Tag Archives: SPLC

What do Ben Carson, Frank Gaffney share? Both are victims of a left-wing smear machine

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) named my organization, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a “hate group” because of our work highlighting the threat from radical Islam.  CSP will join other conservative groups such the Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel and WorldNetDaily, all of which SPLC has smeared by listing them alongside neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.

The SPLC is best known for its work decades ago fighting legal battles against segregation in the South.  But it long ago morphed into a far left group with one purpose: manufacturing material to slander conservatives for use by the news media and on the Internet.

CSP President Frank Gaffney has been on another SPLC hate list for several years along with American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, Accuracy in Media President Cliff Kinkaid (who SPLC has singled out for challenging global warming), Robert Spencer (the founder of director of Jihad Watch blog), Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin (executive vice president of the Family Research Council), WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah and other conservatives.  Joining them on this list are an assortment of neo-Nazis, KKK members and white supremacists.

Dr. Ben Carson was placed on a SPLC “extremist watch list” in 2014 because of statements he made in defense of traditional marriage.  But after a public outcry, the SPLC was forced to withdraw this designation and issue an apology to Carson in February 2015.

Among the many false claims in the SPLC’s new list of hate groups is that Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy have been banned from participating in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and that Gaffney’s banishment from CPAC “probably earns him points with Trump.”

Although CPAC and the Center have had some differences in the past, this is no longer the case.  Gaffney and the Center were present at CPAC last year and will have an expanded presence in 2016.

I will be speaking at CPAC 2016 conference next month on behalf of the Center on the Iranian and North Korean missile programs.

To show how sloppy the SPLC’s research is, a 2015 SPLC report noted that Gaffney and the Center were present at CPAC’s 2015 conference and that the Center was a sponsor.

As ridiculous as the SPLC hate lists may sound, they often are taken seriously by the liberal media.  These lists almost had deadly consequences in 2012 when Floyd Corkins, a volunteer at a gay-rights group, entered the office lobby of the Family Research Council with the intention of killing as many of the Council’s employees as possible because of the organization’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

Corkins shot and injured a building manager before he was disarmed.  He decided to launch a killing spree against the Family Research Council and another conservative organization after he read about their opposition to gay marriage in the SPLC’s hate lists.

While SPLC regularly lumps conservatives with neo-nazis and white supremacists for being anti-gay, anti-immigrant, Islamophobes, white nationalists or for miscellaneous hate (such disbelieving in global warming), it refuses to put liberal individuals and groups on their hate lists.

For example, the SPLC had nothing to say last summer when left wing groups like MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos, Credo and the National Iranian American Council attacked Jewish congressmen who opposed the nuclear deal with Iran like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) by questioning their loyalty to this country.

Elliot Abrams decried this bigotry in an August 10, 2015 article in The Weekly Standard:

“The basic idea is simple: to oppose the president’s Iran deal means you want war with Iran, you’re an Israeli agent, you are in the pay of Jewish donors, and you are abandoning the best interests of the United States. So Dan Pfeiffer, senior political adviser to Obama until this winter, tweeted that Senator Charles Schumer—who announced his opposition to the Iran deal last week—should not be Democratic leader in the Senate because he “wants War with Iran.”

SPLC also has been silent on a growing anti-Semitism on the left and how American colleges are ignoring violence against Jewish students in Israel and the United States.

On the other hand, the SPLC has joined President Obama in jumping on the fraudulent Islamophobia bandwagon.  That’s why CSP and Gaffney caught its attention.

I join Frank Gaffney and everyone at the Center for Security Policy in strenuously condemning discrimination, mistreatment or violence against Muslims and members of any religious group.

The Islamophobia charges made against CSP and other critics of radical Islam have nothing to do with hate or bigotry – they are a ploy by Mr. Obama, American Muslim groups and liberal groups to sidestep how Islamist extremism represents, as American Islamic Forum for Democracy President Zuhdi Jasser has put it, “a problem within the house of Islam.”

This problem is the global jihad movement which is an ideology at war not just with modern society but also with the majority of the world’s Muslims.

This is the real hate: Islamic supremacists cloaking their intolerance and hatred towards anyone who rejects their extremism – Muslims and non-Muslims – as protected religious practice. This hate includes brutalizing and killing groups that the SPLC claims to protect: women, LGBT individuals and racial and ethnic minorities.

