Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Col Steale, Susan's Wait. Just listen as a Fate, A Shadows,
a Secrets Line, the Coast, the Sky Amlas Graminologist, Seals
of Law in the alocyles A Crime Break.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And Jage Bruce Star.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
And here's America's Criminologist, doctor Kerry Myers. Hello, my friends,
Welcome to America's Criminologists. Glad glad to be here. Retired
major county sheriff and former special agent and State trooper.
I spent about fifteen years in academia serving as a
school dean and professor teaching criminology. This is a show
(00:57):
where we talk about crime culture and the founds that
sustain civil society. I have a new book coming out
in the spring of twenty twenty seven. It's going to
be a two volume set of the Rise of the
Feral Man and the Return of the Feral Man. It's
an expansion of my original thoughts on the advent of
Feral Man. It's going to explain how we lost our way.
The second volume, The Return of Fero Man, offers practical
(01:20):
roadmap for restoring faith, familying, formation, and the foundations of
a healthy civilization. So stay tuned for more update dates
on that as we get closer, and as always, feel
free to look at my substack at doctor Currymeyers dot
substack dot com. This segment of America's criminologists is brought
to you by Real Resilience. That's our eel Resilience. It's
(01:44):
a transformative programming inmates prepare for successful re entry using
inspirational films and guided discussions. Real Resilience teaches practical tools
to build resilience, strengthen relationships, and restore hope for the future.
It's real learning through real stories, where positive choices are modeled,
(02:04):
not just preached. Real Resilience because re entry isn't just release,
it's a second chance done right. All right, here's my
riff for the day. One of the challenges in criminal
justice and public policy is learning to follow incentives. We
often ask who broke the law, who violated a policy,
(02:27):
or who crossed an ethical line, But sometimes the more
important question is who profits from that very narrative, And
for decades, Americans were told that certain organizations existed solely
to protect civil rights and expose extremism. Yet when large
(02:47):
nonprofits accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars gain influence with
government agencies shape media coverage and label political opponents. It
becomes fair to ask whether the mission is still the mission,
or whether the mission has become just a profit center
for political activism. Today, we're going to examine one of
(03:10):
the most controversial organizations in America, the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and ask a simple question, when does advocacy become an
industry and when does a nonprofit become something entirely different?
Joining us today as Professor Nicholas Gidarno. Professor Gidarno is
(03:33):
a political science professor at Suffolk County Community College in
New York, where he is taught for nearly two decades.
He has extensive experience in homeland security and emergency management management,
having worked for the New York State Division of Homeland
Security and Emergency Services. He is the host of the
nationally recognized PAS Report podcast Excuse Me, and serves as
(03:58):
a Higher Education fellow with Camp Reform. I really love
his podcast. I highly recommend that everybody watches it and
pays attention because there are some very good topics that
he covers. He's a frequent contributor on television, radio, digital media,
and he's known for his analysis of government institutions, higher education,
(04:19):
free speech, national security, and the growing influence of ideological
organizations on public policy. His work focuses on helping Americans
understand how power, bureaucracy, and political narratives shape our institutions
in culture. Professor joins us today for an end depth
discussion on that Southern Poverty Law Center, It's influence on
(04:44):
government and media, and the growing controversy surrounding that organization. Nick,
thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Thanks for having me. Look forward to the conversation.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, and congratulations on any another semester. I know as
a former faculty member, that was an important deal to
get the finals, especially the end of the year and
into the academic year. Get that out of the way.
So I'm sure you're partying like an animal after it.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I lived my wife semester to semester.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
It's great, absolutely so, Nick. For years, American Americans viewed
the Southern Poverty Law Center as a civil rights watchdog.
When I was in law enforcement in the KBI, we
would get briefs from them directly. Today we're seeing investigations
and indictments, allegations of donor deception, and growing questions about
(05:35):
its relationship with government agencies. Now, for listeners who haven't
followed this story closely, what happened to the SBLC, that's
what it's called referred to. And how did an organization
founded be to fight hate become one of the most
controversial nonprofits in America today.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah, it really is insane when we look at what's
going on with the Southern Poverty Law Center, what we're
finding out today. I mean, just the other day, superseding
indictment came down where it alleges that the Southern Poverty
Law Center not only had these informants infiltrate these groups
and they were paying them, but when the informants wanted
(06:17):
to leave these groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center forced
them to stay. Not only did they force them to stay,
they helped provide money to expand the extremist organization's reach.
They helped with recruiting more members to these extremist organizations.
So the Southern Poverty Law Center tells its donors, well,
(06:37):
we're combating extremism at the same time it's actually trying
to help these organizations. So there's a lot there to unpacked.
But I think one of the biggest stories that a
lot of people are missing is that the Southern Poverty
Law Center had direct access into our government, into the
highest levels of law enforcement and intelligence, and actually influenced
(06:58):
what would be declared extremists and what would not, who
would get targeted with investigations, and who wouldn't. And I
think that that, to me is some of the most
damaging and revealing things not of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
but our own government, because the Southern Poverty Law Center
is found within our government, it's found within the private sector.
(07:20):
It's also found within the educational sector. A lot of
schools use the Southern Poverty Law Center when they're teaching
things like hate in the United States and extremism in
the United States. So they got a real problem on
their hand. And today is a perfect way to talk
about it, because the head of the Southern Poverty Law
Center was testifying before Congress.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I'm when I talked about us getting
in the KBI getting these briefs, we get them directly
from them, and we'd get them also from the FBI
citing them in a lot of you know, this is
this is I'm dating myself, but this is back in
the late nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, UH in
(08:00):
their in their work on you know, watching extremism and
having intelligence on extream extremism. UH in law enforcement is
a you know, as a detective, As an investigator, I always,
you know, like most say, follow the money, and as
a criminologist and teaching in my classes, I would else
(08:20):
tell my students follow the money. Regardless of what's going on,
money is going to be the incentive. Did SPLC create
a system where labeling people became more valuable than actually
solving problems?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It certainly did. And when you look at the amount
of money we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars
here that that they were able to raise off this
idea of extremism and combating extremism, and then they would
funnel it through all these SHEW companies. And it's a
level of sophistication that doesn't normally exist with nonprofits. I mean,
when we think of nonprofits, most people think feeding the homeless,
(08:57):
sheltering the homeless, cleaning up the reads. When people think
of nonprofits, they don't think of some type of shadow
intelligence organization that serves as a pipeline to feed information
to the government and actually direct intelligence operations. So this
was a backdoor that I warned about. In twenty twenty one,
the Biden administration release what was called the National Strategy
(09:20):
for Countering Domestic Terrorism, and in that document it explained
how anyone that expressed any type of anti government sentiment
or anti authorities sentiment could be declared a potential domestic
terrorist or domestic violent extremist. Now, it didn't define what
anti government sentiment or anti authority sentiment is, and that
(09:41):
was the purpose because it could capture anything. Prior to
the Biden administration, when we talked about dvees, it was
always we used the term AGAVI anti government, anti authority,
violent extremists. By dropping the violent extremist part and putting sentiment,
it broadened out the network where it could capture anyone
and everyone. Now, if you look at the National Strategy,
(10:04):
and I churage the audience to read it, it's only
about thirty one pages. Under the Biden administration, if you
look at the pillars of how to quote unquote combatant
domestic terrorism, it explains that the government wants to create
these public private partnerships where they work with organizations like
the Southern Poverty Law Center defeated information. Now why is
(10:26):
this dangerous, Well, because the Southern Poverty Law Center is
an ideological organization. It's not a nonprofit that people normally
think about. This is an organization that tries to push
political viewpoints. And to give you an example, the Southern
Poverty Law Center was used as to justification for what
was called the Richmond Memo that came out of the FBI. Now,
(10:48):
the Richmond Memo was based on anti Catholic ideology, where
the FBI said that Catholics may have a proclivity to
domestic violent extremism because of their pro life stancers, their
belief that God only created two genders. And so the
Southern Poverty Law Centers said, because Catholics believed this, they
(11:11):
could potentially wade into this idea of domestic terrorism. Now,
initially we were told that the Richmond product was just
you know, a couple of agents from the Richmond office
in Virginia and that was it. Once Director Christopher Ray
found out about it, he pulled the product back. He
said that it violated the FBI's rules and that it
(11:33):
wasn't worthy of publication. Since then, we know that the
Richmond product actually flowed to multiple office field offices throughout
the United States. We know that field offices in California
actually took action trying to recruit Catholics in churches to
serve as informants. And what was it based on, Well,
(11:54):
it's based on an ideological framework. In fact, FBI agents
at the time in an FBI and this is all
public information in an FBI email exchange. One official as
is anyone really asking for a product for this? And
apparently we work at the behest of the SPLC. Another
FBI agent wrote back over reliance on the SPLC hate
(12:15):
designations is problematic. So even internally within the FBI itself
they saw a problem with this, but it didn't matter
because the SPLC had that much power and influence. And
when we look at the targeting parents at school board meeting, Catholics,
political opponents. Turning Point USA is designated as a hate group,
(12:37):
Mom's for Liberty designated. There's a commonality between it. All
of this leans conservative. Now here's the thing today. The
SPLC president was asked, why isn't at a fifteen hundred
groups that are listed on the hate map of the
SPLC hot com. There's no Islamic groups listed on that map.
(12:59):
That's an interesting notion, right and those Congressman Trip Roy
that was asking this question, and the head of the
SPLC responded that we don't designate the hate label to religions.
We only designated to what people say and what people
within those religions say. And so tip Roy followed up,
(13:20):
are you telling me you said anyone that criticizes LBGTQ
community could be land on your hate map? Are you
telling me that the Islamic groups that exist out there,
like al Qaeda and isis are pro LBGTQ. And it
really is interesting. This was a political weapon used to
label normal political speech positions that have been widely accepted
(13:44):
in the American public for decades, to make it as
if those people are extremists. So, if you are pro life,
it used to be pro life, pro choice, those were
accepted political positions for decades. Well, now pro life, you're
an extremist because you want to take away women's rights.
