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The ongoing fall from grace of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) -- or, as our friend Tom DiLorenzo calls it, the Soviet Poverty Lie Center -- has been a truly glorious thing to behold.

For as long as any of us can remember, the SPLC was the country's self-appointed watchdog of "hate," and major American institutions, including law enforcement agencies, treated its list of so-called hate groups with deadly seriousness.

Eventually, though, the SPLC got too ambitious. There weren't enough KKK members in America to really amount to anything, and the people running the SPLC had so many other individuals and organizations they hated and wanted to destroy. The SPLC couldn't help itself, and began targeting ever-more mainstream organizations, tarring them with the same language they would use for the KKK. At that point, some people started to figure out that the whole organization was a racket.

But little old ladies would be terrified by the organization's fundraising letters into sending the wealthy SPLC their Social Security checks so they could fight "hate."

I myself never made it onto their hate list, or whatever it was called (they had a list of the most hateful people in America). Beyond just that list, they would condemn people as obviously benign as Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

I did once get contacted by Heidi Beirich, who as "director of intelligence" wrote a lot of the hit pieces intended to destroy people the SPLC hated. I figured it must be my turn for the smear job, though nothing ended up coming of it.

Still, let's be honest and dispense with the bravado: 20 years ago if you got a call from Heidi Beirich, it was terrifying. If the SPLC declared you radioactive, that was it. And if you're thinking FOX News wouldn't have paid attention to them, you're wrong. Nobody wanted to cross the SPLC, so too bad for you. You were a nonperson.

The stories often went like this: Person A said B and C; can you believe he said B and C? It's crazy that somebody would say B and C!

Now B and C happen to be both true and easily proven, and Person A will have an abundance of defenses for saying B and C, but of course none of them will be mentioned.

A member of the SPLC reviewed my Politically Incorrect Guide to American History in a signed editorial on the New York Times editorial page. The entire piece consisted of: can you believe he says this, and this, and that?

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I can, because this, and this, and that happen to be true.

Well, here's the latest PR disaster coming out of the SPLC:

Heidi Beirich has had rather an interesting lover, a man with whom she in fact has a joint bank account, and to whom $1.2 million in SPLC funds were funneled.

Heidi's lover was an informant inside the National Alliance, a group the SPLC has denounced for decades as neo-Nazi and white supremacist.

The National Alliance had all but ceased to exist by 2013, with its membership having plummeted from 1400 all the way down to 20 -- but the SPLC, which cannot raise money without finding hate everywhere, devoted a dozen articles that year to the National Alliance. A group with only 20 members!

Obsessing over an organization that was down to 20 members, in order to portray the United States as a hotbed of "racism," is the SPLC in a nutshell.

Beirich's informant lover went so far as to raise money for the National Alliance and help carry out its activities -- probably not the kind of work SPLC donors thought they were funding.

Beirich also used SPLC donor funds to pay the couple's living expenses -- definitely not what donors thought they were funding.

Robespierre, after terrorizing decent people in France, himself went to the guillotine (with a blood-curdling scream, we might note, in sharp contrast to the dignified silence of King Louis XVI the previous year). For Beirich to become toxic herself after destroying the reputations of so many good people is the same kind of poetic justice.

Tom Woods

P.S. Ol' Woods is heading out of town next week for an anniversary trip with the wife and young son, so although the Tom Woods Show will come out as scheduled (I recorded the episodes in advance), it is conceivable that the emails might be scarcer. It all depends on whether I wake up earlier in the morning than she does!

Also, in case I have any subscribers here who are interested: on my mailing list for entrepreneurs we talk a lot about recurring-revenue models -- subscriptions, memberships, etc. -- because they give you the most financial stability. At the same time, not everyone wants to offer a subscription or an online membership, or build audiences and email lists, or do affiliate marketing, etc.

So for that fraction of folks, we've been discussing a recurring-revenue model that works at least as well and that doesn't involve any of those things. 

It's in the top three things I've ever recommended to them, so if you're curious here's the replay: https://www.tomwoods.com/recording

(It's actually not that long; it looks long because people were so intrigued that the Q&A went much longer than the presentation itself.)






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Tom Woods · PO Box 701447 · Saint Cloud, FL 34770 · USA