While ignoring deep and decades-long communist sympathies, the mainstream media used the death of Julian Bond (shown) to glorify a radical revolutionary, calling him a “hero,” “gifted,” “smart,” a “friend” of President Obama, “passionate,” “eloquent,” and a civil rights “champion.”
Al Sharpton was solicited for his comments on Bond:
As one who came out of the immediate generation after him, I grew up admiring and studying the work of Julian Bond.… The country has lost a champion for human rights.
As was Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, who added:
Future generations will look back on the life and legacy of Julian Bond and see a warrior of good who helped conquer hate in the name of love. I will greatly miss my friend and my hero, Dr. Julian Bond.
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If all those future generations have to rely on for a complete and accurate picture of the life of Julian Bond are the musings and disinformation transmitted by the national media, they will be ill-informed indeed.
Missing from eulogies following his death was any mention of Bond’s trips to Cuba to celebrate the communist takeover in 1959, and then again in 2006, to confirm his initial suspicions:
I first visited Cuba in the spring of 1959 … with three college friends. The truth was we were enchanted by the revolution. Our newspapers had carried stories about President Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana. He and his colleagues were all young, as were we — I was 19 — and we found something appealing in their story and their victory.
The last trip simply reinforced my admiration for the Cuban people and the society they are building.
Missing too in the eulogies of Bond were any mention of his endorsement in the 1960s by the Communist Party, his participation in communist political forums, or his campaigns for communist and left-wing politicians. For instance, he co-chaired the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), described by then-Senator James Eastland as a group “working hand-in-glove with the Communist Party” to foment “revolution in the United States.”
In 1982, he endorsed the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a communist front group headed by Angela Davis and other members of the Communist Party USA. In 2006, he served on the national advisory board of Apollo Alliance, a group founded by the revolutionary communist Van Jones.
In 2013, he spoke about the IRS targeting conservative groups, giving his assent to such actions:
I think it’s entirely legitimate [for the IRS] to look at the Tea Party. I mean, here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President Obama….
They are the Taliban wing of American politics and we all ought to be a little worried about them.
Later that year Bond addressed marchers for Trayvon Martin, reiterating his claim that America is a white-supremacist nation:
We march because Trayvon Martin has joined Emmett Till in the pantheon of young black martyrs. We march because a United States Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act for which we fought and died.
We march because every economic indicator shows gaping white-black disparities. We march for freedom from white supremacy.
Little was mentioned in his eulogies about his ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), except to say that he joined Morris Dees in forming that group in 1971, becoming its first president until 1979. Nothing was said about his continuing relationship as board member and president emeritus until his death.
SPLC has made a name, and a handsome living, for itself by establishing itself as the “hate group” center of the universe, describing the United States as a country “seething” with “racial violence” and “intolerance against those who are different.” Says the SPLC, “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant” and violent crimes against blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and Muslims “are not isolated incidents” but are instead “eruptions of a nation’s intolerance.”
In order to combat those eruptions, the SPLC has assigned to itself the duty to expose all of those groups opposed to its agenda, using both its Hatewatch blog and its quarterly “Intelligence Report,” which it claims (at least until recently) to be the “nation’s preeminent periodical monitoring the radical right in the U.S.”
SPLC has indulged itself in creating data where no data exist in order to further its agenda. For instance, Laird Wilcox, a highly regarded archivist and commentator on contemporary political movements at the University of Kansas, pointed out how evidence of Klan activity in Larkin, Kansas, was planted:
What happened in this case is that someone rented a P.O. box for a bogus Ku Klux Klan group and then kept the rent paid on it for years, thus allowing [the SPLC] to list Larkin as having a “KKK presence.”
This was pure disinformation and an example of the terrible things SPLC does in its campaign to keep the money rolling in from frightened liberals and blacks.
Far from being an isolated case, Wilcox added that upon investigating a list of more than 800 so-called “hate groups” published by the SPLC, over half of them were either non-existent, existed in name only, or “were inactive.”
The SPLC has developed the smear to an art form, as syndicated columnist Don Feder explained:
What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them [together] with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.) to make it appear that there’s a logical relationship between, say, opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands to an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants.
Such attacks are not only deliberate but disingenuous. For example, SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok warned of the dangers of the Tea Party:
We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace.
It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.
The only thing clear was that this warning from Potok was deliberately false. Said Wilcox in an interview with the editor of The Social Contract:
I’ve never met the SPLC writer Mark Potok although he used to interview me when he worked at USA Today….
In private he concedes that there’s no overwhelming threat from the far right and in public says something altogether different.… Professionally he’s just a shill. It’s his job. That’s what he’s paid for.
Even the FBI bought into the SPLC’s faux legitimacy, listing it on its website as one of its sources for information on hate crimes. That is, until Lt. General William Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council (FRC), called them to task. Along with 14 other notables, he wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey in February, 2014:
The SPLC has used its website to inflame public sentiment against those who disagree with some of the group’s goals, resulting in tragic consequences. On August 15, 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the FRC lobby armed with a loaded semi-automatic pistol and 100 rounds of ammunition, intending to slaughter as many FRC staff as he could because they oppose same-sex marriage….
In a chilling interrogation video released by the FBI and played in court, Corkins said he picked his targets by relying on the SPLC website’s Hate Map….
Thus, the FBI now directs the public to trust a group whose website played a significant part in bringing about an act of domestic terrorism….
We appreciate the work the FBI does every day, but we cannot allow the SPLC to be listed in official FBI resources as a friend of civil rights and law enforcement when the organization has become one of the biggest bullies in America….
In conclusion, it is completely inappropriate for the Department of Justice to recommend public reliance on the SPLC hate group lists and data. The links to the SPLC as an FBI “Resource” must be taken down immediately….
Furthermore, we urge FBI leadership to end any current “partnership” with the SPLC in public outreach, given the SPLC’s erroneous data and offensive mischaracterizations of groups such as FRC.
On March 20 Breitbart.com announced that all references to SPLC had been removed from the FBI’s webpage.
None of this was noted in eulogies commemorating the life of Julian Bond, that “hero” and “champion” of civil rights who, in reality, constantly endeavored during his life to damage and threaten the civil rights of those who worked to expose him and his ilk. He worked tirelessly to destroy the goodness of America, calling it instead an irredeemably racist nation.
Photo of Julian Bond: Eduardo Montes-Bradley
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.
