Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch director, joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the congressional resolution calling upon President Trump to condemn hate groups.
Kassam proposed that without precise, nonpartisan definitions of what constitutes a “hate group,” the congressional resolution is tantamount to declaring “open season on free speech.”
“Oh, absolutely, and it’s extraordinarily insidious as well,” Spencer agreed. “Remember, of course, that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies legitimate conservative organizations that dissent from the leftist line as ‘hate groups.’”
“This resolution specifically refers to white supremacists, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups – so what this is, is yet another element of the left’s attempt to use Charlottesville as its Reichstag Fire moment, to crush all dissent,” he warned.
“They lump us in with the Klan and neo-Nazis, and now, they have the president committing to use all available resources – that’s what the resolution says – against us. There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever, and I’m sure there’s none in yours, as well, that this will be used against us. The Klan and the neo-Nazis, in reality, are insignificant and negligible forces. This is about us,” he told Kassam.
In that context, Spencer said the prospect of President Trump’s signing an amnesty deal to ratify the DACA amnesty for illegal immigrants is “chilling because it’s very clear what’s being done here.”
“They’ve backed the president into a corner because they’ve accused him, they’ve accused his close associates, people like Steve Bannon, of being white nationalists and white supremacists,” he explained. “The people who sponsored this resolution see this as Trump turning against the people who elected him and turning against the principles upon which he was elected. The problem is, apparently the president has allowed himself to be backed into this corner and is not sufficiently aware of what’s happening to stop it.”
Spencer said the best hope for protecting freedom of speech may lie with the Supreme Court President Trump is shaping with the addition of justices such as Neil Gorsuch. He hoped Gorsuch would vote to “strike down any attempts to give this resolution teeth and to persecute people who are legitimate conservative voices on its basis.”
Kassam noted that Spencer is well positioned to understand how “hate speech” regulations can be twisted into political weapons since Spencer himself has been banned from the United Kingdom. Kassam worried that a European-style assault on free speech is underway in America.
“The fact is, Raheem, remember: when they say that the president has to use all available resources against the KKK, neo-Nazis, and ‘other hate groups,’ there is no competitor to the SPLC. The Southern Poverty Law Center is the only organization that publishes a list of hate groups,” Spencer said in agreement, noting that his own Jihad Watch is on that list.
“The people that the Southern Poverty Law Center is targeting is not really the Klan and neo-Nazis, but the reasonable organizations that dissent from the leftist agenda that they’ve lumped in with the Klan and neo-Nazis,” he said.
“When the government, if and when the Trump administration and/or some other aspect of the United States government goes up against these hate groups and starts to use all available resources against them, the only list they have of the groups to target is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list. This means that a significant portion of conservative thought that is anti-immigration, that is in favor of traditional values, and that is against jihad terror is going to be targeted,” Spencer predicted.
Robert Spencer’s latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies).
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.