If you believe in two genders, well now you're an
(14:06):
extremist because you do not want to deny trans people
their rights. And that's how the whole scheme worked. But
here's the real danger. The SPLC was brought into FBI
field offices to train FBI agents. Now, imagine being a
new agent you just hired, and you're going through this
training process and you're told that here's the extremists. Parents
(14:30):
at school board meetings, traditional Catholics, people that are part
of Turning Point USA, and other conservative organizations like the
Family Research Center, these are the extremists, these are the
threats to the United States. Well, that a new FBI
agent will actually believe that, maybe because that's what he's
being taught. Well, why would the FBI be lying to me?
(14:52):
Why would they bring in these people to lie to me?
And so the whole system of our governance was actually
weaponized against the American people.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
So did this occur in a phase or were we
duped even back then, because at one point they seem
to change their tactics. They were kind of more doing
research and then they would follow up with research and
then put out information based on research. And now most
recently they actually got involved in active investigations, you know,
(15:24):
undercover work or not them, but hiring sobricades if you will,
or informants. But is it your opinion that this has
been problematic even back when the organization started, or at
some point did the slippery slope occur and they put
profit and notoriety before truth.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I can't answer when this problem first started within the SPLC,
but I think it's clear it might have started for
noble reasons. However, at some point it evolved into an
ideological group. And listen, the bureau, the FBI stopped tea
the SPLC as some side, some sort of outside resource. Right,
we know that our government works with outside think tanks,
(16:07):
they work with outside groups to get information. But they
stop treating the SPLC as an outside resource and they
started treating it as a partner. Today, the SPLC president
was trying to justify the hate maps, saying that they're
completely justified its freedom of speech, that they're just putting
out their opinion. However, they didn't present it as their opinion.
(16:31):
When they were feeding this information to the government and
to the public, they were presenting it as if it
was fact. And they've been sued numerous times and actually
lost by slandering people's reputations. But imagine your name pops
up on the SPLC's radar, you go on their website.
Imagine the harm and to your reputation that that could
do to you. So I don't know exactly when the
(16:53):
transition started with the SPLC. But the one thing that
really comes that I keep coming back to on my mind.
Most people do not know how to cultivate informants. That's
not something that you could just go up to someone
and be like, all right, I'm going to pay you
X amount of dollars each and every month for you
to feed us information. So when we're looking at it,
(17:14):
who actually trained the SPLC to cultivate manage informants inside
these violent groups? I mean, this takes a little bit
of sophistication in tradecraft. And to me, I think that
when we look at the SPLC's methods that they used,
the shell companies they used to provide to these informants
the information they were getting, they couldn't have been doing
(17:37):
that on their own. They had to be getting advice
from some way. They had to be getting a certain
level of training of how to handle these sources, these assets,
and that to me is a big problem that we
still don't know the answer to. But one thing I
do know is that the donors were ripped off. The
donors were giving money for a group to expose extremism
(17:59):
and groups that exist within the United States, and that
organization was taking that money, feeding it to informants to
expand extremism within the United States, to make these groups
even more powerful within the United States. And that's where
it goes back to your question. If there isn't much extremism,
(18:20):
well maybe if we create more, it generates more revenue
for US, it gives more donations to us. And I
want to make this point clear because when we look
at this idea of white supremacy, we've heard it a
lot over the course of the last decade and a half.
That's a growing threat to the United States. If we
go back to the nineteen twenties, the ku Klux Klan
(18:41):
was at the height of its power. We had one
hundred and twenty nine million people living in the United States.
Four million members were part of the Kukux Klan. They
held high level positions. We're talking judges, lawyers, politicians, police chiefs.
If we look at today, the Kukux Klan membership ranges
from three thousand to five thousand individuals in a country
of three hundred and fifty million people. And they're not
(19:03):
high level individuals. These are the rejects within our society
that go to these organizations. We look at all the
whites premise groups that are named on the SPLC's website. Well,
there's not a lot we know about these. Somebody's groups
have one or two members, and yet they're listed as
a group as if they're a threat to the American homeland.
(19:23):
So I think the SPLC has fudging this entire extremist
narrative in order to raise more money to line their
pockets and in order to get more influence over the government,
the politicians, the education system, and even the corporate sector.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Is there any evidence that retired FBI agents went to
work for them and help provide train them, get them
to understand how to do investigations or potential other law
enforcement officers. Have you seen anything where that could be possible.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That's a great question. I wish we had a press
that would investigate that. I have not seen that so far. However,
I would not roll it out because I haven't explicitly
searched for that to see if former FBI agents have
actually gone to work for the SPLC. We know that
in the world of government that there's this revolving door
that exists. When people leave FBI, you see high level
(20:17):
people go off to work for social media companies. They
may go work for the military industrial complex, they may
become consultants at certain firms. It would not shock me
if the SPLC did hire former retired FBI agents to
give them advice, given tactical advice on how to cultivate informants.
(20:38):
I think that's a critical question that I wish would
have been asked today. It certainly wasn't because I watched
the hearings, but also in the core case, I'd like
to see if it get as.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Well, and especially if none of this came to a head.
And if you go back again twenty years ago, it
was as gospel stuff that there was being given to
the FBI. They treated it as gospel many times. It
could have been a very natural leaf to say, well,
you know, we get their information. I'm we use it,
you know, So there's no ethical issue or bridge. So yeah,
(21:11):
I'm retired, I'm going to go, you know, teach them
how to do investigations or how to work informance or
whatever it may be. So yeah, it's definitely something that
we need to follow up. So if if tomorrow Congress
to asks you if you were there today testifying. Are
there three draft reforms for nonprofit transparency and accountability that
(21:33):
would allow the protection of legitimate civil rights organizations while
preventing ideological organizations from becoming political influence operations.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I think that there's a number of things that Congress
actually needs to do. First of all, they need to
know exactly what is the extent of the relationship between
the FBI and the SPLC. Not just the SPLC, any
other ideological activist organization that's providing advice to our government.
We should know about it. So I think that Congress
(22:10):
should call for the immediate to classification of every work
product that relied on SPLC sourcing. I think the public
has a right to know how deep this pipeline ran.
But we also have to dismantle the mechanism that created
this pipeline. That's the national strategy. That's where Congress needs
to step in and look at this national strategy and
(22:31):
how it created this shadow intelligence apparatus that exists, and
they need to start removing the statutory authority from some
of these agencies. Another thing that when we look at
this world of nonprofits, I think we need a clearer
definition of what a nonprofit organization actually does. I think
that nonprofit organizations have been abused in this country. They're
(22:54):
actually activist organizations with the shield of nonprofits to it.
And I think that any federal aid agencies that are
using any type of unvetted partisan hateless as the sole
basis for domestic investigations into Americans, there should be a disclaimer. Okay,
we there should be a warning label, right. We have
warning labels on a lot of our products. We have
(23:16):
an ingredients list on our food products. Well, we should
have warning labels on intelligence assessments that came out where
the the FBI has to disclose who helped provide that
type of information, what are the donors to that organization,
what are the biases of that organization. All of us
(23:36):
have a right to know the partisan history of an
organization that's providing information to our government.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yeah, and the real, the real struggle here is that
when you accept this kind of documentation from this agency. Now,
the FBI is not doing it now, I'm talking about
in the past, but it would when you gather Actually,
we don't know if they're not, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
And I think that's the thing because the mechanism remain
in place, the pipeline remains in place. All you did
was swap out a democratic administration with a Republican administration.
So as of right now today, if Trump's FBI wanted to,
and I don't think they're doing this, but if they
wanted to, they could just go to conservative organizations and say, okay,
(24:19):
fetus intelligence and all the Marxists and communist organizations that
exist in America will label them anti government, anti authority
sentiment and give them the domestic violent extremist labels and
start investigating them. And that's why you know I'm conservative.
I openly admit that. I don't hide that from anyone.
I'm open about it. But it's why I want about
(24:40):
this to the left and say, hey, do you not
see how this could easily be turned around against you
when Republicans are in power. That's why it needs to
be dismantled today, as opposed to kitting the can down
the road, because even if the abuses have stopped under
the Trump administration for now, there is nothing that another
(25:01):
administration coming in can't undo that Trump did well.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
And remember that we have regional fusion centers, fusion intelligence
centers that are throughout the United States and they're intelligence centers,
so that means they're getting intelligence from local, state, federal officials,
law enforcement, and they're putting that into data collection capability.
(25:26):
So when somebody looks up you know, Curry Myers, if
if it's meet that, if it's met that guidelines. Okay,
I'm Catholic, Uh, I'm pro life, you know, because I
follow the tenants of the church. I'm conservative, you know, politically,
(25:46):
I do the Rosary, you know, and they I think
at one time they even said, if you want to
identify potential weapons, it's people who overly use the Rosary.
And you know, quote Scripture I think is even one
of the things that they were And they like Latin masses.
So you know, all of these together. People have to
understand that all of a sudden, you could end up
(26:08):
in a in a generator, in a which is intelligence
at a fusion center. That could cost you, you know,
your freedom at some point. Now they got it. You
gotta have physical evidence. But this this is you know,
it's kind of goes with the FISA warrants, is that
it's way too under the table. There's not enough information
(26:31):
and I realize if we're going to fight terrorism, we
need to take action immediately, but we can't allow this
kind of weaponization of intelligence gathering to harm us. We
have about thirty seconds left at this.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I agree with that. I think that, unfortunately, what Americans
have done is that we've traded liberty in the name
of safety, and nobody really questioned how government ultimately ends
up abusing its power because you have to always find
a threat if you're investing a trillion dollars into that
threat each and every year.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Absolutely, folks, you're listening to America's Criminologists with Doctor Curry Myers,
and we'll continue with Professor Giadano right after this commercial break. Hi, folks,
(27:31):
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Speaker 3 (30:08):
Hey, my friends, is doctor Curry Myers, America's criminologist. I
have a new sponsor for my show. I mean Real Resilience.