The SPLC designated Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy as “haters” because of our work to publicize the threat posed by to the supremacist Islamic shariah doctrine, a threat that President Obama and liberal groups refuse to confront or even name.  They are in denial about this threat and instead condemn as bigots anyone who tries to address it.

This was crystal clear when President Obama on February 3 visited a mosque in Baltimore with known terrorist ties but refuses to meet with Muslims like Dr. Jasser who is leading an Islam reform movement that rejects Islamist radicalism and ISIS.

American leftwing groups like SPLC have also stubbornly ignored flagrantly hateful statements by some American Muslim groups.

There was a glaring example of this after the San Bernardino shooting when Hussam Ayloush, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), toldCNN’s “New Day,” “some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West have fueled that extremism. … We are partly responsible.”

In May 2004, Ayloush said the U.S. war on terror was a “war on Muslims,” adding his belief that the 9/11 attacks were committed because of “the U.S.’s unconditional support of Israel.” The U.S. is Israel’s “partner in crime” against the Palestinians, Ayloush explained.

How can a supposed civil rights organization like the SPLC give Ayloush and CAIR a pass on such hateful statements and actions?

How can it not speak out against growing anti-Semitism on the left and violence against Jewish students in Israel and the United States?

One reason is that the SPLC is not a civil rights organization – it is a far left advocacy group that tries to discredit its political enemies on the right with incoherent hate lists that wrongly associate them with notorious bigots to advance a liberal agenda.  This is consistent with #12 of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

SPLC also demonized conservatives with bogus hate charges because it has found this kind of fearmongering to be very lucrative.  According to the SPLC’s 2014 tax return, this non-profit organization had $54 million in revenue and $315 million in assets.

Back in 2000, an investigative report into the SPLC’s activities was published by Harper’s Magazine titled The church of Morris Dees: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance.  It described the SPLC and its activities as “essentially a fraud” that “shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.”

Perhaps the main reason the SPLC has been able to raise such huge sums because its president, Morris Dees, is so skilled at using scare mongering mailings for fund raising that in 1998 he was inducted into the Direct Mailing Association Hall of Fame.

Based on its 2010 tax return, the liberal website Daily Kos criticized the SPLC in 2012 for its enormous wealth, offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands, and ownership in several foreign corporations.

The author of this article asked, “What I’m very curious to learn is how keeping hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in assets, several offshore bank accounts and part ownership in foreign financial firms in any substantive way addresses poverty in America.”

I believe the SPLC’s new focus on Islamophobia is because the organization has identified attacking critics of radical Islam as the ultimate money pot.  For example, Saleh Abdulla Kamel, a Saudi banker believed to have been a financer of Usama bin Laden, gave $10 million to Yale University in 2015 to build an Islamic law center.

Given the SPLC’s lack of scruples, greed and offshore operations, I believe it is very likely that this group is receiving funding from Gulf state billionaires like Kamel to discredit anyone who criticizes radical Islam and the global jihad movement.

The news media must stop being manipulated by the SPLC’s calumny of its political enemies.

Reporters should realize that an organization which attacks all critics of radical Islam as Islamophobes, refuses to mention the extremism and intolerance of radical Islamist groups, and is silent on the growing anti-Semitism on the left and violence against Jewish university students cannot be considered a neutral and authoritative source.

The media also needs recognize that the SPLC’s hate lists which lump Ben Carson, Frank Gaffney, Cliff Kinkaid and organizations like the Family Resource Council, WorldNet Daily and the Center for Security Policy with neo-Nazis and white supremacists are utter nonsense.

The press should instead be investigating the SPLC’s enormous wealth, anonymous funders and how it is poisoning the public debate in this country to advance a liberal agenda and to enrich itself.

The Love of Freedom is Not ‘Hate’

Islamic supremacists are desperate to silence effective opposition to their efforts to subvert us.

For example, Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are panicking as they see Republican presidential candidates gaining traction for the idea that we shouldn’t import more jihadists, citing opinion research conducted for the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and quoting a secret Brotherhood plan for “destroying Western civilization from within” – a document CSP has made widely available.

So, to whom do the Islamists turn for help? The Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC). (To cite but one example, see CAIR’s prominent display of the SPLC’s attack on “islamophobes” on their facebook page.)

