Attention Facebook users! Be careful the next time you “friend” or “like” one of the founding fathers.
From “Hatewatch,” the blog of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Do a Facebook page search of the name Thomas Jefferson, and the very first listing that will appear is Thomas Jefferson – American. You can click to join 11,753 people who “like” the page.
Well, congratulations. You just signed onto fan pages sponsored by the racist National Policy Institute (NPI), a think tank dedicated to the preservation of America as a nation of, for and dominated by white people. NPI has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group since publishing heir William H. Regnery founded it in 2005.
NPI has hijacked many of America’s Founding Fathers. 12,835 Facebook users “like” the group’s General George Washington page. Another 5,617 network users like the page for Benjamin Franklin – American, and 2,630 like James Monroe – American. While it is unclear how many of those who add their names to NPI’s Facebook pages are aware of NPI’s mission of preserving a culturally white America, without question, the Facebook fan pages are driving thousands of clicks worth of traffic to a racist hate group’s website.
After being contacted by Hatewatch, Facebook’s management has launched an investigation of NPI’s pages. As a largely self-regulated service, Facebook relies heavily on readers to report objectionable content. “Direct statements of hate against particular communities violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and are removed when reported to us,” Simon Axten, Facebook’s manager of public policy, told Hatewatch by E-mail. “We also remove content that supports hateful or violent organizations.”
NPI proudly identifies all of its 42 sponsored Facebook pages that make up the “National Policy Institute Facebook Project,” but there is little evidence of NPI’s philosophies on the pages it devotes to iconic American historical figures. There are pages for Founding Fathers Washington, Franklin, Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock and John Jay; patriots of the American Revolution Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and Nathan Hale, and presidents James Polk and Theodore Roosevelt. NPI also sponsors other noteworthy figures including Mark Twain, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Kit Carson, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Edison, Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney.
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Well, the SPLC exaggerates for a living. Without “hate groups” to ferret out and sometimes McCarthy-ize, it has no purpose. There's no “hate” there at the National Policy Institute, no real threat to the republic.
That said, its references to “white”-ness, “Germanicism” and even Europeanism are disgusting. As Scalia once put it, our forefathers did not come here just to be Europeans. What is good about America we made here; what is still rotten is what we did not manage to leave behind. America had to overcome its “whiteness,” and the task is not yet complete.
And that said, John, I'm scandalized by the president's recent remarks. They are not only the flipside of the NPI race coin, they echo Polemarchus in Plato's Republic, a brutish view of zero-sum politics that Socrates is obliged to refute.
“And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder – and that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
Not “hate speech,” but not very loving or statesmanlike either.