That's our a e l transformative program helping inmates prepare
for successful re entry and uses inspirational films and guided discussions.
Real Resilience teaches practical tools to build resilience. It's really
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an important tool, Real Resilience because re entry isn't just released,
it's a second chance. Done right, all right, all right,
all right. Welcome back to America's criminologists. Please remember that
you can view my work on substack at doctor Curry
Meyers dot substack dot com. We have been talking to Professordarno,
(30:55):
a political science professor at Solfolkcantic Community College in New York.
He is the host of the nationally recognized PAS Report
podcasts and serves as a higher education fellow with Campus Reform.
Before the break, we discussed the SPLC as an institution.
In this half hour, I'd like to move from the
organizational level to the human level, because ultimately, public policy
(31:19):
is not about organizations, It's about people. Recently, Nick interviewed
Terry Newsom, a father and education advocate who found himself
facing scrutiny after challenging school curriculum decisions. His story raises
important questions about labeling, free speech, and civic participation in America.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Professor, welcome back, glad to be here.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
One of the things that concerns me as a criminologist
is what happens when labels become fundraising brochures, media narratives
and began affecting real people. Now recently, as I said
on this on your Podcas asked you had Terry Newsome
it was a disturbed I had heard this before, I
saw it in the news before, but your podcasts got
(32:09):
into it even deeper, and I gotta tell you, brother,
it was disturbing. It was disturbing. According to Terry, after
challenging explicit material in his local school district, he literally
found himself caught in a chain of events that included
(32:31):
activist targeting, media attacks, federal travel scrutiny, and even a
visit from the FBI. Can you walk the audience through
Terry's story and explain why you believe it serves as
a warning about how organizations like SPLC can influence public
perception and potentially trigger consequences for ordinary citizens engaged in
(32:55):
lawful civic participation.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Well, terry story is an interesting one because here you
had a father, that's all it was. He was selling
that woke up in the mornings, went to work, raised
his kids, and you know, when he started to learn
about what his children were learning about in the school,
he decided to go to a school board meeting and
speak up. And that's what we're supposed to do, right,
That's part of our civic obligation. If there's something wrong
(33:20):
within our communities, we're supposed to raise those concerns. So
he did something that he felt was appropriate. He went
to the school board meetings. He raised concerns about sexually
explicit materials that were being taught and available to the
students of the school. And then he found himself being
targeted where the SPLC all these protests started at the
(33:41):
school board meetings. The SPLC designated him as someone that's
an extremists and hateful. You had media outlets that were
slandering him that we're saying that he's a racist and
he hates the LBGT community, and all that led to
him losing his job. Was terminated from his job. Ultimately,
(34:02):
as you stated, he did get into travel scrutiny. Apparently
he was put on a list in the higher ups
of our government. Well how do you get on that list?
And it was because at least what I think is
that the SPLC was the one that fed the name
to the government to get him on that list, because
this was just a parent at a school board meeting,
(34:23):
something that most of us would never really hear about.
Once the SPLC picked up that story, that's when it
took off. And he also received death threats from groups
like Antifa and other outfits out there, and it shows
you that if you speak out, you could become a target.
So it creates this chill. This is anti American, right.
(34:43):
I mean, the reality is that I disagree with people
that have communist beliefs, but I will always defend them
and say they have a right to say what they want.
They have a right to believe what they want, because
that's what America is all about. And it's my job
to refute their ideas, as opposed to say that the
government should be used to say islence those ideas, or
some outside organization, some nonprofits should be used to silence
(35:05):
those ideas. But that's exactly what's happened. I mean, you
have people out there that are terrified as speaking up
because they don't want to be labeled with the extremists
or racist label. It is extremely damaging. People have to work,
they have to put food on the table, they want
to raise their families, and they don't want the scrutiny
of being wide and smeared and dragged through the mud
(35:25):
because they decided to publicly state what their opinion is.
So the power of the SPLC is enormous, and it's
not just the SPLC, it's other organizations that exist out there.
But everyone should understand that this isn't just designed to
feed a pipeline to the government so that the government
(35:45):
could target certain folks or certain ideologies. It goes much deeper.
This is about social engineering, right, And we brought up
on the last segment how the anti Catholic memo is
based on the idea of radical Catholics being prolo Well,
think about how the debate has changed and just the
abortion issue. We went from pro life to pro choice
(36:08):
to now people trying to sit there and explain why
partial birth abortions, abortions in the seventh, eighth and ninth
month are bad, that they shouldn't happen. And that's what happens.
Because you're labeled as an extremist, we start seeing political
positions begin to shift to the left, where if you're
outside that, well, then you're the extremist. And I think
(36:31):
that's the danger of these labels. Extremism should be very
narrowly defined. I think the government has been way too
loose in how it defines what an extremist is. And
this was foreseeable you brought up Pfiser right before the break.
We know that in one year alone, two hundred and
seventy four thousand abuses of the PISA process by the FBI.
(36:55):
That's from a federal court. That's not from Professor Drodano.
It's from a federal court that stated in one year long,
two hundred and seventy four thousand abuses. In a few years,
there was well over a million abuses where the FBI
manipulated the FISA process. And there has been zero accountability
in that. We built this giant apparatus after nine to eleven.
(37:18):
And when nine to eleven happened and the Patriot Act
was introduced and we were discussing creating the Department of
Homeland Security, we were told that the Patriot Act was
going to be used to target international terrorist organizations that
are a threat to the homeland. However, even that I
was concerned about it, I was a senior in college.
I raised concerns about it in papers and whatnot. What
(37:41):
happens when that threat is gone. You can't create a
Department of Homeland Security and create all these changes in
how we collect intelligence and build out an intelligence apparatus
within the FBI, when prior to that there were a
law enforce or strictly a law enforcement organization, and tell
me that once the threat of international terrorism is well,
then we're going to begin to cut back the funding
(38:03):
and the personnel that these agencies hired throughout the years.
That was never going to happen. And so you have
to find a new threat, right, because the FBI, the
Department of Homeland Security, they all have to justify their budgets.
And if they come out and say, well, we've eliminated
the threat of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS and
those groups don't really pose a threat to the United States.
(38:24):
They still exist, they're still a thread out there, but
the threat is low, Well, then Congress will turn around
and say, okay, then you don't need the billions upon
billions of dollars we're feeding your department. And so what happened, Well,
we created a new threat, right, and it's the American citizen.
It's political opponents, it's ideology has become the threat. And
that's what we see taking place. It's what we saw
(38:45):
in Terry Newsom's case. But it goes beyond that because
it even goes to influential people see Terry Newsom. He
doesn't have the capabilities to take on the bureaucracy in
groups like the SPLC. But we saw it with Tulsi Gas,
the head of Ode and I and soon to be
form a head. Unfortunately she was placed on a watch list.
(39:06):
She was placed on a list. If you could target
someone like Tolsey Gabbert who simply just speaks out against
some of the government's policies, well then can't any one
of us be a target of this?
Speaker 4 (39:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Absolutely, And some of this started with bullying laws in reality,
because who's the arbiter of what bullying is? And that's
where the you talked about the slippery slope that has occurred. Well, look,
and when you can't define bullying, you if you ask
(39:40):
any bit on the street define bullying, they can't define it.
And what they do define is not illegal now. And
it may be improper, it may be in bad form,
it may be horrible, but horrible speech is not illegal speech.
And when we pass the bullying laws, that was kind
(40:02):
of the first step to normalize free speech.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Well, I agree, and I think it was bullying, and
then I think it turned into this idea of hate right,
because who gets to define what's hateful and what's not.
One of the most terrifying statistics I've seen in recent
years is the fact that those age sixteen to thirty nine,
over fifty per cent of them believe that the First
Amendment should be amended and hate speech should be considered criminal,
(40:29):
it should be able to be charged criminally. Now again,
when I look at a government document like the National Strategy,
it talks about hate a lot, it doesn't define what
hate is. Now. Sometimes hate is extremely obvious, right when
we look at neo Nazi groups and the klu Klux
Klan or the Black Panther organizations, we see the hate,
it's very overt. But other times what they want to
(40:54):
deem as hate is not really hateful. So if I
am believed that only women should partticipate in female sports,
only girls should participate in female sports, it doesn't mean
I hate trans people. It just means I believe that
those that were born women should participate in women's sports
because men competing against women gives an unfair advantage to
(41:15):
the man. I don't hate the trans people, and yet
they'll say, well, what you're saying is hateful. If I
believe in secure borders, and I believe we should deport
illegal immigrants. Think about the word illegal immigrants. They say,
you can't use that terminology that you have to say
undocumented migrant or undocumented person because illegal immigrant is hateful.
(41:39):
And I always talk to my students and I tell
them when we get into the First Amendment issues, and
some of them do believe that hate should be illegal.
Hate speech should be illegal. Always explained with age.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
They because they they have friends that have been bullied.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
No, but people have been bullied since time began, correct,
So it's not something unusual. You just have to try
to deal with it. But the reason that's out of
hand is because we're not forming our children correctly. An
I mean, I didn't go ahead, but I.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Also ask them, well, who gets to define what's hateful
and what's not Who gets to define what's offensive and
what's not right, Because it's not going to be you,
it's going own to be the people in power. So
just think to yourself, if the opposite party controls the
lovers of power, would you want them to really define
(42:29):
what's constitut hate and offensiveness? And some of them actually
do start to see the point I'm getting to that.