Wait, some might say, isn’t that the prominent “lawfare” organization that defends Americans’ civil rights?

It turns out, not any more.

How Far the SPLC Has Fallen

These days, the Southern Poverty Law Center is engaged in suppressing Americans’ civil liberties – particularly, their freedom of speech if such expression “offends” Islamists. The SPLC recently announced that, on those grounds, it intends to designate the Center for Security Policy as a “hate group.”

This defamation says much more about the Southern Poverty Law Center than it does about the organization it is smearing. The SPLC specializes in hate – especially of those that, like the Center for Security Policy, love freedom.

This bizarre perversion of the SPLC’s original raison d’etre is not exactly new. Back in 2000, an investigative report into the SPLC’s activities was published by Harper’s Magazine under the sub-heading, “How the Southern Poverty Law Center Profits from Intolerance.”

It described the SPLC and its activities – including quotes from leaders of other liberal civil rights institutions, one of whom described the SPLC’s founder Morris Dees as “a fraud and a conman.” The Harper’s piece notes that SPLC made its money by “terrifying donors with visions of armed Klan paramilitary forces” and “violent neo-Nazi extremists” that largely do not exist as a meaningful threat, while using research and investigative tactics that “should give civil libertarians pause.”

The question arises: How much, if any, of its $303 million endowment and its $41 million annual operating budget has the SPLC raised from Islamists who want to “stifle the free speech” of freedom-loving Americans?

The SPLC and groups like CAIR often work in tandem. In its efforts to gin up the appearance of overwhelming anti-Muslim hate (contradicted by the FBI’s own Hate Crimes tracking information), CAIR routinely cites the SPLC’s dubious “Hate Group”designations. Likewise, SPLC routinely cites CAIR, and the two groups have also signed joint letters together.

Inquiring minds want to know: Is it pay-to-play at the SPLC for groups like CAIR, which – speaking of designations – was identified in 2014 as a “terrorist organization” by the United Arab Emirates?

It is simply bizarre that the SPLC would behave as though patriotic Americans who peacefully oppose jihadists are somehow deserving of condemnation. Yet, that’s not true of shariah-adherent Muslims – who believe it is their divinely directed duty to brutalize, if not actually to murder, the SPLC’s claimed favorite victimhood causes: feminists and other women; LGBT individuals; racial and ethnic minorities; etc.

Indeed, the jihadists basically get a complete pass from the SPLC. While the SPLC lists traditional conservative organizations like the Family Research Council together with racist organizations like the Aryan Nation, it devotes no space to any of the American-based organizations that support Jihad and Islamic supremacism. Indeed, there is no such category on the SPLC’s extremist group or extremist ideology page.

Evidently, the organization’s scores of lawyers headquartered out of Montgomery, Alabama are too busy helping groups like CAIR to denounce them, let alone actually to defend against such affronts to the constitutional rights of their countrymen and women.

In short, the Southern Poverty Law Center is now primarily a weapon wielded in highly partisan campaigns to suppress the free speech of individuals and organizations with whom it disagrees politically. The Center for Security Policy is but the latest target of such smear-and-silence operations.

Why the SPLC ‘Hates’ the Center for Security Policy

Why is the SPLC so determined to suppress the Center for Security Policy? The answer appears to be CSP’s effectiveness, which is, in turn, animated by our love of freedom:

  • CSP’s love of freedom — not a desire to hate — puts us in opposition to Muslims who adhere to the supremacist Islamic shariah doctrine, and therefore are freedom’s enemies. We have no quarrel with Muslims whose faith practice is not shariah-adherent. They have as much to fear from the jihadists among them as do the rest of us. We are proud to work with non-supremacist Muslims to expose and help defeat our mutual enemies.
  • The Center for Security Policy’s love of freedom – not some irrational fear of Islam or fictitious “Islamophobia” – prompts us actually to do as we are officially told we must: “See something, say something.” In fact, when we see evidence of encroaching shariah, particularly that being insinuated stealthily by the SPLC’s friends in the Muslim Brotherhood, we not only say something about it. We do something about it, by working to counter and ultimately eliminate this civilization jihad.
  • CSP’s love of freedom also obliges us to respond appropriately to what is – far from some unfounded “conspiracy theory” – proof of an actual and perilous conspiracy to destroy the Constitution that guarantees our liberties and the government constituted to defend them.

