Nelsen v. SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center et al
Craig Nelson started the ProjectUSA.org billboard project circa 2000. Craig Nelsen has filed suit against the SPLC.
Snip from docket:
[...] Nelsen conducted research and learned that US immigration policy is fueling explosive US population growth. Having been so recently in overcrowded, polluted China, this break-neck population growth concerned him deeply. But, even more troubling to him, there was almost no public discussion of what seemed to him to be a reckless policy that was radically remaking the country in completely unpredictable ways ...
Believing such suppression of political speech to be contrary to the principles of the Founders, and detrimental to the political health of the nation, Nelsen made the decision to sell off his share of several restaurants he owned with his brother in Manhattan and use the money to form a group to erect billboards in New York and elsewhere to inform his fellow citizens about basic immigration facts ...
Congressman Joe Crowley, Nelsen's representative in Congress, called the billboards “loathsome”; a group of rabbis protested in front of a billboard in Queens; The Daily Show's Jon Stewart ridiculed Nelsen on Comedy Central and used a photo of him with a Hitler mustache superimposed; TV crews camped outside the homes and businesses of family members; politicians held press conferences denouncing the “hate” the billboards spread; the New York City Council voted 43-2 to condemn ProjectUSA and, at a news conference after the vote, Nelsen was compared to a self-described neo-Nazi who had shot up a Jewish daycare center in Los Angeles and murdered an Asian postal worker the day before; New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, writing in the Jewish Forward, inveighed against “the putrid stench of Nelsen's racism”; billboard companies—after threats from city officials—broke their contracts and took down ProjectUSA billboards...
Prior to living in China, Nelsen had written an article for a neighborhood weekly called the East Villager, in which he had advocated open borders on the grounds everyone in the world had the right to pursue happiness anywhere in the world regardless of freedom-killing, government-imposed borders....
Related: Justia
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