The whole reason the First Amendment exists is not for
speech that you agree with. Speech that you agree with
is easy to say, yes, we want free speech. The
whole point of free speech is speech that you actually
disagree with that you have to tolerate it and you
(42:50):
have to refute it with ideas, not through political violence.
But we're seeing a war out there on free speech,
and the way they're doing it is through groups like
the Southern Poverty Law Center that will label justifiable political
opinions as hate, as offensive, and then the government will
take it upon itself to then say, okay, well, if
(43:13):
they're expressing hateful views, they may have extremist ideology, they
may have extremist tendency, and so we should look further
into that. And that's where we see this shadow Intel
group kind of emerge. This mechanism the public private partnerships exist.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah. Yeah. What's the status on Terry's charges? Has he
gotten some is he back? Is he still on the
on the watch list?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
No?
Speaker 2 (43:43):
I don't believe he's on the watch Listen, he hasn't
been charged with any crimes. He's actually meeting what members
of Congress this week, I believe to talk about the
SPLC given that the interview. You know, they testified today
with the SPLC president, so he'll be providing information to
members of Congress about his story about what he faced.
And no one should have to face terror from an
(44:06):
organization simply because that organization labeled you. It is extremely
destructive in a free society. And we see what can
happen when that's done. When nobody in the United States
wants to be called a racist, nobody wants to be
called an extremists, I mean, the misogynists, whatever word it's
you want to use that the left will try and
label you with. Nobody wants to be called those. Because
(44:28):
you become radioactive, you become toxic. Friends that you've had
for years will begin abandoning you because they don't want
to be associated with you anymore. Your neighbors will look
at you with suspicion. And it doesn't just destroy your reputation,
it also destroys your families and your children's reputations as well.
And so it's a very chilling environment that we're currently
(44:48):
living in right now.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
What was Terry's Why did Terry's particular words get escalated
at such a high level, Because there's other people that
have spoken out at school boards, and they've certainly got
knocked on the door by the FBI as well, but
his seemed to be escalated even higher. Was it complaints
(45:12):
from the school board because I know that happens. Was
there somebody in the audience that had from the government.
What made him so unique that stood out well.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
As far as what Terry told me, it was that
there were members of the school board, not just the
school board, but the school itself that were supportive of
the ideology, the Fall Left ideology. It was supportive of
the SPLC, and some of them actually had direct ties
to groups like Antifa. And Terry didn't get the message.
He didn't get the message that was being sent for
(45:45):
him to sit down and shut up. He kept speaking out,
and therefore that's why he became a bigger and bigger
target because he chose to fight back rather than just
submit surrender and just go quietly away. I would guarantee
you had he gone quietly away, his life would have
been much easier. He would have been able to keep
his job, he would have been able to not have
(46:05):
the harassment that he ended up facing. But he chose
to spoke at I think a lot of people that
did receive any type of pressure whatsoever, many of them
did back off once that pressure came. And we know
that that does happen again. People, I understand it. You know,
you have a family. You got to put food on
the table, and if your livelihood is threatened, you're going
(46:27):
to end up being quiet. You're going to toe the
line because you don't want to face that situation where
you can't put food on the table. You have to
sit there and determine what bills you can paying, what
bills you can't. But it's a fear tactic that chose.
The louder you speak out, the more precocious you are,
the more you're going to be targeted, especially so if
(46:49):
you're a hard nosed person like Terry from Chicago, right.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
Well, then we saw it also with I mean just
look at COVID. We had some doctors that were not
defending the practice that was being done.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
They was.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
They had the alternate saying mass do not work. Uh,
the vaccine may have issues, So I'm not I don't
recommend prescribing it. There is all kinds of things that
many doctors said, and they were ostracized.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
You know wellnity licenses were script from them.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Yeah, so I mean this is a real thing. It's
I don't want. The SPLC is a microcosm of this,
of this bigger effect on people when they're having Now,
did the SPLC in Terry's case, did they give him
a special designation or mention him in a report or
(47:46):
a label that.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
They wrote a whole article about him, So he's up
on the website. They wrote an article about him. And
just to give the SPLC and COVID can be related
because those that to push back against let's say mass
push back against the vaccine mandates, well they became anti
government extremists that the SPLC would label. So it is
(48:10):
all directly tied to each other. And then you can
look at how people like doctor j Bardachara and those
who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. We have emails, government emails,
actual emails saying that we need to hurt these people's
reputations so that people don't take them seriously. Those are
government emails that exist. Cal Crawford, CDC said sent a
(48:31):
message to Twitter that they have to remove any unapproved opinions. Well,
opinions are just that their opinions and Terry is allowed
to have his opinion. So when we look at SPLC,
we see this connection that exists. For Terry, they wrote
a whole piece about him. Once they wrote the piece,
that's what triggered the news media to write the piece.
(48:53):
And part of the issue where Terry was in these
school board meetings, they got so crazy, so out of control.
At one school board meeting, Terry was asking people to
show up for him, to show up and get his back,
to show up and support him, and a few members
of the Proud Boys ended up showing up and that
was like, oh my god, now the South Southern poverty
(49:15):
law sentence. See, we told you he's an extremist. Southern
members of the Proud Boys are showing up to defend
Terry Newsom And so that's what made the story even
bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Yeah, So here's the one hundred thousand dollars question. There
is extremism in some areas, mainly on the left, evidence
with support that mainly on the left. Right now as extremism,
But how do we distinguish between legitimate extremism that law
enforcement should monitor in ordinary political dissent protected by the
(49:48):
First Amendment.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Well, I think it's pretty clear. So I think a
good example would be the anti ICE demonstrations that we
see that we witness. Right, if people want to protest
ICE enforcement the way ICE is enforcing immigration law, you
have every single constitutional right to conduct that protest. It's
clear to me that those people that want to go
(50:11):
out there and they want to hold their protests are
free to do that, and I wouldn't call them extremists. However,
what we're also seeing is this organized effort to impede
law enforcement's ability to do their job. What do we know, Well,
I am seeing at a lot of these demonstrations gas
masks being distributed, and we're not talking about you know,
(50:32):
a handful of gas masks, We're talking about hundreds. These
are not cheap gas masks. They have respirators and then
they can withstand the tier. Guess that's being supplait. We
see the tents, we see medical stations that are being
built up. We know that there is an entire network
online that coordinates activities. They capture ICE's license plates, they
post it and they coordinate and they cross reference it
(50:56):
against other groups. To me, that shows organization and coordination
as a command and control element.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
To it.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
So to me that rises to the level of, hey,
maybe we should look into this. Where are they getting
their funding, Who's providing this funding? Are there any type
of foreign nexus to this or any foreigners trying to
exploit this by contributing money? How are they getting all
this real time information and posting it on databases? So
(51:25):
I think you could distinguish between those that may, let's say,
show up to a No King's protest, who have a
legitimate belief and they want to protest the government and
the Trump administration. That's fine, but when you look at
the organizers and coordinators of these events, well, some of
them certainly need to be looked into because there is
(51:46):
a line to be cross. You're allowed to protest, However,
you are not allowed to engage in criminal behavior while protesting.
That's when the protest ends, and that's when it becomes
criminal in nature.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yeah, and we have been way too lenient, uh, in
in major urban areas because they really are not given
authority to investigate the laws that are on the books.
When it comes to how to how you behave at
a demonstration. You can't block city streets, you can't block
public sidewalks.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
You have to get permits. You're I mean, I've been around.
Can't threaten harassment. Uh, there's there's such a thing. Every
just about every city in the world has threatening words
that you know, uh city the ordinances that deal with
threatening words and lloitering, and none of those things are
being investigated. None of those things. People are being arrested.
(52:42):
These are the things that I'm talking about. Are you
seeing you arrest them because you're you're doing it right
in front of a police officer. And we've let hundreds
and thousands of people at different events walk when it
comes to violations of law, and when that's occurred, then
it just it has an effect on everybody where they
(53:05):
think they can do it wherever they go, and you
turn into almost like a third world country. In Mexico,
they block streets if they don't like something. Not in
the United States of America, and now we're doing it.
And there were so many different areas where they no
one would get arrested as a result.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Well, I think we're seeing the results at a lack
of consequences. You know. Unfortunately today in the United States,
there's a lot of people that believe they could do
whatever the hell they want consequences, be damned because there
aren't going to be any And even if they do
get arrested, many of them look at it. I'll be
released on the street and then the district attorneys will
drop the charges and that will be that. So when
you don't have consequences, there's a reason these things metastasize.
(53:49):
And notice it's only happening in certain urban centers. Now
I can tell you you look at the majority of
the country, ICE operates each and every day this coordination, cooperation,
without incident. We have certain jurisdictions where there is no
cooperation and it evolves and gets out of control. There's
a reason behind it, and I think that we have
(54:11):
to start looking deeply into what exactly constitutes nonprofits in
the United States in this twenty first century that we're
living in.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
Oh yeah, it's happening all the time. And we just
saw that the charges thrown out on the Minneapolis church
where they stormed that they literally stormed the church and
gotten in, stopped a worship and there's no charges. It's
completely gone. It's incredible. Nick, thanks for coming on the show.
(54:41):
How can people follow your great work?
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Everyone could go to pasreport dot com. They could follow
me on social media at PAS Report. Make sure to
listen to the PAS Report podcast and follow and subscribe
to it so you never missed an episode. And I
want to thank you for having me on.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
It's always a pleasure. Hope to have you again because
we have some great discussions every time you come on,
and what you're doing is extremely important. And I highly
recommend folks that you take a look at his podcast
and put it on your favorites because it's awful interesting.
