of the FBI and other intelligence agencies must be noted. Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe is a notorious long-time Democratic operative and Clinton surrogate. Unite the Right Rally organizer Jason Kessler was a member of Occupy and an Obama supporter. Crisis actors were hiredfor the event.

The man who drove a car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, committed an act of terrorism and murder by any definition. But this act of murder occurred after hours of street warfare that was stopped, and allowed to escalate.

It is also not clear who the driver actually was. Was it James Fields, the man who was arrested, or was it someone else? Whoever it was had the skills of a stunt driver. Adding to the confusion are questions about the identity and behavior of those who were attacking the vehicle with baseball bats.

Was Charlottesville a staged false flag operation? Why was this melee allowed to explode? Who gave the orders, and who financed the fighters on both sides?

What is crystal clear is that the entire Washington political establishment, Deep State and mainstream media are benefitting. Trump’s opponents have their pretext and potent new propaganda weapons. They have Heather Heyer as a martyr and symbol of “resistance”.

Charlottesville is shamelessly being used as a fundraising tool. Heather Heyer becomes a symbol and martyr.

Ukraine connection to Charlottesville

As detailed by Lee Stranahan (and on Twitter) there are disturbing connections to Ukraine. These same connections were also noted by Julian Assange.

James Fields, the alleged driver, connected to Ukraine is spotted on videotape chanting “Blood and Soil” and torch-marching, the slogan of Nazi Ukraine Svoboda Party. The Charlottesville torch march was identical to the torch marches in Ukraine. In fact, Ukrainian flags were flown in Charlottesville.

Is it merely a coincidence that elements of the CIA/Obama/Clinton Ukraine coup show up here? The Washington politicians now spewing outrage about racism and Nazis at Trump today, including John McCain are active collaborators with the Ukrainian Nazis.

Is it also coincidental that these Ukrainian Nazis, working in conjunction with US establishment DNC and Republicans alike, also happen to be the central figures behind the completely false Trump/Russia hack narrative that never seems to die?

Intimidation of thought and ideas

Staged mob violence and authoritarian threats are not limited to the streets. Thought itself is under attack.

Not only Trump supporters, but all opponents and critics of the political establishment cannot express themselves without threat of reprisal, censorship, and violence.

A full-scale assault is being carried out against alternative media.

The campaign against “hate speech” and “hate content” labels any anti-establishment media as “hate”. The attack is so broad-brush that entire networks are branded right-wing or “alt-right”, when in fact, many are not right-wing, and many are non-partisan. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, among others, are engaged in campaigns of censorship and control, including the policing of content, the demonetization and suspension of sites, control of political content, and outright censorship through deletion.

Hypocrisy

While Trump is no “Role Model” of political and moral behavior, he has been branded a Nazi and white racist, despite his disavowal and criticism of white supremacists, Nazis, David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. According to Israel Shamir:

President Trump condemned both sides participating in the brawl‚ both white nationalists and Antifa. It is exactly what his opponents were waiting for. His attempt to stay above the brawl was doomed to defeat: liberal hegemonists immediately branded him a racist and neo-Nazi. Trump reminded them that not all defenders of the monument were white racists, but this argument didn’t work. (Global Research,  August 26, 2017

Despite the fact that he spoke out forcefully, many times. (Trump spent much of a recent rally in Phoenix detailing his many responses. See here.) The mainstream media offers no quarter.

Similarly, the majority of Trump supporters have no association with extremist groups of any kind, and have long opposed white nationalists and the “Alt-Right”. Violence has been aggressively disavowed by most of Trump’s base, including Mike Cernovich, who has forcefully denounced violence, and Jack Posobiec, who organized anti-violence rallies weeks prior to Charlottesville. The mainstream media refused to report on these events, while continuing to label him a right-wing extremist and Nazi.

Meanwhile, the establishment “Left” has persistently engaged in violence, without disavowing violence. Project Veritas has exposed and proven the fact that violence is a routine method utilized by Democratic Party operatives. Former president Barack Obama openly encouraged the mobs, pushing them to continue “expressing themselves”.  Former Attorney G Loretta Lynch called for blood in the streets. Democratic members of Congress openly call for Trump’s assassination.The Alexandria mass shooting was the work of a Bernie Sanders supporter. The mainstream media ignores or refuses to accurately report these stories.

Staged anarchist agitation and violence—“protest culture”—is not only being normalized, but popularized. The masses are being successfully indoctrinated. Witness the pervasiveness and viciousness of Hollywood and sports celebrities, who have not refrained from calling for violence against Trump.