In 2007-2008, the U.S. government demonstrated in federal court that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in North America is to take the United States down. That’s just one revelation arising from a secret Brotherhood strategic plan introduced into evidence in the nation’s largest terrorism financing trial, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation. Also found in this so-called Explanatory Memorandum was the declaration that the Brothers’ goal is this country is “‘sabotaging’ [Western civilization’s] miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

In defending freedom against such adversaries, the Center for Security Policy proudly and indefatigably stands with:

  • the untold millions of non-Muslims and Muslims oppressed by Islamists around the globe;
  • the families of those who have been slaughtered or brutalized world-wide in the name of shariah and its jihad;
  • women, who have the right be treated as human beings, not as animals or property;
  • gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals who have the right not to be thrown off roofs or hung for their sexual preferences;
  • Christian, Jewish and other religious minorities subjected to forced expulsions and expropriation, torture, rape and murder; and
  • Muslim reformers who share our determination to prevent Islamic supremacists from imposing their abhorrent “man-made” shariah doctrine in our country – whether through violent jihad, or the Muslim Brotherhood’s preferred, stealthy “civilization jihad” kind.

We have no doubt where the vast majority of Americans come down in any choice between freedom and its enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who thoughtlessly or maliciously repeat, promote and otherwise disseminate the hate-mongering of the Southern Poverty Law Center are on the wrong side of that choice. The Center for Security Policy is not.

Love of Freedom is #NotH8

The Southern Poverty Law Center is engaged in suppressing Americans’ civil liberties – particularly, their freedom of speech if such expression “offends” Islamists.  The SPLC recently announced that, on those grounds, it intends to designate the Center for Security Policy as a “hate group.”  Why is the SPLC so determined to suppress the Center for Security Policy? The answer appears to be our love of freedom.

The Center’s love of freedom — not a desire to hate — puts us in opposition to Muslims who adhere to the supremacist Islamic shariah doctrine, and therefore are freedom’s enemies.  We have no quarrel with Muslims whose faith practice is not shariah-adherent.  They have as much to fear from the jihadists among them as do the rest of us. We are proud to work with non-supremacist Muslims to expose and help defeat our mutual enemies.
In defending freedom against such adversaries, the Center for Security Policy is launching a #NotH8 campaign to show that we proudly and indefatigably stand with:
  • the untold millions of non-Muslims and Muslims oppressed by Islamists around the globe;
  • the families of those who have been slaughtered or brutalized world-wide in the name of shariah and its jihad;
  • women, who have the right be treated as human beings, not as animals or property;
  • gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals who have the right not to be thrown off roofs or hung for their sexual preferences;
  • Christian, Jewish and other religious minorities subjected to forced expulsions and expropriation, torture, rape and murder; and
  • Muslim reformers who share our determination to prevent Islamic supremacists from imposing their abhorrent “man-made” shariah doctrine in our country – whether through violent jihad, or the Muslim Brotherhood’s preferred, stealthy “civilization jihad” kind.
The Center has released a 1-minute video giving a disturbing glimpse at three Islamist voices: Imam Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston tells us that a man who imitates a woman (or vice-versa) is cursed; American Islamic preacher Khalid Yasin openly calls for the death sentence for homosexuals; and a man attending Muslim Day at the U.S. Capitol openly states that homosexuals should be killed.
Please watch the video below and share using the hashtag #NotH8:

Those who thoughtlessly or maliciously repeat, promote and otherwise disseminate the hate-mongering of the Southern Poverty Law Center are on the wrong side of the choice between freedom and the Islamic supremacist agenda to destroy it. We have no doubt where the vast majority of Americans agree that telling the truth about, and opposing, freedom’s enemies is #NotH8.

Why does the Southern Poverty Law Center hate the Center for Security Policy?

