A Very Worthy Cause: Support Glen Allen’s Lawsuit against the SPLC

by Kevin MacDonald

GLEN ALLEN, an attorney from Baltimore, is doing what I wish I had been able to do a long time ago: sue the SPLC. His case is much stronger and much more sympathy-inducing than mine would have been. Basically, the SPLC got Allen fired from his job with the city of Baltimore where he was in charge of writing appeals in cases where Baltimore lost in the lower courts (“Lawsuit Claims SPLC Abetted Theft, Spread Lies to Destroy Lawyer for ‘Thought Crime’”). All it took was a simple phone call alleging that he has ideas that are unacceptable to the powers that be. In particular, he is accused of having supported William Pierce’s National Alliance in the past. As the notorious Heidi Beirich (a defendant in the case) stated in an interview, she “watched Allen ‘like a hawk’ because he had ‘the worst ideas ever created.’”

Presumably this refers to ideas like identifying with your racial or ethnic group and doing what one can to further its interests, as well as calling attention to groups that are antithetical to ideas of White identity and White interests. It goes without saying that such ideas are perfectly acceptable for every other racial and ethnic group in the U.S except Whites.

Allen’s complaint (here) is a brilliant, exhaustive account of the facts relevant to the case. I strongly recommend delving into it — it’s user friendly, even for a non-attorney. At the outset is a ringing defense of free speech and the First Amendment:

Providence has endowed humanity with the ability to grow and change. Indeed, we have a moral obligation to grow and change as we learn new aspects of reality. At the pinnacle of the means by which we grow and change should be robust dialogue, open debate, an aversion to taboos, and genuine conversation. This is the theory of our remarkable American traditions of free expression, as embodied, among other ways, in the First Amendment. But there are also other approaches to inevitable human discord. One is to draw lines of political or cultural orthodoxy, develop massive surveillance networks and extensive dossiers, and severely punish perceived transgressors who cross those lines, seem to cross them, or even seem to think about crossing them.

Beirich, Potok, and the SPLC, defendants in this case, have chosen this latter approach. Motivated by lucrative fundraising aims and employing fundraising techniques decried across the political spectrum as deceptive, the SPLC’s avowed goal, under the leadership of Beirich, Potok, and others, is to destroy, through public shaming, loss of employment, loss of reputation, and other severe harms, groups and persons the SPLC broadly defines as its political enemies.

Glen Allen, plaintiff in this case, is one of Beirich’s, Potok’s, and the SPLC’s victims. The cause of free expression itself is another, for the SPLC has become one of the most effective forces in the country for stifling honest and robust debate on controversial issues. Beirich, Potok, and the SPLC are entitled to espouse their outlook forcefully. They are not entitled, however, to the following actions, all alleged and supported in this complaint: to receive, pay for, and use stolen documents, including confidential documents and documents protected by attorney client privilege, to tortiously interfere with Allen’s prospective advantage in employment; to defame him by publishing false statements that he was “infiltrating” the City of Baltimore’s Law Department; or to masquerade as a 501c3 public interest law firm dedicated to a tax exempt educational mission, when in reality the SPLC fails the basic requirements for this favored status because of its illegal actions (including numerous instances of mail and wire fraud), multiple violations of canons of professional ethics (including improper disclosure of confidential and privileged documents and failure to train its nonlawyer employees), orchestration of violations of the constitutional rights of the organizations and individuals it targets, and sensationalist supermarket tabloid style one-sided depictions of its victims.

The reality is that Beirich, Potok, and the SPLC have perfected what the scholar Laird Wilcox, speaking of the SPLC, called “ritual defamation”: “a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.”

Beirich, Potok, et al. don’t even pretend to engage in honest debate and the free flow of ideas. Atty. Allen quotes Potok: “We see this [as a] political struggle, right? … I mean, we’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups, and we are very clear in our head, … we are trying to destroy them.” And in this case, the attempt to destroy Allen goes far beyond ethical and legal norms — not surprising given the SPLC’s sordid history of using smear tactics and hypocrisy (Section 31) as well as their dedication to fund-raising far beyond what they actually use to further their causes (Section 27).

Of course the attempt “to destroy” people and groups with ideas they don’t like has now spread far beyond the SPLC, including financial firms refusing credit card services, de-platforming on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and banning from crowd-funding sites like Patreon. As noted here several times, TOQ and TOO have been subjected to these forms of de-platforming.

At present there is an ever-escalating war against the dissident right. This war is not based on developing clearly articulated arguments designed to persuade reasonable, intelligent people. Instead, our new elite rely on wall-to-wall propaganda spread throughout the media and educational system — propaganda designed to make the traditional White majority accept its fate as a declining, soon-to-be impotent minority. Our new elite is terrified that White people be exposed to these ideas. Terrified that they will stop being ashamed to proudly identify as White and do what they can to prevent the impending disaster to White America. They are terrified because they realize that, beneath all the propaganda raining down from the media and the educational system, the emperor has no clothes — pseudoscience like: there is no biological basis for racial classifications, no biologically based race differences, and no intellectual basis for Whites having legitimate interests in creating a safe and prosperous future for themselves and their progeny.