Orwellian madness on steroids

Even as establishment-guided mobs intimidate and commit violence, their victims are blamed for violence and hate crimes.

Trump is vilified as a world-ending Nazi/fascist/racist/misogynist, the symbol of tyranny, while the true tyrants and criminals continue to walk free.

Peace is achieved through violence.

Mob violence is noble and heroic.

Attacked from all sides

Trump is under attack and increasingly isolated.

Glen Greenwald beg’s the question: What’s worse: Trump’s agenda or empowering generals and CIA operatives to subvert it?

In addition to being assaulted from outside (Purple Revolution, Russia/hack, Robert Mueller, impeachment threats, etc.), he is being  sabotaged and subverted from inside the White House, and from inside his innermost circle, by the likes of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Dina Habib Powell and the West Wing globalists including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, and Steve Mnuchin.

McMaster has purged the administration of Trump loyalists and populists, and replaced with Bush/Obama/Clinton/Deep State operatives, and runs foreign policy with vice president Mike Pence. Pence routinely issues statements contradictory to Trump’s own ideas. He has not been the focus of any mainstream media criticism. This Bush loyalist is in perfect position to become president in the event of Trump’s removal (by whatever means that occurs).

The neocon generals—Mattis, McMaster, Kelly—“oversee” and control Trump on all matters, treating him like a child. Kelly controls all information to and from Trump.

Trump often seems not to understand what is happening. On the day Charlottesville occurred, Trump applauded the Virginia authorities and Terry McAuliffe, who were more likely involved in causing the disaster. Trump also congratulated the anarchists in Boston—on Ivanka Trump’s urging. Was he oblivious to the fact that the 4,000 Boston protestors were protesting him?

For Trump’s Afghanistan strategy address to the nation, Kelly insisted that Trump walk back the controversy of his remarks on Charlottesville. McMaster and Mattis also insisted, and Trump agreed.

The swamp is not being drained. It is being filled to overflowing. With all of this damage, some of it self-inflicted (why has Trump allowed it?), how will this president hope to deal with a manufactured civil war?

No end in sight

The Summer of Rage is in full swing, but the rage is far from over.

There continue to be anti-Trump events in all major cities in the country, seemingly every weekend. Ginned-up Antifa mobs are being mobilized in response to small pro-Trump “Freedom of Speech” events scheduled to take place in San Francisco and Berkeley on the weekend of August 26. The upcoming clash is already being called the Battle of Berkeley 3.

With the fervent and unanimous support of the San Francisco Bay Area political establishment—all of whom are Democratic Party faithful who (including Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Nancy Pelosi, etc.) are openly calling for Trump’s ouster—it is expected that yet another comparatively small gathering for “prayer, patriotism and free speech”—Trump supporters—will be swarmed and viciously shut down by mobs of Trump-hating Antifa and “social justice warriors”.

The media ignores the fact that the organizers of the pro-Trump rally condemn Nazis and white supremacists, and prohibit them from attending. Headlines continue to brand the event “far right” and“Nazi”, in order to incite.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/08/no_author/violent-color-revolution-america/

Vox Popoli: Alt-Internet

Slate planned a hit piece on the Alt-Tech movement, then realized that perhaps the Alt-Right may have a point with regards to Internet censorship being an all-too-slippery slope.

However distasteful its views, the alt-right has smartly framed its battle in terms of “free speech.” This argument has currency elsewhere on the right, too. President Trump is fond of calling out Amazon, perhaps chiefly because of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said on his show earlier this month that “Google should be regulated like the public utility it is, to make sure it doesn’t further distort the free flow of information to the rest of us.” Former Trump aide and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon has also argued that tech platforms should be regulated like utilities. Combined with Democrats making antitrust regulation a central tenet of their new policy platform, the internet’s gatekeepers could soon be put on notice as never before.

It would be hard not to spot the irony if one of the most significant threats to big tech’s monopolistic power ends up being caused by hate groups. Gab’s Sanduja believes that Apple and Google shutting out his company from their app marketplaces prevents it from accessing 70 to 75 percent of its potential U.S. market. Even if you agree with banning Gab, the power of a handful of companies to banish anyone from the internet should give you pause. And it is one reason why the arguments of alt-tech advocates may find more and more friendly ears in Silicon Valley, where many entrepreneurs increasingly worry they can’t compete.

