Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
How to Understand SPLC & Co.
Marc Andreessen thoughtfully thought to ask Grok what it thought about SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) — recently charged with fraud by DOJ — and what other activist groups were playing the same game as SPLC. He asked Grok:
So @grok, we all just discovered that the SPLC has allegedly been funding some of the worst of the people and groups it claims to oppose. What are other activist pressure groups that advocate censorship/deplatforming of their enemies that could be doing the same thing?
And Grok answered:
ADL (Anti-Defamation League)
Media Matters
And who else, asked Marc:
Color of Change
CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations)
Keep going! Said Marc:
HRC (Human Rights Campaign)
Sleeping Giants — targets conservative outlets
Why? But why? To keep things Real Simple for the Sen. Iselins amongst us, here are three reasons why our liberal activist friends keep on keeping on:
“There is no politics without an enemy” — Curtis Yarvin curating Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy.
“every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket”— longshoreman Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.
Our beloved mainstream media that amplifies the messaging from all left-wing propaganda outlets and because every liberal journalist learned in xer mother’s milk that all right-wing messaging is racist-sexist-homophobic hate speech.
Wikipedia on SPLC:
Founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm, the SPLC began a litigation strategy in the 1980s of filing civil suits for monetary damages on behalf of the victims of violence from the Ku Klux Klan.
But, but, but… You mean to say that KKK violence was a problem in 1971 six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act? You think this was needed after the following interventions by federal troops:
1957: 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas to integrate a high school.
1962: federal troops to integrate University of Mississippi.
1963: federal troops to integrate University of Alabama.
1965: federalized National Guard to protect Selma marchers.
See Eric Hoffer, above.
To understand all these activist organizations continuing their holy quest for racial justice decades after the requisite laws were passed, you just have to read, learn and inwardly digest my three points above.
Politics is about fighting the enemy. It’s in the jeans. All male apes do nothing except defend the border of the troop’s territory. Did you know that human males only started doing work when they were needed to plow fields, because women got miscarriages when plowing fields with horses? However, experts agree, this does not invalidate the sacred truth that women have been oppressed by the patriarchy since Before the Dawn of time by Nicholas Wade.
Fighting a great cause is so delightful that its soldiers never want to quit. Morris “Dees ran a direct mail and direct marketing business” in the 1960s, and then sold it in 1969. “He used the revenue from the sale to found a legal firm (that eventually became the Southern Poverty Law Center) in 1971.” See? That’s what Eric Hoffer is telling us: once the mass movement has achieved its objective, nobody wants to go home. If you are an ordinary salesman there’s no moral charge from “doing good.” But if you use your sales skills to change the world… Alas, once the cause has won, then the sacred quest turns into a business — just the thing for a direct marketing expert — and degenerates into a racket when you start paying people to act like your dastardly enemy.
The left’s willing accomplices in the media. If you are a lefty activist or politician you have the whole mainstream media ready willing and able to blast your political enemy as exactly the racist-sexist-homophobic hard-right armed insurrectionists you believe them to be. Talk about temptation. If Eve were living today: “the activist beguiled me, and I did eat.” Or Alfred Doolittle: “I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you” about the skunks of racist sexist homophobes lurking in the shadows of which you’ve heard tell.
After the next mass movement has heroically ditched the whole liberal firmament and consigned the SPLCs and Media Matters and HRCs to the flames of Hell, I wonder what its business and its racket will turn out to be.
Stay tuned.
| Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:20:44 GMT |
More End-of-an-Age Musings
If you check X every day right now you see some people saying that President Trump is resetting the world, making the US undisputed Lord of the Americas and fossil fuels. And others saying that he is losing it — and always did.
And then there’s the SPLC indictments, about how the Southern Poverty Law Center has been creating fake far-right activists for years, including the Charlottesville tiki-torch marchers.
And then there is Charles Murray on X discussing the problem the left has with Human Bio-diversity, or HBD. If humans are diverse in their capabilities — rather than a Blank Slate — then the left’s war on inequality is simply power politics with no basis in science. You know, like lefty economics from Marx to Keynes to Krugman has no basis in science.
And there are all kinds of stories about how the Intelligence Community has been getting its oar into national politics, and backing the liberal side all the way. I have a conspiracy theory that the IC and its alums have been far more involved in our national politics than we like to think or admit. And that’s because all the alums are versed in “color revolution” tactics. Which is short for fomenting revolution. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is one such. She worked for the CIA from 2006 to 2014. I’m not saying she actually fomented revolution. But she probably learned all about it.
My point is that our liberal friends are really good at playing power politics, and they really think that people like them should be in power. The problem is that almost everything they believe, culturally and politically and economically, Makes Things Worse.
It really isn’t a good idea to inflame resentment. It really isn’t a good idea to have the care of the poor assigned to government. It really isn’t a good idea to develop a huge establishment of economic regulation. It really isn’t a good idea to make us all dependent on the state. But liberals are in favor of all that because they believe. It never occurs to them that big government gives them power, political power.
And things won’t change until liberals have made such a mess of things that all ordinary people come to rebel against the notion that government can do anything except make thing worse.
I wish it wouldn’t come to that, because it would mean desperate hardship and misery for ordinary people.
I guess it comes down to this. All the signs are signaling that we are coming to the end of an age, because our rulers are fools and know nothing except how to stay in power, for the time being.
Change is coming. The only question is how much the current rulers will resist and how violent the new regime will be. Has there ever been a regime change in history that did not involve a civil war?
It comes down to the question of the butcher’s bill, and who has to pay it.
| Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:06:59 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reign of Terror equals Great Purge equals Cultural Revolution equals Cancel Culture
Socialism promises belonging but delivers isolation.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Question of Human Knowledge
