Over the weekend, Fox New’s Laura Ingraham brought on Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR, considered to be a hate group), to slam the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and pretend that hate groups don’t exist.
“There’s a legal definition as to what a hate crime is,” Dane said, “but a hate group is a concoction of the politically left Southern Poverty Law Center.”
That’s right: a spokesman from a hate group went on Fox News to make the claim that hate groups don’t actually exist.
Watch the clip below:
The Fox News segment was responding to the SPLC’s annual “Hatewatch” report, whose latest edition was released last Tuesday. The report found significant growth and increasing militancy for fringe groups on the radical right. There were 149 of these groups, by their count, in 2008—and 1,360 in 2012, a growth of 813% over four years. The SPLC, a nonprofit civil rights organization which has won commendable legal victories against Aryan supremacists and Ku Klux Klan-affiliated groups, has long listed Dane’s ultra-anti-immigrant organization (FAIR) as one of its hate groups to watch.
Bob Dane and Ingraham, of course, were outraged about what they considered to be SPLC’s smear of FAIR, claiming that it was dangerous for SPLC to label FAIR as a hate group simply for having different political opinions. But contrary to what Dane and Ingraham are getting worked up about, FAIR is not considered a hate group because they oppose immigration reform or don’t support citizenship for aspiring Americans. And contrary to what Ingraham appears to believe about FAIR—that it’s a “legitimate organization that safeguards civil rights”—there are ample reasons why FAIR is rightfully considered a hate group.
Here’s Media Matters about FAIR this weekend:
FAIR has a history of holding rallies where immigrants are smeared as “disease-ridden” criminals. One FAIR event featured a guest who had threatened, “We should hang you and send your body back to where you came from.” FAIR also has close ties to the White Nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens and has received over $1 million in funding from a white supremacist group. According to the SPLC, FAIR is “the most important organization” in a network of 13 hate groups founded by John Tanton, who once warned of a coming “Latin onslaught.”
Here’s the New York Times in 2011 about FAIR and its founder, the supremacist-sympathizer John Tanton:
FAIR was founded on complaints about the immigrants’ numbers, not their culture. But Dr. Tanton feared that they were failing to assimilate. He formed a new group, U.S. English, to oppose bilingual education and demand that government agencies use English alone. By 1988, Dr. Tanton had a high-profile director in Ms. Chavez and ballot measures pending in three states.
Then The Arizona Republic revealed the contents of a memorandum he had sent to friends before a brainstorming session. “Will Latin-American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida (bribe)?” he asked. “As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”
Latino fertility rates caused him special alarm: “those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!”
Soon followed the news that FAIR had received grants from the Pioneer Fund, whose most famous grantee was William B. Shockley, the Nobel-winning physicist who argued that for genetic reasons, blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.
And here’s a just-released report from the Center for New Community on FAIR, John Tanton, and their support for population control policies—that included the use of Quinacrine, a forced sterilization drug:
In its early years, FAIR solicited and received $1.2 million in contributions from the notorious Pioneer Fund, a foundation committed to the pseudoscience of eugenics. Eugenic research aims to prove the existence of fixed genetic differences between races, an undertaking that has been often used for a number of disturbing causes—namely, for proving the genetic superiority of white, European-descended peoples. This practice has been mired in controversy since its inception, and especially since the Nazis used it to rationalize the Holocaust and other war crimes…
Tanton and FAIR, like the Pioneer Fund, have played an important role in funding and connecting many of the players in the eugenics and antiimmigrant movements. Tanton introduced Mumford, Kessel, Epstein, and Collins to key donors and potential supporters of their Quinacrine sterilization efforts…
Today it is clear that a significant number of groups affiliated with FAIR are attempting to weave population control ideology into the anti-immigrant agenda.64 Groups associated with or directly linked to FAIR—like Negative Population Growth, Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR), Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), and NumbersUSA—are also hard at work rebranding anti-immigrant and population control ideology as a contemporary interest in immigration and the over-consumption of resources.
And that’s all before we even get to the Southern Poverty Law Center and all the reasons why they consider FAIR to be a hate group, delineated in a number of reports over the years.
It’s got to be tough working for FAIR and the other Tanton groups these days, especially considering that their anti-immigrant policies–like self-deportation–led to the Republicans’ trouncing in the 2012 elections. Now many Republicans are running away from FAIR and its ilk as fast as they can, in order to give the party some shot at a political future. While Bob Dane got a friendly reception from Ingraham on FOX News, other conservatives have been all over FAIR for being too extremist:
Now, Republicans pushing the party to rethink its approach to the issue are accusing those groups — Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — of masquerading as conservative. Critics say the groups and some of their supporters are pressing an unorthodox agenda of strict population control that also has included backing for abortion, sterilization and other policies at odds with conservative ideology.
“If these groups can be unmasked, then the bulk of the opposition to immigration reform on the conservative side will wither away,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a leading organizer of the effort.
If Bob Dane really believes that hate groups don’t exist, he should take a closer look at the one he works for.