It’s also hard not to see this conundrum as big tech’s fault from the start. In a way, the alt-right is calling out the essential tension of the major internet companies, which espouse “don’t be evil” philosophies and want to “bring the world closer together,” yet also owe their popularity (and profits) to an internet where seemingly anything goes, until they say it doesn’t. Banning Nazis may be a perfectly defensible stance, but given the inconsistent transparency and enforcement of community guidelines from tech companies, it also has the whiff of the arbitrary.

In a more plural market, Facebook and Google and GoDaddy would be just as free to boot odious ideologies—but they wouldn’t face the same accusations of speech suppression, because places like Daily Stormer would have more places to go for their social-networking and domain-hosting needs. The early ideal of the internet was that of a great commons where all kinds of diverse opinions could be shared, where people could come to understand each other and to be convinced of new, challenging ideas. That particular utopian wish list may have always been naïve, but the notion that an open internet should not be controlled by a small group of corporations beholden only to shareholders continues to hold sway for a reason. Facebook was only ever supposed to be part of the public commons; the walled garden was never meant to subsume it.

Which may be why Gab and its Free Speech Tech Alliance has gained the trust of Nazis but can also invoke the rhetoric of left-wing antitrusters—well, to a point. “If Google and Apple are straight-up corporations for their political sides, they should openly declare their discriminatory behavior. They should be proud of it,” said Gab’s Sanduja. “They should not be mendacious and talk about change and be different. Stop engaging in sophistry. Come out to us as the major SJW platforms you are.”

The funny thing was that they really wanted to talk to Gab's Torba, not Sanduja. Because, of course, Sanduja didn't fit the original intended Narrative of Alt-Tech being nothing but white supremacist Nazis.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/08/alt-internet.html?m=1

Lost Causes on the Right - by Gary North

I came to political awareness in the height of the anti-Communist movement in 1956.

I was brought into the conservative movement at a lecture by the Australian anti-Communist physician Fred Schwarz. I have told my story in a collection of reminiscences by 82 libertarians, I Chose Liberty. You can read it here (pages 239ff.).

Historians usually date the rise of the conservative political movement in the United States with the 1948 hearings that were triggered by Whittaker Chambers' accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only Communist, but a spy for the Soviet Union. At the time, Hiss was the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I find that ironic. So did a lot of other anti-Communists at the time.

This issue divided the nation. The Left and intellectuals generally sided with Hiss. Millions of common people sided with Chambers. Richard Nixon, a first-term congressman, sided with Chambers. That made Richard Nixon's career when Hiss was sentenced to prison for perjury on January 1950. He was elected to the U.S. Senate the following November.

Then came McCarthy's accusations, beginning in 1950 and continuing through 1954. He created a sensation, or really a series of sensations, regarding his accusations of communist infiltration in the federal government. My friend M. Stanton Evans' book on McCarthy, Blacklisted by History, indicates that a lot of these accusations were correct. Evans was a first-rate journalist, a first-rate historian, and one of the best writers in the conservative movement. It has been systematically forgotten that William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, co-authored a book in 1955 defending McCarthy: McCarthy and His Enemies.

I also grew up in an era in which there were accusations about Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Well, there really was Communist infiltration of Hollywood. The Left-wing President of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, carried a pistol in a shoulder holster because of his anti-Communist statements, which had generated death threats against him. There was a series of congressional hearings on Communist infiltration in Hollywood that got a lot of attention. There was a blacklist of Communist writers, including Dalton Trumbo. They could not get jobs. This made the Left angry, because they think they are the only ones who are allowed to conduct boycotts against ideological enemies. It still angers them that, this one and only time, the Right stuck it to a tiny handful of limousine Communists. The Left really does believe that advocating violent revolution is neither here or there, and nobody should suffer a paycheck cut because of it.

It is almost impossible to find any trace of Communism in any movie that anybody still watches. That was true at the time. There are Left-wing causes in movies. In Hollywood, these been common since the 1930's. But the great change in Hollywood came in 1960, with the release of Inherit the Wind and Elmer Gantry. These were not political movies. They were social movies. They were opposed to Protestant fundamentalism. They represented the great reversal of the enormous success of Ben Hur in 1959. That was when the second-generation of humanist activists in Hollywood took over. The founders of Hollywood's movie empire were non-Orthodox Jews, but most of them were socially conservative in public and pro-American. Beginning in 1960, this began to change. The best book on this was written by an Orthodox Jew, Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America.

In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that Congress bothered to come to Hollywood to investigate Communist infiltration, other than for publicity. The movies that Hollywood cranked out from 1934 to 1959 were patriotic. They were socially conservative to a fault: twin beds for married couples. They were politically non-controversial. I think of Yankee Doodle Dandy. This was the era of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and Grandpa Ike. The fact that Hollywood made The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 is hardly surprising. It had been a best-selling novel. Hollywood makes movies about best-selling novels.

