Anti-immigrant ringleader sad his hate group has been labeled a 'hate group' by SPLC

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, has a sad. See, he doesn’t appreciate the fact that CIS—a top ally of Jeff Sessions and others from the Trump regime—was just labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate activity nationwide. Krikorian believes this is really a campaign to delegitimize, silence, and oppress him, and like all delegitimized, silenced, and oppressed people, he penned an op-ed in one of the nation’s top papers in which to air his grievances:

Since 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center has methodically added mainstream organizations critical of current immigration policy to its blacklist of “hate groups,” including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Californians for Population Stabilization, among others. In February, my own organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), got its turn.

The wickedness of the SPLC’s blacklist lies in the fact that it conflates groups that really do preach hatred, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Nation of Islam, with ones that simply do not share the SPLC’s political preferences. The obvious goal is to marginalize the organizations in this second category by bullying reporters into avoiding them, scaring away writers and researchers from working for them, and limiting invitations for them to discuss their work.

The rationale offered for CIS’s inclusion on the blacklist is implausible even for those predisposed to support blacklists. The SPLC long ago made a hate figure of John Tanton, a controversial Michigan eye doctor it breathlessly describes as the “puppeteer” of various groups skeptical of current immigration policy, including CIS.

So his argument seems to be, “Hey, we don’t wear sheets!” Still, he does his best to whitewash both Tanton and Tanton from CIS history, saying that at most Tanton just raised money for the group, and that Tanton’s “controversial”—in other words, racist—claims about immigrants and others groups were just “vices.” But even if Tanton were just a funder, he’s still a part of the group’s DNA. And as for some of those so-called “vices,” well, check out them out, courtesy of SPLC.