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An Open Letter to Mark Potok and his collectivist calumniating co-conspirators at SPLC. Now I beseech those that shall read this book, that they be not shocked at these calamities, but that they consider the things that happened, not as being for the destruction but for the correction of our nation. For it is a token of great goodness when sinners are not suffered to go in their ways for a long time, but are presently punished. -- 2 Maccabees, Chapter 6, Verses 12 & 13. [Image] To my fellow "aging, government-hating propagandist": I noted with some amusement your description of me in the latest example of fund-raising appeal slash collectivist historical revisionism entitled "WAR IN THE WEST: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right," as an "aging, government-hating propagandist." (1) Wikipedia defines the term as: Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause or position. Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare. Now let's examine that bit of name-calling for a second. "Aging?" Well, I'll give you that. I'm 62 and I've been fighting you lying collectivist sonsabitches at SPLC for about twenty years now, so, yeah, I'm aging, but then so are you. So let's just stipulate for the record that we're both aging. As for "propagandist," well, I guess it takes one to know one and you sure as hell fit that description. I mean, considering that SPLC has been a symbiotic familiar of the militarized federal police establishment since the 90s (even to the point of lying for them, and excusing the inexcusable, in the Good O' Boys Roundup scandal, where white ATF agents sold "nigger hunting licenses" and put on skits in black-face entitled "Birth of the Black Race" by pulling a black baby doll out of a watermelon -- a scandal exposed by the Alabama militia) well, I think that when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror there is certainly a propagandist staring back at you, so let's call that a professional opinion. (2) But as for "government-hating," I suppose that depends on how you define government. I am not "anti-government" if you mean the government of the Founders. I believe in small government, safe government, a government of checks and balances that protects the rule of law and lives within it. I believe in a government that serves the people, not the other way around as you seem to. Indeed, your actions over the years seem to indicate that by the Founders' definition, YOU are the government hater, not I. But if you mean I hate the kind of "government" that gives us things like Waco, Fast & Furious and the NSA and IRS scandals, then yes, I hate that kind of government just as much as you seem to hate the government of the Founders. So consider the rest of this letter as being from one aging, government-hating propagandist to another. Of course, I don't have the entire national police establishment mouthing my words like some sort of gigantic, armed but mindless sock puppet as you do. That makes you a far more dangerous character than me. (3) And what are you doing with that power? Why urging the government to use its armed might to attack your political opponents, of course, as your War In The West screed makes clear. Your lies, omissions and conflations in that "report" are many and egregious, none more so than portraying the Millers as supporters of the Bundys, when we now know (see "'This shit is going to get innocent people killed.' Mark Potok's Deadly Sock Puppet: How the Department of Homeland Security dances to SPLC's tune" cited above) that the Miller's were Las Vegas Police Department informers who demonstrated an unusual interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement when they were in Indiana (an odd turn for supposed "right-wing fanatics"), two facts unmentioned in your "intelligence report." Of course in order to prime the police to physically attack your political enemies (that would be us) you first gin up the fear level by making much of these two methamphetamine-fueled cop killers interest in the Bundys and their use of the Gadsden flag. As you well know, but failed to mention, I am the guy who was responsible for turning away the Millers from the Bundy security operation. They had no connection to the Bundys, but it is in your propagandist's interest to link them, so you do. A better circumstantial case could be made that the Millers were police snitches in Indiana before they were police snitches in Nevada. (As my friend Bob Wright observes, "Once a snitch always a snitch.") But mentioning that would interfere with your lying narrative, wouldn't it? One further point. The militias did not rally to the Bundys because they necessarily agreed with their point of view on the legality of BLM regulation. Indeed, many of us did not embrace their interpretation of the facts -- nor did we particularly care. What we DID embrace was the iron-clad lesson learned from Waco: that no one deserves to die at the hands of the militarized federal police, no matter how they are demonized and marginalized by those, including yourselves, who seek to justify the use of unchecked federal power against them. There will be no more free Wacos, as I wrote Eric Holder some years ago. Which is why I write you today. I sense from the name-calling and heightened use of loaded language in War In The West that you view this latest screed of yours as simply more of the same sort of bullshit written to motivate potential donors that SPLC has been writing since the 90s -- that "Brown Scare" of the "Narrative of 1996" that Professor Robert Churchill criticized you for in his recent book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face. But surely even you must realize that you are now operating in an unexplored and unprecedentedly dangerous environment. You may think, besotted with your new sock-puppet master power, that such lying propaganda now fully embraced by the government comes with some sort of magical protection -- the same sort of free pass you have been getting since the 90s. If so, you're living in an imaginary psychological green zone. Of course those of us who are your political enemies don't have those illusions. We have known all along the very real dangers of opposing the leviathan that you now seek to provoke into attacking us. I have had on my desk for some time a cautionary object that I use as a paperweight. I call this object LUCCKY. Here is a picture of him: [Image] LUCCKY is an acronym. It stands for the "Law of Unintended Consequences Can Kill You." I use it as a reminder that civil wars -- one of which you seem to be eagerly soliciting at the moment -- can rage out of control. After re-reading War In The West I was prompted to recall a quote from an excellent history of the last domestic conflagration, Bushwhackers by William B. Trotter, an account of the civil war in the North Carolina mountains: When the war broke out, therefore, there was already a long-standing tradition of personal dispensation of justice. One Union soldier stationed at a refugee camp in the northeastern tip of Alabama, where hundreds of civilians from the Appalachians came looking for food and shelter after being burned or starved out of their homes by Confederate guerrillas, remembered how the womenfolk inculcated a thirst for vengeance in their children: "I heard them repeat over and over to their children the names of men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle." As I tried to explain to Senator Harry Reid in my Patriot's Day speech at the Bundy Ranch, civil wars haven't gotten any more civil in the intervening century and a half since Aunt Jenny Brooks made a soap dish out of the skull of the Confederate Home Guard who killed her husband and oldest son. So it strikes me, after reading The War In The West, that you probably need LUCCKY more than I do. I will be forwarding him to you as soon as I raise the postage, along with a copy of this letter. And I urge you to please be a little more circumspect about your lying propaganda. You never can tell where those lies might take you. Sincerely, Mike Vanderboegh PO Box 926 Pinson, AL 35126 (1) "WAR IN THE WEST: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right" http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/war_in_the_west_report.pdf (2) Informer on Racist Gathering by Agents Was Ex-Police Officer With Ax to Grind, New York Times, 27 August 1995. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/27/us/informer-on-racist-gathering-by-agents-was-ex-police-officer-with-ax-to-grind.html (3) "This shit is going to get innocent people killed." Mark Potok's Deadly Sock Puppet: How the Department of Homeland Security dances to SPLC's tune. http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2014/08/this-shit-is-going-to-get-innocent.html