CAPS Board Member Responds Angrily to Request for Comment
I thought our readers might be interested in the email I received from CAPS board member Stuart Hurlbert after I wrote to him, CAPS President Diana Hull, and CAPS board member Ben Zuckerman, seeking comment for my blog post "Lou Dobbs Citing Extremists, Again." I asked them about the Pioneer Fund grant they received and about CAPS' relationship with Wayne Lutton, the white supremacist mentioned in my blog post.
Here's what I received back from Hurlbert:
Diana,
My recommendation is that you not reply to Beirich. Her organization is not interested in any rational or civil discussion of population stabilization, immigration, or environmental issues.
The SPLC is basically a fascistic, hate-mongering organization with an open borders agenda. Its main strategy is use smear tactics, innuendo and charges of "hate" against any individual or group that has become effective in stymying the open borders agenda of SPCL and other organizations of the radical left and radical right.
It functions much like Hamas, or Hezbollah, or drug lords who provide gyms and soccer fields to rural Mexican villages. It does a few good things (like go after the KKK, neoNazis, etc.) in order to drum up donations to fund a lot of bad things.
Below is a good example of how even very liberal institutions increasingly recognize SPLC's lack of credibility. The news director of our local PBS radio station, based at SDSU, used SPLC "information" to write a smear piece on our local Minuteman group.
I called him on the smear, in a letter (below) that was copied to the KPBS and SDSU administration. Three months later there was a KPBS news story (url below) about how he was leaving his job. No administrator has admitted to me that he was fired, but they also have not denied that he was. If he's managed to find a new job, we can be sure he now takes all pontifications from the SPLC cum grano magno salis, as most of the public does.
It is heartwarming, of course, to have finally gotten the attention of SPLC, as it is at least an index of our effectiveness.
It has seemed eminently unfair to me that many of our allies such as FAIR, The Social Contract Press, etc. got listed as "hate groups" before we did. Talk about invidious discrimination and social injustice!
And as one who has been in this business for more than 20 years, it is irresponsible to the point of criminality that SPLC does not yet have a mini bio on me up on their website, in their pantheon of "haters", when they have so many wet-behind-the-ears newcomers up there!
Again, my recommendation is that we waste no time responding to fascist groups with hidden agendas.
Stuart
KPBS News Director Signing Off
http://www.sdsuniverse.info/people_content.asp?id=60321
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 14:51:17 -0700
To: news@kpbs.org
From: "Stuart H. Hurlbert" <shurlbert@sunstroke.sdsu.edu>
Subject: KPBS: biased treatment of immigration issues
Dear Michael Marcotte [and the SDSU and KPBS administration],
re: Watchdog Group Claims Minutemen Linked to White Supremacists
http://www.kpbs.org/news/local;id=9235
This is a shameful piece of yellow dog, muckraking journalism. Maybe the biased treatment of immigration issues by KPBS is now beyond remedy, and it's time for heads to roll in the news department as well? This is a disgrace to KPBS and the SDSU community.
Many SDSU employees and thousands of SDSU alumni are Minutemen or Minutemen supporters.
If you believe that use of smear language and innuendo are appropriate to a news organization then at least have the courage to do it on your own, without relying on the Southern Poverty Law Center as a crutch.
The extreme left, open-borders agenda of the SPLC (just one of many such organizations hiding behind the label of "civil rights") and its propensity for smear tactics have long been known. Anyone working in a news organization surely must be aware of that.
Over the last twenty years, tremendous numbers of SDSU students, staff and faculty, for example, have been active supporters of Prop. 187 (denial of state benefits to illegal aliens), Prop. 209 (ending racial preferences), Prop. 54 (prohibiting governmental racial categorization of individuals), and halting the recent amnesty legislation in Congress.
In every case, these individuals and the organizations they worked with with have been smeared as "hate groups", "racists", "white supremacists", "nativists", etc. by the SPLC. Got that?! We're talking about tens of thousands of folks in the SDSU community! You are being successful in drawing a line in the sand with KPBS and SPLC on one side and ourselves on the other.
And, certainly on most of these issues, the majority of the citizenry, in San Diego and elsewhere, has been more with the Minutemen and allied groups than they have been with KPBS or SPLC. Damage to SDSU's reputation with the general public via slanted reporting on this issue by its guest, KPBS, is something for the SDSU administration to assess.
If you want to do a piece on white supremacy organizations, by all means do it. But don't waste your time with the MM. For a couple of years I've participated in occasional MM operations from the beautiful border in Campo to the center of the Mexica movement in Maywood, and I've yet to meet a racist - at least not on the MM side of the street. Get off your butt and into the street, and you'll discover why being a white supremacist would be rather dangerous for a MM. Often 20-30 percent of the MM at one of our events are blacks and hispanics. Personally, when I show up at one I sometimes get more hugs and kisses from cute hispanic grandmothers than I can handle.
KPBS, like other local news organizations, of course has never reported on the racist signs often held up by supporters of open borders, or talked about the racist taunts routinely slung at MM at every big demonstration. Just as it will never consider doing any investigative reporting of the many organizations (ACLU, CRALF, Catholic Church, International Socialist Organization, MEChA, etc., etc., etc.) in San Diego County actively supporting illegal immigration and illegal aliens, and usually breaking federal law in doing so.
Where are the stories about the weekly drug shipments across the border in Campo or Jacumba? About weekly violence against Border Patrol agents out there and elsewhere? About the number of persons killed by illegal aliens in the county the last few years? How about a story on how many lives would have been saved if over the last 20 years local law enforcement had aided the feds in identifying and apprehending illegal aliens, as they have had the option of doing under existing federal law?
Where was KPBS when the Senate passed a bill a year ago (S.2611) that would have tripled legal immigration rates and doubled the rate of U.S. population growth from about 1%/year to 2%/year? Did it report those aspects? Is the KPBS staff incapable of analyzing the social, economic, and environmental consequences of such a growth rate for California or the San Diego Region? Perhaps KPBS did not want to give positive credit to Republicans in the House for killing that bill?
At least on the issues relating to immigration and MM, KPBS's new coverage is biased, superficial, and focused on the trivial. If you think the general public is fooled, you're wrong, and it is hurting SDSU.
Sincerely, Stuart Hurlbert
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Stuart H. Hurlbert
Department of Biology
Life Science Building
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, California 92182-4614
Tel. 619-594-5409, Fax. 619-594-5676
Email: shurlbert@sunstroke.sdsu.edu
Research Professor of Biology; Director, Center for Inland Waters
CIW website: http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/
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"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." - Lao Tzu
"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody will see it." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society." - Thurgood Marshall
"Our country and state have a special obligation to work toward the stabilization of our own population so as to credibly lead other parts of the world towards population stabilization." - Ronald Reagan
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." - anonymous U.S. Navy chaplain
