Hate-Promoting SPLC Smears Bolton’s Chief of Staff, Media Run with It

Dorothy Haymer of Yazoo City, at podium, Indigo Williams, left and Precious Hughes, right.
AP/Rogelio V. Solis
Penny Starr

The controversial leftwing hate group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is spewing out misinformation about Fred Fleitz, National Security Adviser John Bolton’s newly named executive secretary and chief of staff of the National Security Council.

“We’re deeply alarmed by this trend of people associated with hate groups joining the Trump administration,” a statement from SPLC said, referring to the respected Center for Security Policy (CSP) where Fleitz was senior vice president before taking a post with the Trump administration.

SPLC’s statement that CSP is “known for propagating wild conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact but do stoke a climate of fear and violence against American Muslims.”

This despite SPLC’s “hate map” that targets groups because of their religious convictions or ideology it finds unacceptable — a map that a man said inspired him to go on a shooting spree at the Christian Family Research Center (FRC) in Washington, DC.

On Aug. 15, 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, 29, entered FRC brandishing a gun and was thwarted by a security guard who suffered a gunshot wound but was able to subdue the shooter, preventing what could have been mass murder.

Corkins told the FBI he targeted FRC after finding it listed as an “anti-gay” group on SPLC’s website.

Aside from FRC other D.C. based “hate groups” targeted on SPLC’s “hate map” include Religious Freedom Coalition, Clarion Project, Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), and the Center for Immigration Studies.

The leftwing media has jumped on the misinformation campaign against Fleitz, including New York Magazine, which used the headline on Bolton’s announcement: “Bolton Installs Anti-Muslim Wingnut As NSC Chief of Staff.”

The Washington Post’s headline reads “New NSC chief of staff is from group that believes Muslims are plotting to take over U.S.”

The Post’s report uses radical leftwing groups to build a case against Fleitz:

The appointment of Fred Fleitz drew condemnation from civil rights groups this week. The Anti-Defamation League criticized what it described as “his senior leadership role with the Center for Security Policy, an Islamophobic, conspiracy-promoting organization.”

Another organization, Muslim Advocates, wrote in a statement responding to Fleitz’s appointment Tuesday, “The White House continues to be the nation’s central organizing body for white supremacists.”

The Post labeled Fleitz as “one of an assembly of aides and advisers that civil rights groups have accused of bigotry and religious bias since Trump took office.”

Talking Point Memo reported:

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group was founded Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan official, in 1988 and has morphed from a ‘hawkish think tank” to a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.’

But Fleitz has many supporters who attest his long public service record and security expertise.

 

 

Fleitz was Bolton’s chief of staff when he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the George W. Bush administration.

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