My friends, I'm retired Sheriff Curry Myers and this has
been America's criminologist on k M e T. Stay safe,
(55:18):
stay informed, and remember to check out my work on
substack doctor Curry Myers dot substack dot com. Stay safe,
have a great week.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Came Steale suss light us distrusting me as a fate.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
Shadows see quist Doctor.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Currys do the sasquam analogist common seals loosy
Col Steale, Susan's Wait. Just listen as a Fate, A Shadows,
a Secrets Line, the Coast, the Sky Amlas Graminologist, Seals
of Law in the alocyles A Crime Break.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And Jage Bruce Star.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
And here's America's Criminologist, doctor Kerry Myers. Hello, my friends,
Welcome to America's Criminologists. Glad glad to be here. Retired
major county sheriff and former special agent and State trooper.
I spent about fifteen years in academia serving as a
school dean and professor teaching criminology. This is a show
(00:57):
where we talk about crime culture and the founds that
sustain civil society. I have a new book coming out
in the spring of twenty twenty seven. It's going to
be a two volume set of the Rise of the
Feral Man and the Return of the Feral Man. It's
an expansion of my original thoughts on the advent of
Feral Man. It's going to explain how we lost our way.
The second volume, The Return of Fero Man, offers practical
(01:20):
roadmap for restoring faith, familying, formation, and the foundations of
a healthy civilization. So stay tuned for more update dates
on that as we get closer, and as always, feel
free to look at my substack at doctor Currymeyers dot
substack dot com. This segment of America's criminologists is brought
to you by Real Resilience. That's our eel Resilience. It's
(01:44):
a transformative programming inmates prepare for successful re entry using
inspirational films and guided discussions. Real Resilience teaches practical tools
to build resilience, strengthen relationships, and restore hope for the future.
It's real learning through real stories, where positive choices are modeled,
(02:04):
not just preached. Real Resilience because re entry isn't just release,
it's a second chance done right. All right, here's my
riff for the day. One of the challenges in criminal
justice and public policy is learning to follow incentives. We
often ask who broke the law, who violated a policy,
(02:27):
or who crossed an ethical line, But sometimes the more
important question is who profits from that very narrative, And
for decades, Americans were told that certain organizations existed solely
to protect civil rights and expose extremism. Yet when large
(02:47):
nonprofits accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars gain influence with
government agencies shape media coverage and label political opponents. It
becomes fair to ask whether the mission is still the mission,
or whether the mission has become just a profit center
for political activism. Today, we're going to examine one of
(03:10):
the most controversial organizations in America, the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and ask a simple question, when does advocacy become an
industry and when does a nonprofit become something entirely different?
Joining us today as Professor Nicholas Gidarno. Professor Gidarno is
(03:33):
a political science professor at Suffolk County Community College in
New York, where he is taught for nearly two decades.
He has extensive experience in homeland security and emergency management management,
having worked for the New York State Division of Homeland
Security and Emergency Services. He is the host of the
nationally recognized PAS Report podcast Excuse Me, and serves as
(03:58):
a Higher Education fellow with Camp Reform. I really love
his podcast. I highly recommend that everybody watches it and
pays attention because there are some very good topics that
he covers. He's a frequent contributor on television, radio, digital media,
and he's known for his analysis of government institutions, higher education,
(04:19):
free speech, national security, and the growing influence of ideological
organizations on public policy. His work focuses on helping Americans
understand how power, bureaucracy, and political narratives shape our institutions
in culture. Professor joins us today for an end depth
discussion on that Southern Poverty Law Center, It's influence on
(04:44):
government and media, and the growing controversy surrounding that organization. Nick,
thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Thanks for having me. Look forward to the conversation.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, and congratulations on any another semester. I know as
a former faculty member, that was an important deal to
get the finals, especially the end of the year and
into the academic year. Get that out of the way.
So I'm sure you're partying like an animal after it.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I lived my wife semester to semester.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
It's great, absolutely so, Nick. For years, American Americans viewed
the Southern Poverty Law Center as a civil rights watchdog.
When I was in law enforcement in the KBI, we
would get briefs from them directly. Today we're seeing investigations
and indictments, allegations of donor deception, and growing questions about
(05:35):
its relationship with government agencies. Now, for listeners who haven't
followed this story closely, what happened to the SBLC, that's
what it's called referred to. And how did an organization
founded be to fight hate become one of the most
controversial nonprofits in America today.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah, it really is insane when we look at what's
going on with the Southern Poverty Law Center, what we're
finding out today. I mean, just the other day, superseding
indictment came down where it alleges that the Southern Poverty
Law Center not only had these informants infiltrate these groups
and they were paying them, but when the informants wanted
(06:17):
to leave these groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center forced
them to stay. Not only did they force them to stay,
they helped provide money to expand the extremist organization's reach.
They helped with recruiting more members to these extremist organizations.
So the Southern Poverty Law Center tells its donors, well,
(06:37):
we're combating extremism at the same time it's actually trying
to help these organizations. So there's a lot there to unpacked.
But I think one of the biggest stories that a
lot of people are missing is that the Southern Poverty
Law Center had direct access into our government, into the
highest levels of law enforcement and intelligence, and actually influenced
(06:58):
what would be declared extremists and what would not, who
would get targeted with investigations, and who wouldn't. And I
think that that, to me is some of the most
damaging and revealing things not of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
but our own government, because the Southern Poverty Law Center
is found within our government, it's found within the private sector.
(07:20):
It's also found within the educational sector. A lot of
schools use the Southern Poverty Law Center when they're teaching
things like hate in the United States and extremism in
the United States. So they got a real problem on
their hand. And today is a perfect way to talk
about it, because the head of the Southern Poverty Law
Center was testifying before Congress.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I'm when I talked about us getting
in the KBI getting these briefs, we get them directly
from them, and we'd get them also from the FBI
citing them in a lot of you know, this is
this is I'm dating myself, but this is back in
the late nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, UH in
(08:00):
their in their work on you know, watching extremism and
having intelligence on extream extremism. UH in law enforcement is
a you know, as a detective, As an investigator, I always,
you know, like most say, follow the money, and as
a criminologist and teaching in my classes, I would else
(08:20):
tell my students follow the money. Regardless of what's going on,
money is going to be the incentive. Did SPLC create
a system where labeling people became more valuable than actually
solving problems?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It certainly did. And when you look at the amount
of money we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars
here that that they were able to raise off this
idea of extremism and combating extremism, and then they would
funnel it through all these SHEW companies. And it's a
level of sophistication that doesn't normally exist with nonprofits. I mean,
when we think of nonprofits, most people think feeding the homeless,
(08:57):
sheltering the homeless, cleaning up the reads. When people think
of nonprofits, they don't think of some type of shadow
intelligence organization that serves as a pipeline to feed information
to the government and actually direct intelligence operations. So this
was a backdoor that I warned about. In twenty twenty one,
the Biden administration release what was called the National Strategy
(09:20):
for Countering Domestic Terrorism, and in that document it explained
how anyone that expressed any type of anti government sentiment
or anti authorities sentiment could be declared a potential domestic
terrorist or domestic violent extremist. Now, it didn't define what
anti government sentiment or anti authority sentiment is, and that
(09:41):
was the purpose because it could capture anything. Prior to
the Biden administration, when we talked about dvees, it was
always we used the term AGAVI anti government, anti authority,
violent extremists. By dropping the violent extremist part and putting sentiment,
it broadened out the network where it could capture anyone
and everyone. Now, if you look at the National Strategy,
(10:04):
and I churage the audience to read it, it's only
about thirty one pages. Under the Biden administration, if you
look at the pillars of how to quote unquote combatant
domestic terrorism, it explains that the government wants to create
these public private partnerships where they work with organizations like
the Southern Poverty Law Center defeated information. Now why is
(10:26):
this dangerous, Well, because the Southern Poverty Law Center is
an ideological organization. It's not a nonprofit that people normally
think about. This is an organization that tries to push
political viewpoints. And to give you an example, the Southern
Poverty Law Center was used as to justification for what
was called the Richmond Memo that came out of the FBI. Now,
(10:48):
the Richmond Memo was based on anti Catholic ideology, where
the FBI said that Catholics may have a proclivity to
domestic violent extremism because of their pro life stancers, their
belief that God only created two genders. And so the
Southern Poverty Law Centers said, because Catholics believed this, they
(11:11):
could potentially wade into this idea of domestic terrorism. Now,
initially we were told that the Richmond product was just
you know, a couple of agents from the Richmond office
in Virginia and that was it. Once Director Christopher Ray
found out about it, he pulled the product back. He
said that it violated the FBI's rules and that it
(11:33):
wasn't worthy of publication. Since then, we know that the
Richmond product actually flowed to multiple office field offices throughout
the United States. We know that field offices in California
actually took action trying to recruit Catholics in churches to
serve as informants. And what was it based on, Well,
(11:54):
it's based on an ideological framework. In fact, FBI agents
at the time in an FBI and this is all
public information in an FBI email exchange. One official as
is anyone really asking for a product for this? And
apparently we work at the behest of the SPLC. Another
FBI agent wrote back over reliance on the SPLC hate
(12:15):
designations is problematic. So even internally within the FBI itself
they saw a problem with this, but it didn't matter
because the SPLC had that much power and influence. And
when we look at the targeting parents at school board meeting, Catholics,
political opponents. Turning Point USA is designated as a hate group,
(12:37):
Mom's for Liberty designated. There's a commonality between it. All
of this leans conservative. Now here's the thing today. The
SPLC president was asked, why isn't at a fifteen hundred
groups that are listed on the hate map of the
SPLC hot com. There's no Islamic groups listed on that map.
(12:59):
That's an interesting notion, right and those Congressman Trip Roy
that was asking this question, and the head of the
SPLC responded that we don't designate the hate label to religions.
