It doesn't take much to get one's self branded a racist in Michigan these days.

Donald Trump pulled off an upset win in the state that has gone Democrat in the previous two presidential elections, but that hasn't stopped the entrenched establishment from demonizing those who hold Trump-like views on immigration.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is teaming up with local Detroit media to paint a Maryland-based journalist as an anti-Muslim "extremist" and "Islamophobe" simply because he has produced fact-based research on the U.S. government's refugee resettlement program.

James Simpson has been invited to speak at the annual Business Roundtable Breakfast in Oakland County, one of several counties in Michigan that have been pummeled with refugees from the Middle East over the last eight years of the Obama administration.

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"Civilization jihad" is underway. Get Leo Hohmann's brand new book, "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad," for an in-depth look at the plan of radical Muslims to fundamentally transform the population of the United States.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, who won re-election in a landslide on Nov. 8, has been a vocal critic of the refugee program, threatening to sue the administration for violating the Refugee Act of 1980. Under Obama, the feds have distributed thousands of refugees into Oakland County without advance notice to Patterson and other local government officials. Once the federal month that follows the refugees runs out, Oakland County taxpayers are left holding the bag for the education and welfare of the refugees.

But the SPLC's attack stance has now frightened away one of the Roundtable event's main sponsors, the Fifth Third Bank.

SPLC is the same organization that tried to label former GOP presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson an "extremist" only to remove the post from its website and apologize after an intense nationwide backlash in 2015. The SPLC website still includes a negative "file" on Carson maintaining he has said things that "most people would conclude are extreme," citing as the main example Dr. Carson's belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

But the newest source of the media-made controversy in Michigan is Simpson, author of the 2015 book "The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America."

Simpson has been invited by Patterson to speak at the annual economic forum on Dec. 1. Simpson is a research fellow at Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. The SPLC was used as the source of the negative stories about Simpson that appeared in the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit Metro Times.

Simpson's book, published by Center for Security Policy, exposes both secular and church groups working as paid government resettlement contractors and provides data on the costs of the resettlement program. Oakland County, along with Wayne and Macomb counties, has been on the receiving end more than 7,000 Muslim refugees from Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Bosnia and elsewhere over the past 20 years. The Islamization has been so intense that many local opponents have started referring to Dearborn as "Dearbornistan" and Hamtramck as "Shariahville."

Patterson issued the following statement to WND:

"Mr. Simpson was invited to speak at the Oakland County Business Roundtable precisely because he is provocative. It’s not about whether one agrees with him, but it’s about stimulating meaningful conversation on a timely and important topic in our country. It would be rather Orwellian to exclude him. After all, this is still the United States of America where the First Amendment protects even the most contentious speech."

Pamela Geller, author of "Stop the Islamization of America" and president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, said that if Simpson had authored a leftist propaganda book the Fifth Third Bank would have had no problem with it.

"James Simpson is author of 'The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.' That's why the bank withdrew its sponsorship," Geller told WND. "If a hard-left speaker had been invited, the bank would have had no problem. But those who speak the truth on the right are increasingly ostracized, demonized, and marginalized. The bank is justifiably afraid that leftist thugs will target it for protests, boycotts, etc. But it should stand up to these fascists instead of caving in to them."

'Doubling down' against free speech

And it's not just in Michigan where this is happening. Anyone armed with facts that refute the talking points of the government and its resettlement contractors is immediately branded a racist, said Ann Corcoran, who blogs for the website Refugee Resettlement Watch.

"They're going after the only county executive who's willing to take a stand, and he's right next door to the other county executive in Macomb County who's all in for more refugees," Corcoran said. "Even with the new president-elect they are bearing down, doubling down, in their effort to crack down on free speech."

Simpson said he will appear on Detroit radio host Frank Beckman's show Monday at 9:45 a.m. to discuss the attacks against him in the local media. Beckmann typically hosts listener call-in comments after his interviews.

Simpson has often called the refugee resettlement program a scam that hides under the guise of humanitarian goodness when in actuality it's about making money and changing political demographics in favor of Democrats and socialists. When someone dares challenge their talking points, the resettlement advocates often respond with Saul Alinsky tactics of dehumanizing their opponent, rather than engage them in a civil debate, he said.

"What we're dealing with are faux, self-righteous indignation and really they [at Fifth Third Bank] don’t have the guts to stand up to these people who use vicious tactics, and we need to be stronger than that now," Simpson told WND.

He said the left's "guerrilla warfare" against Trump, the election and anyone associated with this nation's rejection of their agenda, continues unabated.

"Of course, Ann Corcoran, the Center for Security Policy and I are all irredeemable deplorables for our stance against open borders and the Islamization of America," he said.

'Psychological terror' tactics

Simpson said the time for political correctness has passed.

"The election was a referendum on these sanctimonious, dishonest, fraudulent attacks. It's a form of psychological terror not only to intimidate us, but to make it radioactive and intimidate others who might be following in our example and wish to speak out," he said. "They want to destroy anybody they don’t' agree with."

Simpson said a virtual cottage industry has grown up in America that feeds off of destroying people's reputations.

