An Army of Skinheads
By: streiff
RedState
Keeping with its recent policy of acting as al Qaeda’s registered agent in America, the New York Times has turned its guns from revealing national secrets to generally defaming the uniformed services.
Today it mindlessly parrots a nonsensical bit of dross being pushed by the Southern Poverty Law Center that alleges a large scale infiltration of the military by skinheads, racists, and neo-nazis.
Note from the article that not one iota of original reporting was done and the reporter, John Kifner, simply trims down the SPLC press release, adds a prepositional phrase here and there and runs it as a story. Great work, John, I thought they only did hack crap like that in small down market papers, like pennysavers.
I’m not going to take the time to fisk the SPLC study. It is sophomoric. Read it and keep two phrases in mind: 1) post hoc ergo propter hoc and 2) the plural of anecdote is not data. Repeat those phrases after each paragraph and you will have done a commendable job on your own.
But I don’t fault an extremist advocacy group like the SPLC for encouraging some kind of Orwellian purge of the military for thought crimes. They have to raise money and the idea of thousands of racists receiving military training and combat experience in preparation for a race war will no doubt sell very well with their funding foundations and individual donors.
I have no doubt that there are racists, skinheads, neo-nazis, black separatists, street gangs, Atzlan aficionados, MEChA fanatics, Puerto Rican nationalists, muslim extremists and all manner of other people who have belonged to questionable organizations in the military. These people exist in society and there is no reason to expect that some of them will not wind up in the armed forces. I do have doubts that they are present in large numbers or that they let very many people know their views on race and ethnicity outside a very small circle of close acquaintances. Doing so is not a well thought out evolutionary strategy when you are in a combat zone surrounded by heavily armed people who know you hate them. But of their existence I have no doubt.
I won’t even say the NYT should not publish this story if it were true... though I don’t think they should. The rhetorical question I’m posing is why the NYT would run a story, if we can call it a story, like this without even going through the motions of an independent investigation of the facts to ensure that it is true?
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splcenter.org
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