It was in 1940 that Franklin Roosevelt made a self-conscious switch from what he called Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win the War. He ran in 1940 against Wendell Willkie, a renegade Democrat who somehow got the nomination of the Republican Party, on the issue of internationalism. Both of them were internationalists. Both of them were interventionists. The only question was how fast were we going to get involved in the war in Europe.

There was not much trace of Communism, one way or the other, in the movies of the 1940's. You have to be an extreme movie buff even to think of scenes in which Communist propaganda was being promoted. The movie probably was probably obscure.

There was even an anti-Communist movie. I saw it at the time. I have never seen it again. It really went down the memory hole: My Son John (1952). It started Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, and Robert Walker. Given the quality of its cast, it's pretty clear that this was a case of a memory hole filing cabinet.

There was no Communism in high school civics and history textbooks. Textbook-screening committees saw to that. I never saw any Communist propaganda in college-level textbooks in the early 1960's. I was alert to such ideas. I was probably more alert to such ideas than almost any college student in the West Coast. Textbooks are screened by Ph.D.-holding bureaucrats. Publishers want to sell lots of books. They don't want controversy. They want income. They make certain that the books don't make waves large enough to threaten book sales.

There were virtually no openly Marxist professors of economics until the late 1960's. Even these people were pretty soft-core. They created the Union of Radical Political Economists, with the unfortunate acronym of "Urpee." Any group trying to promote itself by means of word "urpee" was going to have serious marketing problems. I did an Alexa.com search to see how high its website, URPE.org, is ranked. The lower the number, the higher the ranking. Urpe.org is ranked 4,256,502. That is to say, it is invisible. Urpe has been invisible for at least four decades.

The major academic Communist was Herbert Aptheker, but his daughter Bettina became far more famous as a result of the Berkeley student protests in 1964. Late in her academic career, she admitted that he had molested her sexually when she was a child. He was not a major academic figure. Rarely are any of his books footnoted in a conventional monograph. He edited the papers of black Leftist W. E. B. DuBois, and for that he was recognized. Other than this, he had no academic influence.

My father was in the FBI. He spent his career investigating Communist Party activities and the activities of tiny Marxist splinter groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party. He called them "the swoopers." I don't think he took them seriously. At some point, he had gotten a baseball style from a local Sherwin-Williams Paint store. It had SWP on it. He would occasionally wear it around the house on weekends.

He once told me that he would occasionally have to go out to tail the head of the local Communist Party, Dorothy Healey. He said that after one meeting, when she walked out, she looked back at his car, waved her arm as if to say "you might as well follow me," got into her car, and drove away. My dad of course followed her.

Healey was representative of a generation of dedicated American Communists. She was challenged in 1956 by Khrushchev's speech on the crimes of Stalin, his famous cult of personality speech. But she stayed in the party, trying to reform it from within. Then, in 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. She could no longer live in intellectual schizophrenia. She resigned. She got involved in a lot of obscure leftist causes over the next decade, but it was all pretty much futile. Here's what she said: "My hatred of capitalism, which degrades and debases humans, is as intense now as it was when I joined the Young Communist League in 1928. I remain a communist, as I have been all my life, albeit without a party." But without the Communist Party, she was just a little old lady in tennis shoes, just like all the Right-wing little old ladies in tennis shoes in Southern California who were on the other side of the political divide. She went to meetings. The back pages of some obscure newspaper would mention this. There would be some little old lady on the other side of the ideological battlefield clipping the article and using scotch tape to put it into one of her filing cabinets or scrapbooks.

Nobody today remembers any of this. I do, because I was recruited by one of those little old ladies. Actually, she wasn't that old. I remember a few of my father's stories. He did not tell many of them. He did his job, collecting material to be put in official FBI files. The files were dutifully filed, and I am sure never used again. The Communist Party was in favor of the violent overthrow of the government, and therefore it had to be listed as a subversive group by the Attorney General's office. So, that meant that the FBI had to collect files. But nothing was ever done with most of these files. Hardly any Communists were ever sent to prison. As far as I know, there was no great conspiracy that ever amounted to much of anything. Maybe I'm just forgetful at this stage.

There were investigations of antiwar protesting groups in the late 1960's. That is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about the anti-Communist movement from 1948 until the middle of the 1960's.