We only designated to what people say and what people
within those religions say. And so tip Roy followed up,
(13:20):
are you telling me you said anyone that criticizes LBGTQ
community could be land on your hate map? Are you
telling me that the Islamic groups that exist out there,
like al Qaeda and isis are pro LBGTQ. And it
really is interesting. This was a political weapon used to
label normal political speech positions that have been widely accepted
(13:44):
in the American public for decades, to make it as
if those people are extremists. So, if you are pro life,
it used to be pro life, pro choice, those were
accepted political positions for decades. Well, now pro life, you're
an extremist because you want to take away women's rights.
If you believe in two genders, well now you're an
(14:06):
extremist because you do not want to deny trans people
their rights. And that's how the whole scheme worked. But
here's the real danger. The SPLC was brought into FBI
field offices to train FBI agents. Now, imagine being a
new agent you just hired, and you're going through this
training process and you're told that here's the extremists. Parents
(14:30):
at school board meetings, traditional Catholics, people that are part
of Turning Point USA, and other conservative organizations like the
Family Research Center, these are the extremists, these are the
threats to the United States. Well, that a new FBI
agent will actually believe that, maybe because that's what he's
being taught. Well, why would the FBI be lying to me?
(14:52):
Why would they bring in these people to lie to me?
And so the whole system of our governance was actually
weaponized against the American people.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
So did this occur in a phase or were we
duped even back then, because at one point they seem
to change their tactics. They were kind of more doing
research and then they would follow up with research and
then put out information based on research. And now most
recently they actually got involved in active investigations, you know,
(15:24):
undercover work or not them, but hiring sobricades if you will,
or informants. But is it your opinion that this has
been problematic even back when the organization started, or at
some point did the slippery slope occur and they put
profit and notoriety before truth.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I can't answer when this problem first started within the SPLC,
but I think it's clear it might have started for
noble reasons. However, at some point it evolved into an
ideological group. And listen, the bureau, the FBI stopped tea
the SPLC as some side, some sort of outside resource. Right,
we know that our government works with outside think tanks,
(16:07):
they work with outside groups to get information. But they
stop treating the SPLC as an outside resource and they
started treating it as a partner. Today, the SPLC president
was trying to justify the hate maps, saying that they're
completely justified its freedom of speech, that they're just putting
out their opinion. However, they didn't present it as their opinion.
(16:31):
When they were feeding this information to the government and
to the public, they were presenting it as if it
was fact. And they've been sued numerous times and actually
lost by slandering people's reputations. But imagine your name pops
up on the SPLC's radar, you go on their website.
Imagine the harm and to your reputation that that could
do to you. So I don't know exactly when the
(16:53):
transition started with the SPLC. But the one thing that
really comes that I keep coming back to on my mind.
Most people do not know how to cultivate informants. That's
not something that you could just go up to someone
and be like, all right, I'm going to pay you
X amount of dollars each and every month for you
to feed us information. So when we're looking at it,
(17:14):
who actually trained the SPLC to cultivate manage informants inside
these violent groups? I mean, this takes a little bit
of sophistication in tradecraft. And to me, I think that
when we look at the SPLC's methods that they used,
the shell companies they used to provide to these informants
the information they were getting, they couldn't have been doing
(17:37):
that on their own. They had to be getting advice
from some way. They had to be getting a certain
level of training of how to handle these sources, these assets,
and that to me is a big problem that we
still don't know the answer to. But one thing I
do know is that the donors were ripped off. The
donors were giving money for a group to expose extremism
(17:59):
and groups that exist within the United States, and that
organization was taking that money, feeding it to informants to
expand extremism within the United States, to make these groups
even more powerful within the United States. And that's where
it goes back to your question. If there isn't much extremism,
(18:20):
well maybe if we create more, it generates more revenue
for US, it gives more donations to us. And I
want to make this point clear because when we look
at this idea of white supremacy, we've heard it a
lot over the course of the last decade and a half.
That's a growing threat to the United States. If we
go back to the nineteen twenties, the ku Klux Klan
(18:41):
was at the height of its power. We had one
hundred and twenty nine million people living in the United States.
Four million members were part of the Kukux Klan. They
held high level positions. We're talking judges, lawyers, politicians, police chiefs.
If we look at today, the Kukux Klan membership ranges
from three thousand to five thousand individuals in a country
of three hundred and fifty million people. And they're not
(19:03):
high level individuals. These are the rejects within our society
that go to these organizations. We look at all the
whites premise groups that are named on the SPLC's website. Well,
there's not a lot we know about these. Somebody's groups
have one or two members, and yet they're listed as
a group as if they're a threat to the American homeland.
(19:23):
So I think the SPLC has fudging this entire extremist
narrative in order to raise more money to line their
pockets and in order to get more influence over the government,
the politicians, the education system, and even the corporate sector.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Is there any evidence that retired FBI agents went to
work for them and help provide train them, get them
to understand how to do investigations or potential other law
enforcement officers. Have you seen anything where that could be possible.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
That's a great question. I wish we had a press
that would investigate that. I have not seen that so far. However,
I would not roll it out because I haven't explicitly
searched for that to see if former FBI agents have
actually gone to work for the SPLC. We know that
in the world of government that there's this revolving door
that exists. When people leave FBI, you see high level
(20:17):
people go off to work for social media companies. They
may go work for the military industrial complex, they may
become consultants at certain firms. It would not shock me
if the SPLC did hire former retired FBI agents to
give them advice, given tactical advice on how to cultivate informants.
(20:38):
I think that's a critical question that I wish would
have been asked today. It certainly wasn't because I watched
the hearings, but also in the core case, I'd like
to see if it get as.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Well, and especially if none of this came to a head.
And if you go back again twenty years ago, it
was as gospel stuff that there was being given to
the FBI. They treated it as gospel many times. It
could have been a very natural leaf to say, well,
you know, we get their information. I'm we use it,
you know, So there's no ethical issue or bridge. So yeah,
(21:11):
I'm retired, I'm going to go, you know, teach them
how to do investigations or how to work informance or
whatever it may be. So yeah, it's definitely something that
we need to follow up. So if if tomorrow Congress
to asks you if you were there today testifying. Are
there three draft reforms for nonprofit transparency and accountability that
(21:33):
would allow the protection of legitimate civil rights organizations while
preventing ideological organizations from becoming political influence operations.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
I think that there's a number of things that Congress
actually needs to do. First of all, they need to
know exactly what is the extent of the relationship between
the FBI and the SPLC. Not just the SPLC, any
other ideological activist organization that's providing advice to our government.
We should know about it. So I think that Congress
(22:10):
should call for the immediate to classification of every work
product that relied on SPLC sourcing. I think the public
has a right to know how deep this pipeline ran.
But we also have to dismantle the mechanism that created
this pipeline. That's the national strategy. That's where Congress needs
to step in and look at this national strategy and
(22:31):
how it created this shadow intelligence apparatus that exists, and
they need to start removing the statutory authority from some
of these agencies. Another thing that when we look at
this world of nonprofits, I think we need a clearer
definition of what a nonprofit organization actually does. I think
that nonprofit organizations have been abused in this country. They're
(22:54):
actually activist organizations with the shield of nonprofits to it.
And I think that any federal aid agencies that are
using any type of unvetted partisan hateless as the sole
basis for domestic investigations into Americans, there should be a disclaimer. Okay,
we there should be a warning label, right. We have
warning labels on a lot of our products. We have
(23:16):
an ingredients list on our food products. Well, we should
have warning labels on intelligence assessments that came out where
the the FBI has to disclose who helped provide that
type of information, what are the donors to that organization,
what are the biases of that organization. All of us
(23:36):
have a right to know the partisan history of an
organization that's providing information to our government.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yeah, and the real, the real struggle here is that
when you accept this kind of documentation from this agency. Now,
the FBI is not doing it now, I'm talking about
in the past, but it would when you gather Actually,
we don't know if they're not, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
And I think that's the thing because the mechanism remain
in place, the pipeline remains in place. All you did
was swap out a democratic administration with a Republican administration.
So as of right now today, if Trump's FBI wanted to,
and I don't think they're doing this, but if they
wanted to, they could just go to conservative organizations and say, okay,
(24:19):
fetus intelligence and all the Marxists and communist organizations that
exist in America will label them anti government, anti authority
sentiment and give them the domestic violent extremist labels and
start investigating them. And that's why you know I'm conservative.
I openly admit that. I don't hide that from anyone.
I'm open about it. But it's why I want about
(24:40):
this to the left and say, hey, do you not
see how this could easily be turned around against you
when Republicans are in power. That's why it needs to
be dismantled today, as opposed to kitting the can down
the road, because even if the abuses have stopped under
the Trump administration for now, there is nothing that another
(25:01):
administration coming in can't undo that Trump did well.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
And remember that we have regional fusion centers, fusion intelligence
centers that are throughout the United States and they're intelligence centers,
so that means they're getting intelligence from local, state, federal officials,
law enforcement, and they're putting that into data collection capability.
(25:26):
So when somebody looks up you know, Curry Myers, if
if it's meet that, if it's met that guidelines. Okay,
I'm Catholic, Uh, I'm pro life, you know, because I
follow the tenants of the church. I'm conservative, you know, politically,
(25:46):
I do the Rosary, you know, and they I think
at one time they even said, if you want to
identify potential weapons, it's people who overly use the Rosary.
And you know, quote Scripture I think is even one
of the things that they were And they like Latin masses.
So you know, all of these together. People have to
understand that all of a sudden, you could end up
(26:08):
in a in a generator, in a which is intelligence
at a fusion center. That could cost you, you know,
your freedom at some point. Now they got it. You
gotta have physical evidence. But this this is you know,
it's kind of goes with the FISA warrants, is that
it's way too under the table. There's not enough information
(26:31):
and I realize if we're going to fight terrorism, we
need to take action immediately, but we can't allow this
kind of weaponization of intelligence gathering to harm us. We
have about thirty seconds left at this.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I agree with that. I think that, unfortunately, what Americans
have done is that we've traded liberty in the name
of safety, and nobody really questioned how government ultimately ends
up abusing its power because you have to always find
a threat if you're investing a trillion dollars into that
threat each and every year.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Absolutely, folks, you're listening to America's Criminologists with Doctor Curry Myers,
and we'll continue with Professor Giadano right after this commercial break. Hi, folks,
(27:31):
Doctor Curry Myers here to let you know that my
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(27:51):
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show is directed at you, America's criminologist, every Tuesday at
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Speaker 3 (30:08):
Hey, my friends, is doctor Curry Myers, America's criminologist. I
have a new sponsor for my show. I mean Real Resilience.
