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Hate Debate
Insight on the News, June 19, 2000 by Robert Stacy McCain
A noted researcher says the 'hate fringe' isn't as crowded as some claim and accuses liberals of exaggerating the danger of extremists.
They collect millions of dollars for their crusades against hate groups. But do so-called "watchdog" organizations exaggerate the dangers posed by neo-Nazis and other racist movements?
Laird Wilcox thinks so. A Kansas author and editor who has spent decades researching what he calls "fringe" groups, Wilcox claims the total number of active, organized extremists on the right is not much more than 10,000.
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"Because of their nature, it's very difficult to come up with firm numbers" for such groups, says Wilcox, who estimates militia groups comprise only about 5,000 to 6,000 people. The Ku Klux Klan is down to about 3,000 members. The combined membership of all neo-Nazi groups is probably just 1,500 to 2,000."
In a nation of more than 270 million people, the small size of such fringe groups represents a tiny danger, argues Wilcox, yet they are the target of an "industry" of watchdog groups. "There is an antiracist industry entrenched in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics whose identity and livelihood depend upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization," he writes in his 1999 book, The Watchdogs. Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, based in Montgomery, Ala., have become "a massive extortion racket."
The SPLC, founded in 1971, has amassed an endowment of $113 million through the efforts of cofounder Morris Dees, who served as finance director for Democratic Sen. George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. The SPLC consistently has exaggerated the size and numbers of extremist groups, claims Wilcox, who for more than 20 years has edited the Guide to the American Right (now in its 24th edition) and the Guide to the American Left (in its 21st edition), each of which lists hundreds of organizations.
In 1992, for instance, SPLC's Klan-watch division claimed some 346 white-supremacy groups operated in the United States. In terms of "viable groups," says Wilcox, "the actual figure is about 50." Although the SPLC recently announced that the number of hate groups had declined, it claimed the figures "may be deceiving" in part because of a trend of consolidation in which "smaller groups disbanded or joined larger organizations."
According to SPLC spokesman Mark Potok, however, Wilcox has had "an ax to grind for a great many years. He spends his time attacking other people who do antiracist work, calling them everything from Communists to opportunistic slime." Wilcox's criticism has been "used by right-wing extremists very frequently as a vehicle to attack us," Potok adds.
But Wilcox is not the only critic of the SPLC. Left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn said Dees has raised millions "by frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street." According to the Atlanta Constitution, Dees used "the campaign's donor list of 700,000 liberals for the law center."
Wilcox, however, has chronicled scandals involving numerous antiracist groups:
* In 1993, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, which monitors anti-Semitism, came under scrutiny when the FBI accused one of its paid investigators, Roy Bullock, of using confidential information from San Francisco police inspector Tom Gerard to compile computer files on political groups.
* In 1996, the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based group originally known as the National Anti-Klan Network, sparked a national media uproar by claiming "a well-organized white-supremacist movement" was responsible for an "epidemic" of arson attacks against black churches in the South. Within months, journalists and law-enforcement officials had concluded that church-burnings actually had declined, that racism was a motive in less than half of the arsons and that white churches were more often targeted by arsonists.
* In 1992, the Political Research Associates, based in Cambridge, Mass, became embroiled in controversy when one of its analysts, Chip Berlet, "conclusively identified" the Rev. Francis Stryokowski as having attended a 1988 meeting of the "Anti-Communist Confederation of Polish Freedom Fighters." The 76-year-old Catholic priest later claimed he "did not know ahead of time" about the anti-Semitic nature of the meeting conducted by former Klan leader Bob Miles.
Wilcox says most watchdog groups have a tendency to use what he calls "links and ties" to imply connections between individuals and groups. "It's kind of like three Catholics hold up a bank in San Francisco, and you blame the pope," he says, citing the Oklahoma City bombing as an instance in which the links-and-ties method was used to blame militia groups for the bombing. "Militias had nothing to do with Oklahoma City, absolutely nothing," says Wilcox, citing the massive FBI investigation that turned up "absolutely no tangible link between [convicted bomber Timothy] McVeigh and any militia group."
