China Attacks Breitbart News in ‘Human Rights Report,’ Cites SPLC Smears
by John Hayward: Breitbart News
The Chinese Communist Party published a farcical “Record of Human Rights Violations in the United States” on Friday — essentially a schoolyard-taunt level response to the U.S. State Department’s annual report on human rights, released on March 11 — that strove to paint China’s critics as “white supremacists” and denounce their very existence as a human rights violation.
Breitbart News was one of the media organizations attacked by the authoritarian regime, using information cribbed from the controversial far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The report is nothing new, as the Chinese government launched a massive disinformation effort in November to blunt international criticism over its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims and the people of Hong Kong. As with other Chinese agitprop, the “human rights report” draws heavily from American left-wing publications, the mainstream media, and Democrat Party political rhetoric on topics such as gun control and income inequality.
Nine pages into the bloated 24-page screed comes the assault on Breitbart News, in a section called “White supremacy is on the rise”:
The Guardian website reported on Nov. 12, 2019 that senior White House adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Miller also praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.
While running for election, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis referred to old racist tropes linking people of African descent to monkeys and implying lesser evolutionary achievement.
A report of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent issued on Aug. 2, 2019 said that politicians from the United States have used language that has reinforced the negative stereotyping of people of African descent.
The legacy of racial stereotypes and negative characterizations of people of African descent, which were created to justify the enslavement of Africans, and continue to harm people of African descent and violate their human rights.
The “old racist trope” supposedly employed by Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis consisted of him advising Florida voters to continue the good work of his Republican predecessor Rick Scott and not “monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda.” This was stretched into an alleged racial slur because his Democrat opponent, Andrew Gillum, was black. DeSantis won the race, while Gillum coincidentally came back into the news on Friday in a most unfortunate way.
It might sound odd hearing the Chinese — who marched a million Muslims into concentration camps to “re-educate” them away from their religion — complain about “Islamophobia,” but brazenness is an important part of Beijing’s constant struggle to gaslight the world.
China’s efforts to conceal the coronavirus epidemic for as long as possible, silencing and punishing doctors who dared to raise the alarm, caused incalculable damage by giving the disease weeks to escape from the city of Wuhan and begin spreading across the world. To this day, a vast army of Chinese censors works around the clock to suppress discussions of the coronavirus that displease the ruling regime.
Having largely succeeded in bullying international organizations and the U.S. media out of referring to the disease as the “Wuhan virus,” the Chinese Communist Party has moved on to a massive propaganda effort claiming the virus actually originated in America and was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. Chinese state media outlets are warning that if criticism of how Beijing handled the outbreak continues, the Chinese might begin withholding vital medical components from the U.S. and Europe.
As for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the left-wing organization long ago squandered its credibility as a non-partisan monitor of “hate groups” by constantly smearing the enemies of the Left as hatemongers. The targets of SPLC slander have repeatedly implored media and tech companies to stop working with the organization. One of those targets, the Family Research Council, was assaulted by a gunman in 2012 who said he shopped for “anti-gay groups” to attack using the SPLC’s website.
As critics such as Sen. Tom Cottom (R-AR) have observed, the group’s definition of a hate group is so broad, opportunistic, and politically subjective that the SPLC itself would qualify as a hate group under any less politicized standards. Aside from its propensity for attacking conservatives, the SPLC has been criticized even from the Left for wildly exaggerating the number of hate groups in the United States to produce sensationalized “hate maps” and keep donations rolling in.
The FBI stopped openly referencing the SPLC’s work in 2014 but appears to have maintained a more nebulous relationship with them since then. The Defense Department removed citations of the SPLC’s work from its training materials on hate groups in 2017.
The lavishly funded SPLC was rocked by a string of scandals in 2019, leading to the ouster of co-founder Morris Dees, among others. Allegations against leaders of the organization included sexual harassment, unethical fundraising, and in a bitter irony, racial discrimination against black employees.
It is definitely far better to be attacked by the Chinese Communist Party than quoted approvingly by its agitprop. The Party hardly needed to bother quoting the SPLC on racial supremacy, since that is a topic the Han Chinese supremacists in Beijing understand quite well on their own.
Communists are pathological liars, whether the variety found in Red China or those at the Southern Prevarication Lie Center. In fact, any of them would lie even if the truth would save their souls…