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(30:55):
a political science professor at Solfolkcantic Community College in New York.
He is the host of the nationally recognized PAS Report
podcasts and serves as a higher education fellow with Campus Reform.
Before the break, we discussed the SPLC as an institution.
In this half hour, I'd like to move from the
organizational level to the human level, because ultimately, public policy
(31:19):
is not about organizations, It's about people. Recently, Nick interviewed
Terry Newsom, a father and education advocate who found himself
facing scrutiny after challenging school curriculum decisions. His story raises
important questions about labeling, free speech, and civic participation in America.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Professor, welcome back, glad to be here.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
One of the things that concerns me as a criminologist
is what happens when labels become fundraising brochures, media narratives
and began affecting real people. Now recently, as I said
on this on your Podcas asked you had Terry Newsome
it was a disturbed I had heard this before, I
saw it in the news before, but your podcasts got
(32:09):
into it even deeper, and I gotta tell you, brother,
it was disturbing. It was disturbing. According to Terry, after
challenging explicit material in his local school district, he literally
found himself caught in a chain of events that included
(32:31):
activist targeting, media attacks, federal travel scrutiny, and even a
visit from the FBI. Can you walk the audience through
Terry's story and explain why you believe it serves as
a warning about how organizations like SPLC can influence public
perception and potentially trigger consequences for ordinary citizens engaged in
(32:55):
lawful civic participation.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Well, terry story is an interesting one because here you
had a father, that's all it was. He was selling
that woke up in the mornings, went to work, raised
his kids, and you know, when he started to learn
about what his children were learning about in the school,
he decided to go to a school board meeting and
speak up. And that's what we're supposed to do, right,
That's part of our civic obligation. If there's something wrong
(33:20):
within our communities, we're supposed to raise those concerns. So
he did something that he felt was appropriate. He went
to the school board meetings. He raised concerns about sexually
explicit materials that were being taught and available to the
students of the school. And then he found himself being
targeted where the SPLC all these protests started at the
(33:41):
school board meetings. The SPLC designated him as someone that's
an extremists and hateful. You had media outlets that were
slandering him that we're saying that he's a racist and
he hates the LBGT community, and all that led to
him losing his job. Was terminated from his job. Ultimately,
(34:02):
as you stated, he did get into travel scrutiny. Apparently
he was put on a list in the higher ups
of our government. Well how do you get on that list?
And it was because at least what I think is
that the SPLC was the one that fed the name
to the government to get him on that list, because
this was just a parent at a school board meeting,
(34:23):
something that most of us would never really hear about.
Once the SPLC picked up that story, that's when it
took off. And he also received death threats from groups
like Antifa and other outfits out there, and it shows
you that if you speak out, you could become a target.
So it creates this chill. This is anti American, right.
(34:43):
I mean, the reality is that I disagree with people
that have communist beliefs, but I will always defend them
and say they have a right to say what they want.
They have a right to believe what they want, because
that's what America is all about. And it's my job
to refute their ideas, as opposed to say that the
government should be used to say islence those ideas, or
some outside organization, some nonprofits should be used to silence
(35:05):
those ideas. But that's exactly what's happened. I mean, you
have people out there that are terrified as speaking up
because they don't want to be labeled with the extremists
or racist label. It is extremely damaging. People have to work,
they have to put food on the table, they want
to raise their families, and they don't want the scrutiny
of being wide and smeared and dragged through the mud
(35:25):
because they decided to publicly state what their opinion is.
So the power of the SPLC is enormous, and it's
not just the SPLC, it's other organizations that exist out there.
But everyone should understand that this isn't just designed to
feed a pipeline to the government so that the government
(35:45):
could target certain folks or certain ideologies. It goes much deeper.
This is about social engineering, right, And we brought up
on the last segment how the anti Catholic memo is
based on the idea of radical Catholics being prolo Well,
think about how the debate has changed and just the
abortion issue. We went from pro life to pro choice
(36:08):
to now people trying to sit there and explain why
partial birth abortions, abortions in the seventh, eighth and ninth
month are bad, that they shouldn't happen. And that's what happens.
Because you're labeled as an extremist, we start seeing political
positions begin to shift to the left, where if you're
outside that, well, then you're the extremist. And I think
(36:31):
that's the danger of these labels. Extremism should be very
narrowly defined. I think the government has been way too
loose in how it defines what an extremist is. And
this was foreseeable you brought up Pfiser right before the break.
We know that in one year alone, two hundred and
seventy four thousand abuses of the PISA process by the FBI.
(36:55):
That's from a federal court. That's not from Professor Drodano.
It's from a federal court that stated in one year long,
two hundred and seventy four thousand abuses. In a few years,
there was well over a million abuses where the FBI
manipulated the FISA process. And there has been zero accountability
in that. We built this giant apparatus after nine to eleven.
(37:18):
And when nine to eleven happened and the Patriot Act
was introduced and we were discussing creating the Department of
Homeland Security, we were told that the Patriot Act was
going to be used to target international terrorist organizations that
are a threat to the homeland. However, even that I
was concerned about it, I was a senior in college.
I raised concerns about it in papers and whatnot. What
(37:41):
happens when that threat is gone. You can't create a
Department of Homeland Security and create all these changes in
how we collect intelligence and build out an intelligence apparatus
within the FBI, when prior to that there were a
law enforce or strictly a law enforcement organization, and tell
me that once the threat of international terrorism is well,
then we're going to begin to cut back the funding
(38:03):
and the personnel that these agencies hired throughout the years.
That was never going to happen. And so you have
to find a new threat, right, because the FBI, the
Department of Homeland Security, they all have to justify their budgets.
And if they come out and say, well, we've eliminated
the threat of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS and
those groups don't really pose a threat to the United States.
(38:24):
They still exist, they're still a thread out there, but
the threat is low, Well, then Congress will turn around
and say, okay, then you don't need the billions upon
billions of dollars we're feeding your department. And so what happened, Well,
we created a new threat, right, and it's the American citizen.
It's political opponents, it's ideology has become the threat. And
that's what we see taking place. It's what we saw
(38:45):
in Terry Newsom's case. But it goes beyond that because
it even goes to influential people see Terry Newsom. He
doesn't have the capabilities to take on the bureaucracy in
groups like the SPLC. But we saw it with Tulsi Gas,
the head of Ode and I and soon to be
form a head. Unfortunately she was placed on a watch list.
(39:06):
She was placed on a list. If you could target
someone like Tolsey Gabbert who simply just speaks out against
some of the government's policies, well then can't any one
of us be a target of this?
Speaker 4 (39:19):
Well?
Speaker 3 (39:19):
Absolutely, And some of this started with bullying laws in reality,
because who's the arbiter of what bullying is? And that's
where the you talked about the slippery slope that has occurred. Well, look,
and when you can't define bullying, you if you ask
(39:40):
any bit on the street define bullying, they can't define it.
And what they do define is not illegal now. And
it may be improper, it may be in bad form,
it may be horrible, but horrible speech is not illegal speech.
And when we pass the bullying laws, that was kind
(40:02):
of the first step to normalize free speech.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Well, I agree, and I think it was bullying, and
then I think it turned into this idea of hate right,
because who gets to define what's hateful and what's not.
One of the most terrifying statistics I've seen in recent
years is the fact that those age sixteen to thirty nine,
over fifty per cent of them believe that the First
Amendment should be amended and hate speech should be considered criminal,
(40:29):
it should be able to be charged criminally. Now again,
when I look at a government document like the National Strategy,
it talks about hate a lot, it doesn't define what
hate is. Now. Sometimes hate is extremely obvious, right when
we look at neo Nazi groups and the klu Klux
Klan or the Black Panther organizations, we see the hate,
it's very overt. But other times what they want to
(40:54):
deem as hate is not really hateful. So if I
am believed that only women should partticipate in female sports,
only girls should participate in female sports, it doesn't mean
I hate trans people. It just means I believe that
those that were born women should participate in women's sports
because men competing against women gives an unfair advantage to
(41:15):
the man. I don't hate the trans people, and yet
they'll say, well, what you're saying is hateful. If I
believe in secure borders, and I believe we should deport
illegal immigrants. Think about the word illegal immigrants. They say,
you can't use that terminology that you have to say
undocumented migrant or undocumented person because illegal immigrant is hateful.
(41:39):
And I always talk to my students and I tell
them when we get into the First Amendment issues, and
some of them do believe that hate should be illegal.
Hate speech should be illegal. Always explained with age.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
They because they they have friends that have been bullied.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
No, but people have been bullied since time began, correct,
So it's not something unusual. You just have to try
to deal with it. But the reason that's out of
hand is because we're not forming our children correctly. An
I mean, I didn't go ahead, but I.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Also ask them, well, who gets to define what's hateful
and what's not Who gets to define what's offensive and
what's not right, Because it's not going to be you,
it's going own to be the people in power. So
just think to yourself, if the opposite party controls the
lovers of power, would you want them to really define
(42:29):
what's constitut hate and offensiveness? And some of them actually
do start to see the point I'm getting to that.
The whole reason the First Amendment exists is not for
speech that you agree with. Speech that you agree with
is easy to say, yes, we want free speech. The
whole point of free speech is speech that you actually
disagree with that you have to tolerate it and you
(42:50):
have to refute it with ideas, not through political violence.
