Our California Conference: From Gold to Dust…. and Back Again!
Our August 20th Conference was a terrific event – we aimed to give people not only a realistic assessment of the “state of the state” of California, but also ideas for how to help turn the state back to the Golden one it had once been – and by all accounts, we did exactly that.
Held at the Luxe Hotel in Westwood, the conference drew about 200 attendees to hear over 20 outstanding speakers on the five major areas of concern here in California, and the event was capped with the brilliant keynote address by Victor Davis Hanson.
Photos of the event are here.
Videos of the event are here
And some articles about it are here:
From George Miller at Citizen’s Journal (and the article cited by Victor Davis Hanson as an accurate reporting of the event,) this review: AFA Focuses on Decline of California and What to do About It.
From Chriss Street at Breitbart, American Freedom Alliance Takes on California’s Destruction
From Monica Showalter, this article about one of the lesser-known aspects about our border.
SPLC’s HATE LIST
But because we’re on the SPLC hate group’s “hatewatch” list, even this benign conference about how to restore California to its former greatness drew their ire. One of their little minions sat with us, ate with us, drank coffee with us, (may have even said the Pledge of Allegiance with us… but probably not) listened to these 20+ impassioned speakers, each of whom has nothing but love for this state, then went home to scrawl the outrageous lies and slander in this “article” here. From the title on down, the lies in here are brazen and disgusting.
Aside from the specific deceptions and misrepresentations, the most troubling aspect is this: they will use whatever tactic they have at their disposal to intimidate speakers who associate with us, regardless of the issue. The mission of the SPLC, as even they have admitted, is to destroy groups whose ideology they disagree with, and they took to slandering Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute, several others of our speakers, and of course, Victor Davis Hanson himself whose entire talk was completely distorted by this cowardly anonymous writer.
My response to their little slime piece is this open letter to its author. I had tried to post it as a comment on their website, but because (as we of course know!) free speech is intolerable to them, they naturally refused to allow it to be posted.
Katy Grimes’ report is here.
Peter Woods wrote this stellar rebuttal here.
and Victor Davis Hanson, as is his wont, wrote this point-by-point rebuttal here as well as this exceptional indictment of their tactics and deceit:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been in the news recently as a recipient of millions of dollars of grants from large corporations and movie stars, so I am not denying that fictions like the present one are effective in more or less leveraging money through hysteria. Yet your methods are not justified by your ends; the former are reprehensible and the latter self-centered. A growing number of Americans are learning about your group and discovering that when it cannot uncover hate, it invents it—and finds the ensuing smears and slanders quite profitable, resulting ironically in short-term lucre, but in the long-term continued diminution of your reputation. For a fair account of the meeting and speech, see http://citizensjournal.us/afa-focuses-decline-ca/
But take note: the more they try to silence us, the more crucial it is that we speak out.
Join AFA as a member (your tax-deductible contributions are doubled during our MATCHING GRANT opportunity) by clicking here.
Help ensure that the truth continues to be told.
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