After reporting on extremism for many years, Mark Potok (former journalist for USA Today) decided to move from journalism to activism.
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One Person’s Terrorist Might Be Another’s… Conservative?
By Sam Francis
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in which he claimed that Christian conservatives Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer had “provided the moral atmosphere” for the murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard in Wyoming—a claim preposterous on its face.
But the fact is that professional hate hunters like Mr. Potok have influence on both federal and state and local law enforcement agencies. Their “experts” often testify in trials and provide seminars for law enforcement and intelligence agencies on what constitutes the “real threats” to national security. In 1999, they helped produce a report for the FBI itself warning of massive right-wing violence on the eve of the change of the millennium. There was of course no such violence.
While the phony hate hunters were pushing the feds into hunting for non-existent terrorists on the domestic right, the real terrorists carried out the Sept. 11 massacres.
Interesting post.
If memory serves, Sam Francis was himself declared a racist and rendered persona non grata. Deceased now, I was always impressed with his courage in speaking truth to power.