"It's a franchise, that's all it is," he said. "It's a franchise of people who don't know how to do anything productive or that is of any value to anyone so instead they use political manipulation and psychological terrorism against those of us who they don't agree with."

Simpson said the Detroit Metro Times article, which called him an "extremist Islamophobe," was particularly vicious.

"The election was a referendum on that kind of baseless ad hominem attack, and they were essentially proving the point for me," he said.

Obama DOJ threatens communities that oppose mosques

Sterling Heights is one of the cities in the sights of the federal government's effort to transform Southeastern Michigan into a model of multicultural "diversity," where all cultures are seen as equal, and some perhaps more equal than others.

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Muslim expansion is spilling over into Sterling Heights from nearby Detroit, Troy and Hamtramck, which last year became the first U.S. city to elect a Muslim-majority city council. Seeing what happened in Hamtramck, with calls to prayer blasted over loudspeakers and storefronts changed from Polish markets to a mixture of halal and spirit-less restaurants, the people of Sterling Heights pressured their planning commission to deny a major mosque project in the middle of a residential area. The commission voted 9-0 in September 2015 to deny the project citing traffic, parking and other zoning issues but the Obama Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations has sued the city claiming the Islamic group's rights were violated.

Another mosque and Islamic school proposed in Pittsfield Township near Ann Arbor, Michigan, faced the same legal onslaught – a lawsuit by CAIR and the Obama DOJ – and settled out of court last month for $1.7 million. The imam of the Ann Arbor mosque is a known radical who was investigated for ties to the 9/11 terrorists but that didn't stop Obama from rushing to defend his "civil rights."

As Geller has often stated, civil rights to the Obama administration include the right to preach hate and violence against Jews and Christians, even as the administration seeks to crack down on speech critical of Islam.

It's against this backdrop that Oakland County's Patterson is fighting back.

Dick Manasseri, spokesman for Secure Michigan, said his group has submitted a letter to the Free Press's op-ed page based on the First Amendment rights of all Michiganders to speak out.

"It's just as a statement in support of freedom of speech, even though we do have Shariahvilles in Michigan we don't live under the Shariah in Michigan, we have a right to express ourselves, and James Simpson is just presenting information," Manasseri told WND.

"This is standard protocol for them, they do it all the time, and they're given credence by the mainstream media, which is pretty low," said Manasseri. "We've experienced this before."

In January after the jihadist attacks on Paris, one Michigan state senator, Morris Hood II, said Manasseri and anyone who supported Gov. Rich Snyder's call for a halt on Syrian refugees were "racist."

"We went to Lansing and presented six minutes of data on refugees, no commentary, just data, and the refugee industry was represented by CAIR, the Catholic Church, the Jewish and Lutheran Church. And the Democratic leader called the senator proposing the resolution and by reference anyone who supported it a racist because we questioned the fact that they couldn't be vetted," he said. "This is the way it works in Michigan. This goes on all the time, this type of intimidation by the refugee industry in cahoots with the left."

Manasseri said Oakland County has been getting about 500 refugees a month, with about 200 of those coming from Syria.

"And we at Secure Michigan would love to see an injunction from the courts, given that we are likely to see a policy change from the Trump administration, and we have the refugee industry bearing down on people who present information. Simpson has done his homework, he has researched the costs, the national security issues, and the secrecy of the program."

He said the Oakland County health director has never been notified ahead of time of how many refugees are coming into the county.

"That's major, so people are not following the law," he said. "So the position of the county is clear, legal immigration, legal refuges, no problem. It's in the Refugee Act of 1980 that the federal government must consult the local county and ORR has placed hundreds in this county without that consultation having taken place."

"Civilization jihad" is underway. Get Leo Hohmann's brand new book, "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad," for an in-depth look at the plan of radical Muslims to fundamentally transform the population of the United States.

He said Secure Michigan would be happy if the law was followed and the county would get advance notice of who is coming, how they've been vetted, and the state of their health conditions.

"There have been no meetings to this effect. Going from June to now there have been two quarterly meetings and the county still does not have any knowledge of refugees being placed in the county," he said. And what an outrage, they invited a national expert on the issue, I would say that's leadership rather than the slurs being used.

"The meeting is Dec. 1, in a major hotel, and as far as we know the only official group to drop out is the Fifth Third Bank," said Manasseri.

He said the Detroit Free Press, one of the newspapers running a negative piece against Simpson citing the opinion of the SPLC that he is an "extremist," has refused to publish his letter to the editor presenting an opposing perspective.

"We're just trying to get people focused on the issues" he said. "Why would the Free Press print an article and then not publish op-eds on the issue? It would seem on an issue as hot as this when we have a new president who has voiced concerns about this, that it would be something that would sit in an inbox for three or four days."

Bill Mullan, spokesperson for Patterson, said Oakland County is a "global community" that welcomes international business and is home to more than 1,050 foreign-owned companies from 39 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and South America.

"We celebrate legal immigrants. We even open our doors to refugees from anywhere in the world as long as they have been properly vetted and screened for homeland security and public health concerns," Mullan said.

He added that Patterson understand the scope of the Syrian refugee crisis.