Marietta Daily Journal

OPINION

Letters to the editor

Kemp’s broken campaign promise

There is a reason we quit the Georgia Republican Party — and it is centered around the fact that in a state with more illegal aliens than green card holders, illegal immigration has become a forbidden topic in an effort to court the fabled “suburban moderates” and Hispanics. This insulting and dangerous treachery is not going to drive conservative independent voters to the polls in November. Including us.

January 7, 2020

DEAR EDITOR:

In November a male foreign national with an ICE detainer was arrested in Marietta for sexually molesting two teenage boys for years starting when the boys were ages 8 and 9. Just after Christmas another alien with an ICE hold, Juan Antonio Gonzalez, was arrested by Cobb police and booked into the county jail facing six felonies including murder, aggravated assault, fleeing police and possessing a gun during the commission of a crime. We know this because the MDJ reported it. Thank you.

While Gov. Kemp is endlessly boasting of his business-first approach to governing Georgia and the “No. 1 for business” ranking from some magazine, what the MDJ and the rest of the state media are not reporting is that these two examples of vicious crimes by illegal aliens illustrate part of a broken campaign promise from Kemp.

Readers who can remember back to 2018 may recall “Brian Kemp’s Track and Deport Plan” which was a particularly detailed campaign pledge to voters aimed at illegal aliens who commit additional crimes. It went like this: “As governor, conservative businessman Brian Kemp will create a comprehensive database to track criminal aliens in Georgia. He will also update Georgia law to streamline deportations from our jails and prisons.”

We have no hope of Kemp going after the employers who draw the “undocumented” cheap labor into our state. That would upset the business donors. But at our house we have been waiting to see Kemp follow through on his tough talk on illegal alien crime. Including the two examples above, we challenge anyone to find any mention from Kemp — or the Georgia media — of the campaign promise, new laws, tracking criminal aliens or illegal alien databases.

There is a reason we quit the Georgia Republican Party — and it is centered around the fact that in a state with more illegal aliens than green card holders, illegal immigration has become a forbidden topicin an effort to court the fabled “suburban moderates” and Hispanics. This insulting and dangerous treachery is not going to drive conservative independent voters to the polls in November. Including us.

Bill Buckler

Kennesaw

Here.

*  Washington Times coverage here.

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‘DEFAMATORY’: Conservative Demands Swing-State Newspaper Retract ‘Hate Group’ Smear

From the Daily Signal

Tyler O’Neil

October 22, 2024

D.A. King, an immigration enforcement activist whose defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center is proceeding in court, sent a legal demand letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, requesting a correction when the newspaper called his organization an “anti-immigration hate group.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper of record in and around Georgia’s capital city, mentioned King’s group, the Dustin Inman Society, as an aside in an Oct. 7 article about Katy Stamper, who won the Democratic primary in Georgia’s 11th Congressional District. Democrats now support a write-in candidate, claiming Stamper won the primary on false pretenses.

“A search of activity under her birth name, Karen Sacandy, which Stamper legally changed in 2019, showed that she previously was aligned with a Marietta-based anti-immigration hate group,” The Journal-Constitution’s Washington correspondent, Tia Mitchell, wrote. Mitchell went on to include links to the Dustin Inman Society’s website, without mentioning the society or explaining why the paper characterized it as an “anti-immigration hate group.”

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The Dustin Inman Society, which advocates enforcing immigration law and combats illegal immigration, has three legal immigrants on its board of advisors: Mary Grabar (from Slovenia); Maria Litland (from Austria); and Sabine Durden-Coulter (from Germany). The society takes its name from a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant.

“This smear is an ongoing and retaliatory habit for the staff at the AJC,” King told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “They know it’s false and have had to run corrections many times over the years telling readers that we are aimed at illegal immigration and are not somehow ‘anti-immigration.’”

Where Did AJC Get the Idea?

King is already fighting to restore his reputation in court after one left-leaning organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, branded the Dustin Inman Society a “hate group.”

The SPLC, which routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups” and puts them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, branded the society an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018. Yet back in 2011, the SPLC told The Associated Press that it didn’t consider the society a “hate group.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates lessening immigration restrictions, registered a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported. The SPLC marked the society as a “hate group” around the same time.

King sued the SPLC for defamation, and a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to move to the discovery process.

As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” a terrorist used the organization’s “hate map” to attack a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., in 2012, and a former SPLC staffer called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” Many defamation lawsuits against the SPLC have failed, however, in part because few plaintiffs before King could prove that the organization had reason to suspect the “hate group” label was false.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn’t cite the SPLC in its attack on the Dustin Inman Society, and it didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this story.

King told The Daily Signal that the newspaper is echoing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attack but setting itself up as a separate arbiter of “hate.”

“Since we began our battle against illegal immigration here in 2005, the AJC has migrated from merely being biased, liberal and agenda-driven to blooming into apparent competition with the despicable SPLC,” he said. “They have now apparently taken it upon themselves to bypass the leftist establishment smear artists and classify pro-enforcement political opponents who talk back as operating an ‘anti-immigration hate group’ themselves—including those who are immigrants.”

King said the newspaper was engaging in a double standard: condemning his organization as a “hate group” while celebrating those on the Left who advocate amnesty for illegal aliens. He cited the Georgia Association of Elected Officials, which goes by the acronym GALEO and describes itself as focusing “on increasing civic participation of the Latinx community and developing prominent Latino leaders throughout Georgia.”

“In the meantime,” King said of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “they label anti-enforcement, far-left groups such as the notorious GALEO that publicly protest against immigration enforcement as ‘civil rights groups.’”

King also noted that the AJC paid to sponsor the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund gala in 2004. Mario Obledo, MALDEF’s co-founder, had suggested that non-Hispanic, white California residents should move “back to Europe.”

When then-President Bill Clinton gave Obledo the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, a man in the audience asked, “You also made the statement that California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn’t like it they should leave. Did you say that?”

“I did,” Obledo replied. “They ought to go back to Europe.”

“The AJC has promoted open borders and helped this far-left, anti-borders group with fundraising,” King told The Daily Signal. “Just because MALDEF founder Mario Obledo called for Americans who didn’t agree with his plan for California and saying those who didn’t ‘ought to go back to Europe’ didn’t stop AJC from serving as ‘dinner chair’ for a MALDEF funder gala here.”… please read the entire article here.

ByJEFF AMY Associated Press

February 29, 2024, 6:08 PM

AP,