Please Donate. It’s an Important Cause

Allen’s lawsuit will be an uphill struggle against an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets ($432,000,000 as of 2017) over and above what they have spent on their nefarious activities. Media coverage can be expected to favor the SPLC: it is routinely quoted as a respectable “civil rights organization” in the mainstream media. (In reality, the SPLC can be accurately described as a secular-sounding front for Jewish anti-White activism.) And the lawsuit has the additional burden of navigating a legal system that is now dominated by people sympathetic to its causes. As Laird Wilcox noted, “Anyone attacked by the SPLC is basically up against a contest of resources, from the ability to engage legal counsel, to the access to fairness in media treatment, to the ability to survive the financial destruction of a reputation or a career” (quoted in Allen’s complaint). See Section 27 of Allen’s complaint for the details: “The SPLC’s Dominant Objective Is Lucrative Fundraising.” In Allen’s case, there is a great need for money to finance this lawsuit. Litigation is always costly — Allen estimates it will cost at least $45,000 — a large sum, especially for someone who has lost his source of income. This estimate includes fees for a (rather brave) co-counsel. He is therefore soliciting donations at Breathing Space for Dissent LLC, an organization dedicated to resisting the deplatforming campaign by so many similar sites, such as Patreon, Obviously, this is a very worthy cause. I strongly urge people to donate.

My Experience with SPLC Harassment

I am well acquainted with SPLC tactics. Despite realizing that I was protected by tenure rules and the First Amendment (given that I was working at a public university), the SPLC engaged in a two-year campaign, from 2006–2008, overtly attempting to get me fired. Even after this campaign, I was never far from her thoughts. In 2013 she penned an outrageous article claiming that I “glorified violence.”

In reality, as Laird Wilcox described their tactics, this was nothing more than “ritual defamation”: “a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated.” It was quite successful in that regard.

Heidi Beirich came to campus in the Fall of 2006 and immediately set to work getting the professors riled up against me. This was quite easily accomplished given the political views of the vast majority of academics these days. I wrote about it early on, in November, 2008, in an article posted at VDARE (“Heidi Does Long Beach: The SPLC vs. Academic Freedom”). The article included an account of Beirich’s ethical lapses — which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read Allen’s complaint — including misrepresenting my academic qualifications and quoting me out of context. Given that the SPLC’s campaign against me has continued, it’s worth thinking about whether things have improved in the last 10 years. They haven’t.

The fact is that even academics with tenure are terrified of being called racists, anti-Semites or any other pejorative concocted by the left.

This is ironic. Unlike politicians, who must curry favor with the public in order to be reelected, and unlike media figures, who have no job protection, tenured academics should be free from any such fears. Part of the job — and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the first place — is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions.

That image of academia, however, simply and sadly has no basis in reality. Consider, for example, an article appearing almost two months after the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s famous essay on the Israel Lobby and appropriately titled ” A hot paper muzzles Harvard.” [by Eve Fairbanks, The Los Angeles Times, May 14 2006]:

“Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle — and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.”

It’s not that professors don’t want to sound off on public policy issues. When there is an opportunity to spout righteous leftism, professors leap to the front of the line. A good example: the Duke University rape allegation case. Despite considerable evidence that the charges are spurious, three academic departments, 13 programs, and 88 professors at Duke paid for an ad in the campus newspaper in which they assumed the guilt of the men, and stated that “what happened to this young woman” resulted from “racism and sexism”.

In that case, of course, the professors who went public with their indignation knew they were part of a like-minded community and that there would be much to gain by being on the politically-correct side.

Seen in this context, the reaction to Mearsheimer and Walt makes a lot of sense. As one professor explained: “People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card and promised that afterward everyone would be friends.”

But this campaign to make me into a non-person at CSULB worked wonderfully:

Cold shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.

I keep saying to myself: why is this so hard? At the conscious level I was perfectly confident that I could sit down with any of my colleagues and defend my ideas. I know rationally that a lot of the people giving me negative vibes are themselves members of ethnic minority groups — who like the present ethnic spoils system, such as affirmative action and ethnically-influenced foreign policy, just fine.

My theory: Ostracism and hostility from others in one’s face-to-face world trigger guilt feelings. These are automatic responses resulting ultimately from the importance of fitting into a group over evolutionary time. We Westerners are relatively prone to individualism and to feeling guilt (as opposed to shame) for violating group norms. But we certainly don’t lack a sense of wanting to belong and to be accepted. Violating certain taboos carries huge emotional consequences.

This little bit of personal experience is doubtless typical of the forces of self-censorship that maintain the political order of the post-World-War-II West. It’s the concern about the face-to-face consequences of being a non-conformist in the deeply sensitive areas related to race or to Jewish influence.

Beirich’s presence on campus set off a storm of faculty emails, some of which had pretensions of academic wisdom. However, they would never respond to some simple statements of my position, namely:

I am willing to defend the idea that my ethnic identity and ethnic interests are as legitimate as those of the numerous ethnic activists that make a living in academia. Would Mexicans or Chinese be considered moral reprobates if they didn’t like the idea of their people losing political, demographic, and cultural control within their homeland? Should academics like Cornel West or Alan Dershowitz be fired or ostracized because of their obvious and deeply expressed ethnic commitments? What of the many Latino professors who marched in the recent spate of pro-immigration rallies supporting more immigration to the U.S. for the people with whom they identify?

All of these are accepted and indeed approved. However, my relatively low-key expression of ethnic identity as a white European-American concerned about the prospects of his people and culture so easily becomes whipped up into mass hysteria on campus. 

But in the end, as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger:

This guilt trauma is the result of our evolved psychology and a long history of socialization in post-World-War-II America. It’s a big part of the problem, and people like me have simply got to become better at dealing with it.

So in the end, I’ve come to greet Heidi’s arrival in Long Beach as therapeutic — a painful but necessary challenge that must be overcome first at the psychological level if any progress is to be made on unabashed and unfettered discussion of critical issues like the Third World Invasion of America and the impending death of the West. 

I survived. But the SPLC is continuing to spread its evil. Glen Allen’s lawsuit is an important way to fight back. To start to bring down this behemoth of the left. Please donate.

* * *

Source: Occidental Observer