But we're seeing a war out there on free speech,
and the way they're doing it is through groups like
the Southern Poverty Law Center that will label justifiable political
opinions as hate, as offensive, and then the government will
take it upon itself to then say, okay, well, if
(43:13):
they're expressing hateful views, they may have extremist ideology, they
may have extremist tendency, and so we should look further
into that. And that's where we see this shadow Intel
group kind of emerge. This mechanism the public private partnerships exist.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah. Yeah. What's the status on Terry's charges? Has he
gotten some is he back? Is he still on the
on the watch list?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
No?
Speaker 2 (43:43):
I don't believe he's on the watch Listen, he hasn't
been charged with any crimes. He's actually meeting what members
of Congress this week, I believe to talk about the
SPLC given that the interview. You know, they testified today
with the SPLC president, so he'll be providing information to
members of Congress about his story about what he faced.
And no one should have to face terror from an
(44:06):
organization simply because that organization labeled you. It is extremely
destructive in a free society. And we see what can
happen when that's done. When nobody in the United States
wants to be called a racist, nobody wants to be
called an extremists, I mean, the misogynists, whatever word it's
you want to use that the left will try and
label you with. Nobody wants to be called those. Because
(44:28):
you become radioactive, you become toxic. Friends that you've had
for years will begin abandoning you because they don't want
to be associated with you anymore. Your neighbors will look
at you with suspicion. And it doesn't just destroy your reputation,
it also destroys your families and your children's reputations as well.
And so it's a very chilling environment that we're currently
(44:48):
living in right now.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
What was Terry's Why did Terry's particular words get escalated
at such a high level, Because there's other people that
have spoken out at school boards, and they've certainly got
knocked on the door by the FBI as well, but
his seemed to be escalated even higher. Was it complaints
(45:12):
from the school board because I know that happens. Was
there somebody in the audience that had from the government.
What made him so unique that stood out well.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
As far as what Terry told me, it was that
there were members of the school board, not just the
school board, but the school itself that were supportive of
the ideology, the Fall Left ideology. It was supportive of
the SPLC, and some of them actually had direct ties
to groups like Antifa. And Terry didn't get the message.
He didn't get the message that was being sent for
(45:45):
him to sit down and shut up. He kept speaking out,
and therefore that's why he became a bigger and bigger
target because he chose to fight back rather than just
submit surrender and just go quietly away. I would guarantee
you had he gone quietly away, his life would have
been much easier. He would have been able to keep
his job, he would have been able to not have
(46:05):
the harassment that he ended up facing. But he chose
to spoke at I think a lot of people that
did receive any type of pressure whatsoever, many of them
did back off once that pressure came. And we know
that that does happen again. People, I understand it. You know,
you have a family. You got to put food on
the table, and if your livelihood is threatened, you're going
(46:27):
to end up being quiet. You're going to toe the
line because you don't want to face that situation where
you can't put food on the table. You have to
sit there and determine what bills you can paying, what
bills you can't. But it's a fear tactic that chose.
The louder you speak out, the more precocious you are,
the more you're going to be targeted, especially so if
(46:49):
you're a hard nosed person like Terry from Chicago, right.
Speaker 3 (46:53):
Well, then we saw it also with I mean just
look at COVID. We had some doctors that were not
defending the practice that was being done.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
They was.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
They had the alternate saying mass do not work. Uh,
the vaccine may have issues, So I'm not I don't
recommend prescribing it. There is all kinds of things that
many doctors said, and they were ostracized.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
You know wellnity licenses were script from them.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Yeah, so I mean this is a real thing. It's
I don't want. The SPLC is a microcosm of this,
of this bigger effect on people when they're having Now,
did the SPLC in Terry's case, did they give him
a special designation or mention him in a report or
(47:46):
a label that.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
They wrote a whole article about him, So he's up
on the website. They wrote an article about him. And
just to give the SPLC and COVID can be related
because those that to push back against let's say mass
push back against the vaccine mandates, well they became anti
government extremists that the SPLC would label. So it is
(48:10):
all directly tied to each other. And then you can
look at how people like doctor j Bardachara and those
who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. We have emails, government emails,
actual emails saying that we need to hurt these people's
reputations so that people don't take them seriously. Those are
government emails that exist. Cal Crawford, CDC said sent a
(48:31):
message to Twitter that they have to remove any unapproved opinions. Well,
opinions are just that their opinions and Terry is allowed
to have his opinion. So when we look at SPLC,
we see this connection that exists. For Terry, they wrote
a whole piece about him. Once they wrote the piece,
that's what triggered the news media to write the piece.
(48:53):
And part of the issue where Terry was in these
school board meetings, they got so crazy, so out of control.
At one school board meeting, Terry was asking people to
show up for him, to show up and get his back,
to show up and support him, and a few members
of the Proud Boys ended up showing up and that
was like, oh my god, now the South Southern poverty
(49:15):
law sentence. See, we told you he's an extremist. Southern
members of the Proud Boys are showing up to defend
Terry Newsom And so that's what made the story even
bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Yeah, So here's the one hundred thousand dollars question. There
is extremism in some areas, mainly on the left, evidence
with support that mainly on the left. Right now as extremism,
But how do we distinguish between legitimate extremism that law
enforcement should monitor in ordinary political dissent protected by the
(49:48):
First Amendment.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Well, I think it's pretty clear. So I think a
good example would be the anti ICE demonstrations that we
see that we witness. Right, if people want to protest
ICE enforcement the way ICE is enforcing immigration law, you
have every single constitutional right to conduct that protest. It's
clear to me that those people that want to go
(50:11):
out there and they want to hold their protests are
free to do that, and I wouldn't call them extremists. However,
what we're also seeing is this organized effort to impede
law enforcement's ability to do their job. What do we know, Well,
I am seeing at a lot of these demonstrations gas
masks being distributed, and we're not talking about you know,
(50:32):
a handful of gas masks, We're talking about hundreds. These
are not cheap gas masks. They have respirators and then
they can withstand the tier. Guess that's being supplait. We
see the tents, we see medical stations that are being
built up. We know that there is an entire network
online that coordinates activities. They capture ICE's license plates, they
post it and they coordinate and they cross reference it
(50:56):
against other groups. To me, that shows organization and coordination
as a command and control element.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
To it.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
So to me that rises to the level of, hey,
maybe we should look into this. Where are they getting
their funding, Who's providing this funding? Are there any type
of foreign nexus to this or any foreigners trying to
exploit this by contributing money? How are they getting all
this real time information and posting it on databases? So
(51:25):
I think you could distinguish between those that may, let's say,
show up to a No King's protest, who have a
legitimate belief and they want to protest the government and
the Trump administration. That's fine, but when you look at
the organizers and coordinators of these events, well, some of
them certainly need to be looked into because there is
(51:46):
a line to be cross. You're allowed to protest, However,
you are not allowed to engage in criminal behavior while protesting.
That's when the protest ends, and that's when it becomes
criminal in nature.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yeah, and we have been way too lenient, uh, in
in major urban areas because they really are not given
authority to investigate the laws that are on the books.
When it comes to how to how you behave at
a demonstration. You can't block city streets, you can't block
public sidewalks.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
You have to get permits. You're I mean, I've been around.
Can't threaten harassment. Uh, there's there's such a thing. Every
just about every city in the world has threatening words
that you know, uh city the ordinances that deal with
threatening words and lloitering, and none of those things are
being investigated. None of those things. People are being arrested.
(52:42):
These are the things that I'm talking about. Are you
seeing you arrest them because you're you're doing it right
in front of a police officer. And we've let hundreds
and thousands of people at different events walk when it
comes to violations of law, and when that's occurred, then
it just it has an effect on everybody where they
(53:05):
think they can do it wherever they go, and you
turn into almost like a third world country. In Mexico,
they block streets if they don't like something. Not in
the United States of America, and now we're doing it.
And there were so many different areas where they no
one would get arrested as a result.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Well, I think we're seeing the results at a lack
of consequences. You know. Unfortunately today in the United States,
there's a lot of people that believe they could do
whatever the hell they want consequences, be damned because there
aren't going to be any And even if they do
get arrested, many of them look at it. I'll be
released on the street and then the district attorneys will
drop the charges and that will be that. So when
you don't have consequences, there's a reason these things metastasize.
(53:49):
And notice it's only happening in certain urban centers. Now
I can tell you you look at the majority of
the country, ICE operates each and every day this coordination, cooperation,
without incident. We have certain jurisdictions where there is no
cooperation and it evolves and gets out of control. There's
a reason behind it, and I think that we have
(54:11):
to start looking deeply into what exactly constitutes nonprofits in
the United States in this twenty first century that we're
living in.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
Oh yeah, it's happening all the time. And we just
saw that the charges thrown out on the Minneapolis church
where they stormed that they literally stormed the church and
gotten in, stopped a worship and there's no charges. It's
completely gone. It's incredible. Nick, thanks for coming on the show.
(54:41):
How can people follow your great work?
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Everyone could go to pasreport dot com. They could follow
me on social media at PAS Report. Make sure to
listen to the PAS Report podcast and follow and subscribe
to it so you never missed an episode. And I
want to thank you for having me on.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
It's always a pleasure. Hope to have you again because
we have some great discussions every time you come on,
and what you're doing is extremely important. And I highly
recommend folks that you take a look at his podcast
and put it on your favorites because it's awful interesting.
My friends, I'm retired Sheriff Curry Myers and this has
been America's criminologist on k M e T. Stay safe,
(55:18):
stay informed, and remember to check out my work on
substack doctor Curry Myers dot substack dot com. Stay safe,
have a great week.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
Came Steale suss light us distrusting me as a fate.
Speaker 2 (55:39):
Shadows see quist Doctor.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Currys do the sasquam analogist common seals loosy
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