The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has a well-documented history of lining its own pockets by promulgating lies, half-truths, and malicious slanders. Usually, they do it in a way that requires the dupes who send them money to do some digging to uncover their misrepresentation of the facts. But recently, they’ve been getting sloppy.
In their weekly “Anti-immigrant roundup,” they accuse me of “blaming immigrants living in California for supposedly having negative effects on the state’s traffic congestion and air quality,” citing a blog I posted on April 5. The blog was a whole three paragraphs, which means it would take even a slow reader about 30 seconds to discover that the SPLC is blatantly misrepresenting what I wrote.
Those who managed to make it all the way to the third paragraph would have gotten to the part that states unequivocally, “And, no, FAIR is not blaming global warming or traffic on illegal aliens – those are problems that would need to be addressed even if there weren’t a single illegal alien in the country. But California’s policies on illegal immigration aren’t making solutions to these other problems any easier.” (Emphasis added for the benefit of SPLC trolls who monitor this site.)
Even though I didn’t blame worsening traffic and air quality on California issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority came pretty close to doing just that. Again, it would not have required the sleuthing prowess of Sherlock Holmes to discover that, because I provided a link to a Los Angeles Times article which stated, “Metropolitan Transportation Authority leaders attributed a decline in ridership over the last few years, in part, to the new licenses. Last year, the number of trips taken on Los Angeles County’s bus and rail network fell to the lowest level in more than a decade.” (Ditto on the reason for the added emphasis.)
Anyone at the SPLC who might have had the slightest interest in the truth could also have followed the link that the L.A. Times itself provided to back-up that assertion. That link leads to a Jan. 25 story in the Times that states, “A change in state immigration policy has also chipped away at another longtime group of Metro riders. A state law that took effect in 2015 allows immigrants in the country illegally to apply for California driver’s licenses.”
And because, unlike the SPLC, FAIR likes to deal in facts and has some regard for truth, let me again be very, very clear: The issuance of a million driver’s licenses to illegal aliens is only one of several factors attributed to worsening traffic in California. As the Jan. 25 L.A. Times story states, in addition to implementation of the law granting licenses to illegal aliens, the decline in Metro ridership can be attributed to “competition from Uber and Lyft and more people buying cars — as well as perceived problems with existing transit service and security.”
Those who want to get a fuller picture of the SPLC’s sleazy record of lies and distortion can find it here.