I'm also not talking about espionage. In any case, espionage was not what the anti-Communist movement was all about. The anti-Communist movement was about domestic Communists who worked in the government or Hollywood to undermine the government through organizing revolutionary action.

Ultimately, the whole idea of a Communist revolution in the West was preposterous. It had always been preposterous. Western working-class people just wanted a larger share of the pie. They were not about to go to the barricades in the name of Marxist revolution. This was recognized clearly in the 1920's and 1930's by the Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci. He spent his later years in a fascist prison. In some of his famous prison letters, he made it clear that he did not think that Communist revolution could ever come in the West based on the capitalist mode of production. In other words, he completely abandoned Marxist theory. He said that there would have to be an erosion of the moral foundations of the West, meaning ethical and religious foundations. Only after this took place, he said, could there be a successful Communist revolution. But Marx had always said that religion and ethics are simply part of the superstructure of the mode of production. The substructure is what matters: the mode of production.

Gramsci created what is known as cultural Marxism, which is not Marxism. It is anti-Marxism. It is pop-Hegelianism. It is what Marx was opposed to. It says that ideas have consequences, especially religious ideas. Marx dismissed this idea with his famous phrase that religion is the opium of the people. That was always Marx's problem. He kept trying to dream up better ideas to show that ideas don't have consequences. He kept trying to influence the thinking of bourgeois intellectuals, and he never bothered to write for working-class people. He wrote in German. He was not understandable in German. He was not understandable in translation, either. Engels wrote most of what is clear in the writings of Karl Marx. He was a ghost writer, and he was a pretty good one.

When we look back at the hard-core Stalinists prior to his death in 1953, when the anti-Communist movement began in America, we can find almost no trace of any Communists. That was a complaint of anti-anti-Communists at the time. It was a legitimate complaint.

The conservative who saw this most clearly was Robert Welch of the John Birch Society. He founded the organization in 1958 is an anti-Communist organization. In 1964, overnight, he switched it to an anti-establishment, anti-conspiratorial organization. He did it with one book: More Stately Mansions. The vast majority of his followers never missed a beat. They stopped talking about Communism, because he stopped talking about Communism. Well, that's not quite correct. He stopped talking about Communism as a separate movement based in the Soviet Union which was trying to take over the world unilaterally. He started talking about the alliance between the Soviet Communists and the American establishment. The Birch society started focusing on the establishment. It started talking about the Council on Foreign Relations, not the Communist Party. In short, it started to get relevant.

The closest that the conservative movement got to the truth in the heyday of anti-Communism was in 1954. In that year, Congressman Carroll Reece of East Tennessee began investigating the large nonprofit foundations, not yet called think tanks, especially in New York City. Reece was allied to Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio. He hired an investigator named Norman Dodd. Dodd began to get into the files of the Ford Foundation and other major concentrations of nonprofit propaganda. There, he was astounded to find the extent of the promotion of one-world government. These organizations were systematic in their pursuit of the unification of the Soviet Union in the United States. They believed that there would be a common socialist society of the future that would incorporate the best of both societies.

These ideas began coming out at the hearings of the committee. Very few conservatives knew about these hearings. Very few reporters knew about the hearings. Because of the Web, it is now possible to access these hearings and download them. They are posted here. These are basically untouched historical resources. They deserve several books, but these books probably will not be written. This is old news. The internationalist mindset of the nonprofit foundations is still dominant, but the Soviet Union is long gone. The foundations bet on the wrong pony, just as the anti-Communists did. That pony dropped dead coming around the second turn. It faltered in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping liberalized the Chinese economy. It dropped dead on December 25, 1991, when Gorbachev announced its unexpected demise.

I would love to see somebody on Saturday Night Live do a dead pony skit. Maybe Larry David could switch from his Bernie Sanders imitation and play another socialist.

In retrospect, the obvious question is this: "What was all the fuss about?" That applies to both sides of the great confrontation, which never amounted to much of anything other than rhetoric.

Alger Hiss at Yalta was important. That was a matter of espionage. The Left has never admitted that he was a spy, and the Left has always tried to cover up his importance at Yalta. Whittaker Chambers was right in blowing the whistle. But if we're talking about homegrown domestic Communism, the true believers who were committed to it wasted their lives, and the dedicated anti-Communists who tried to expose them wasted a lot of time and scotch tape.

It was good training for me. My concern was international Communism, not domestic Communism. I figured my father would take care of any domestic Communism. I didn't have to. It was a working division of labor.

I wish he had kept his SWP cap. It would be my most treasured possession that he left me.

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