Why are the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Islamist friends so determined to suppress the Center for Security Policy? The answer appears to be CSP’s effectiveness, which is, in turn, animated by our love of freedom:

  • CSP’s love of freedom — not a desire to hate — puts us in opposition to Muslims who adhere to the supremacist Islamic shariah doctrine, and therefore are freedom’s enemies. We have no quarrel with Muslims whose faith practice is not shariah-adherent. They have as much to fear from the jihadists among them as do the rest of us. We are proud to work with non-supremacist Muslims to expose and help defeat our mutual enemies.
  • The Center for Security Policy’s love of freedom – not some irrational fear of Islam or fictitious “Islamophobia” – prompts us actually to do as we are officially told we must: “See something, say something.” In fact, when we see evidence of encroaching shariah, particularly that being insinuated stealthily by the SPLC’s friends in the Muslim Brotherhood, we not only say something about it. We do something about it, by working to counter and ultimately eliminate this civilization jihad and its motivating Islamist
  • CSP’s love of freedom also obliges us to respond appropriately to what is – far from some unfounded “conspiracy theory” – proof of an actual and perilous conspiracy to destroy the Constitution that guarantees our liberties and the government constituted to defend them.

In defending freedom against such adversaries, the Center for Security Policy proudly and indefatigably stands with:

  • the untold millions of non-Muslims and Muslims oppressed by Islamists around the globe;
  • the families of those who have been slaughtered or brutalized world-wide in the name of shariah and its jihad;
  • women, who have the right be treated as human beings, not as animals or property;
  • homosexuals who have the right not to be thrown off roofs or hung for their sexual preferences;
  • Christian, Jewish and other religious minorities subjected to forced expulsions and expropriation, torture, rape and murder; and
  • Muslim reformers who share our determination to prevent Islamic supremacists from imposing their abhorrent “man-made” shariah doctrine in our country – whether through violent jihad, or the Muslim Brotherhood’s preferred, stealthy “civilization jihad” kind.

We have no doubt where the vast majority of Americans come down in any choice between freedom and its enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who thoughtlessly or maliciously repeat, promote and otherwise disseminate the hate-mongering of the Southern Poverty Law Center are on the wrong side of that choice. The Center for Security Policy is not.

Q & A

 

Is the Center for Security Policy “anti-Muslim”?

Absolutely not. The Center for Security Policy stands against enemies of the United States, its Constitution and the freedoms guaranteed thereby – without regard to their ethnicity, geography, ideology or religious associations. Foremost among such enemies at the moment are Islamic supremacists, also known as shariah-adherent Muslims, also known as jihadists.

This subset of the followers of Islam are the ultimate hate-group. They hate Muslims who do not adhere to shariah. They hate women. They hate gays and lesbians. They hate followers of other religions. They hate democracy and any “man-made” law or government not submissive to their Quran. They hate anyone – including authors, songwriters and artists – whose free expression defies their totalitarian program of thought control.

The Center for Security Policy stands in defense of the billions of people around the world who are endangered or victimized by these hateful “Islamist phobias.”

 

Is the Center for Security Policy “Islamophobic”?

Absolutely not. To be clear, the term “Islamophobia” was first coined twenty-years ago by Islamists and their leftist enablers for use as an instrument of political warfare. They wield it to suppress the freedom of expression of their adversaries.

Specifically, by falsely accusing those who are critical of Islamic supremacism, shariah and jihad of having an unreasoned fear (i.e., a “phobia”) of Muslims, the perpetrators of this smear are trying to impose what amount to shariah blasphemy restrictions – a prohibition on any expression that “offends” them. What is more, by threatening, explicitly or implicitly, violence against those who give such offense, the Islamists are actually trying to instill fear in their enemies – non-Muslim and Muslim alike – in order to terrify them into submission. To ignore that reality would be irrational, and quite possibly fatal.

The Center for Security Policy has no fear of law-abiding, patriotic, tolerant, non-shariah-adherent Muslims. To the contrary, it views them as potentially invaluable partners in opposing the jihadists – violent and stealthy – in their midst.

 

Does the Center for Security Policy believe there is an Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert the United States from within?

Eight years ago, the U.S. government established in federal court during the largest terrorism financing trial in the country’s history, U.S. v Holy Land Foundation, that, for more than fifty years now, the Muslim Brotherhood has engaged in a conspiracy with the mission – in the Brotherhood’s own words – of “destroying Western civilization from within.” (See: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/05/25/an-explanatory-memorandum-from-the-archives-of-the-muslim-brotherhood-in-america/.)

It is national security malpractice to ignore this reality and maliciously deceptive and/or delusional to portray those who refuse to do so as “conspiracy theorists.”

The Center for Security Policy has comprehensively documented the extent to which the Islamic supremacists are succeeding in penetrating virtually every major civil society and governing institution in furtherance of this conspiracy. (Publications in the Center’s Civilization Jihad Reader Series may be downloaded for free at www.SecureFreedom.org.) We are determined to expose, root out and neutralize such subversive influence operations in America.

 

In light of these facts, how should responsible journalists, public policy professionals and the American people more generally regard criticisms of the Center for Security Policy issued by the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center?

The SPLC’s assertions are utterly without foundation. They show a willingness to say and do anything to further a transparently political agenda. Such partisan, and often unhinged, criticisms are nothing more than efforts to incite hatred against, and thereby silence, their opposition.

Given the facts, those who cite or otherwise repeat such unfounded assertions are either witting partners in that odious, indefensible effort, or useful idiots who should know better – and desist.

Shariah-Compliant Twitter

Twitter seems to think 2016 is 1984. It has welcomed in the New Year with a change in the rules governing all of its accounts that is reminiscent of Orwellian thought-control. Or at least that practiced by another, non-fictional totalitarian system: the Islamic supremacist program known as shariah.

Shariah’s adherents demand that no offense be given to them, their religion, deity or prophet. Now, all other things being equal, they are close to ensuring that none will be forthcoming in 140 characters.

If successful, contemporary Islamists will have achieved a major step towards a goal they have been pursuing through other means for nearly two decades: the worldwide prohibition of “defamation of religions” – read, Islam. In particular, since 2005, their proto-Caliphate – the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – has been working through the United Nations on a ten-year plan to impose this restraint concerning freedom of expression on the rest of us.

In 2011, with the active support of the Obama administration, this gambit produced UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. It basically gives the imprimatur of international law to Shariah’s demand that speech, books, videos and now Tweets that “defame” Muslims or their faith be prohibited.

In July of that year, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton implicated herself personally in this affront to our First Amendment guarantee of free expression. She launched with the OIC and the European Union the so-called “Istanbul Process,” a tripartite effort to accommodate the Islamic supremacists’ demands that Western nations conform to Resolution 16/18 by adopting domestic strictures against offense-giving to Muslims. 

On that occasion, Mrs. Clinton famously declared her willingness “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” The message could not have been more clear to jihadists around the world: The United States was submitting to shariah blasphemy norms.

According to shariah, the proper response is to redouble the effort to make the infidel “feel subdued.” That means, worse behavior from the Islamists, not better.

Now, it seems that one of the greatest enablers of the global jihad, Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, is seeing his substantial stake in Twitter stock translate into another breakthrough for Islamic supremacy: The suppression of Tweets that, according to the company’s new rule, involve “hate speech or advocacy against an individual, organization or protected group based on race, ethnicity, national origin, color, religion, disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status or other protected status.”

To be sure Twitter is a private sector enterprise. It is, therefore, free to deny its services to those whose content it finds objectionable. At least, as long as it doesn’t try to deny service to approved “haters” like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This organization has deviated wildly from its early history as an effective advocate for civil liberties. Today, its invective-laced advocacy against individuals or organization who are supposed to enjoy “protected status” under our Constitution, namely that of citizens free to express themselves, can only be described as hate speech. Yet, the SPLC is embraced and even cited by the Obama administration and others among the leftists and Islamists who make up the “Red-Green axis” now feverishly working to silence any who they, as Hillary Clinton put it, “abhor.” (For more on this unlikely alliance, see Jim Simpson’s The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.)

What is particularly concerning is that the new Twitter rule sounds a lot like what is coming out of the Obama administration these days. See, for example, the Justice Department’s “Guidance for Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Regarding the Use Of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, National Origin, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Or Gender Identity.”

Speaking of the Justice Department, Americans who are inclined not to worry about losing the ability to Tweet their concerns about jihadism, shariah and anything else that might offend Muslims should bear in mind that Attorney General Loretta Lynch has put us all on notice that considerably worse may be in store for our First Amendment rights. Last month she told a Muslim Brotherhood-tied organization, Muslim Advocates: “Now, obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone…lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric…When we see that, we will take action.”

With Hillary Clinton’s prominent role in promoting restriction of free expression, and what appears to be accelerating momentum in the direction of ensuring conformity with shariah blasphemy restrictions, this would seem to be a good time for Republican presidential candidates – and the rest of us – to be expressing our adamant objections. If Twitter gets away with keeping us from doing it in 140 characters, we better make sure we do it otherwise, while we still can.