5 Reasons The Southern Poverty Law Center Is A Hate-Mongering Scam
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Southern Poverty Law Center is not a legitimate arbiter of public discourse. It poisons public discourse for profit.
Amazon has decided to pull the Alliance Defending Freedom from its Amazon Smile program, in which shoppers can send a portion of their Amazon purchases to charities. Because the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled ADF a hate group, Amazon yanked its opportunity to receive donations on an equal playing field with other Amazon Smile participants, which include highly political leftist organizations Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, Media Matters, and Oxfam-America.
ADF is a nonprofit, First Amendment-focused legal organization that has successfully argued in front of the Supreme Court seven times in the past seven years. It is not some Klu Klux Klan revival, and to suggest so is both false and deeply offensive. Yet slandering good-faith people is SPLC’s raison d’etre . Why? Because that’s how it rakes in millions of dollars a year, show its latest tax filings, to fund its astronomical $432,723,955 endowment and management’s $200,000-$350,000 annual salaries (plus perks!).
Numerous media outlets and watchdog organizations have documented this reality, and over several decades. The Atlantic and Politico have covered, albeit in friendly fashion, the organization’s decision to group with neo-Nazis, black power groups, and Klu Klux Klan chapters people and organizations like Sen. Rand Paul, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, ADF, the Family Research Council, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz. Publications that have exposed SPLC’s hate-profiteering include Tablet magazine ; a newspaper local to SPLC’s headquarters, the Montgomery Advertiser ; Philanthropy magazine, Harper’s magazine, Megan McArdle at Bloomberg; The Weekly Standard ; City Journal ; National Review ; and The Washington Free Beacon.
Simply put, SPLC is not a legitimate arbiter of public discourse. It poisons public discourse for profit. Its business model is to target groups and people, sometimes with baseless smears, to gin up fear and anger so people send SPLC gobs of cash it largely doesn’t use to benefit the oppressed. Neither Amazon nor major media outlets — such as CNN , The Los Angeles Times , The Boston Globe , The Washington Post , the Associated Press , CBS , and PBS — should amplify or give any credence to SPLC’s highly partisan, highly personal, self-interested fear-mongering.
Here are a few reasons why. (The Federalist senior contributor Stella Morabito offers more here .)
1. SPLC’s Attacks Are Purposefully Personal
“The SPLC’s hate group and extremist labels are effective. Groups slapped with them have lost funding, been targeted by activists and generally been banished from mainstream legitimacy,” Politico’s chummy writeup notes. “…in America, even fighting racism can be very good business.”
SPLC’s “extremist” and “hate group” labels are not impartial designations that help citizens, media, and public leaders make better decisions about either local concerns or broader politics. At best, they are self-interested marketing. At worst, they are designed to execute partisan vendettas, to wield financial and political power against legitimate opponents in public discourse.
“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that
our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them,” SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok said at a 2007 conference .
Of course the ideas and methods of the KKK and other violent and bigoted groups that appear on SPLC’s listings are morally wrong and should be rejected. But since SPLC spends the vast majority of its funds on its own salaries and savings instead of tangible efforts to protect and serve victims of bigotry, it seems pretty clear that it uses the relatively few cranks and purveyors of reprehensible racism it can find in America to serve itself — both financially and ideologically — rather than the public good.
2. The Southern Poverty Law Center Is a Scam
“They’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs,” noted Montgomery Advertiser Managing Editor Jim Tharpe in a talk for Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
That’s because SPLC is basically a very effective scam organization that uses images of white-bedsheeted people and, now, Donald Trump policies, to scare donors into sending them piles of money. Trump-mongering has been very good for business. The organization’s latest IRS form, from 2017, shows that “Gifts, grants, contributions, membership fees” to SPLC almost tripled, from $50,297,653 in 2015 — already a huge amount — to $132,044,179 in 2016, of course the year Trump ran and won the presidency. Investigative reporters and actual anti-hate-crimes groups say SPLC is largely a shell organization that uses masterful marketing techniques to rake in big-time profits for its staff, especially founder Morris Dees.
“Over the years, numerous investigators have pointed out that most of the scary KKK and Nazi and militia groups that the SPLC insists are lurking under our beds are actually ghost entities, with no employees, no address, hardly any followers, and little or no footprint,” Philanthropy noted. “…Its two largest expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual lists of ‘haters’ and ‘extremists,’ and running a big effort that pushes ‘tolerance education’ through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. And the single biggest effort undertaken by the SPLC? Fundraising. On the organization’s 2015 IRS 990 form it declared $10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.”
Last year, a Washington Free Beacon investigation showed SPLC keeps millions in offshore accounts, which charity experts labeled “a huge red flag” and “completely unacceptable.”
3. The Southern Poverty Law Center Is Deeply Biased
While listing among largely isolated and rare racist groups several constructive, nonviolent organizations that lean conservative such as ADF and the Ruth Institute, a small pro-family organization headed by a genial PhD who has taught at Yale University, SPLC’s hate list does not include violent leftist organizations such as Antifa .
SPLC says this is because ” as a general matter, prejudice on the basis of factors such as race is more prevalent on the far right than it is on the far left.” That’s not the case for anti-Semitism . Even if one assumes we should ignore political labels and focus on actions and ideology, as Megan McArdle notes , “the center offers bizarrely shifting rationales that suggest that the staff started with the target they wanted to deem hateful, and worked backward to the analysis.”
That is likely why its designated “haters” are those the organization deems most likely to stir up contributions from its mostly liberal donors, not groups and people who genuinely deserve calling out according to objective criteria.
“The SPLC blacklist list contains practicing Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, foreign-policy think-tankers like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, and right-wing firebrands like David Horowitz—none of whom could be reasonably described as anti-Muslim bigots,” finds Tablet magazine. “…[T]he Southern Poverty Law Center is now aggressively defending the kind of violent supremacists [Islamists] it had once sought to prosecute, and attacking types like Nawaz it had once defended against violence.”
SPLC is entitled to its own opinions, but it is not entitled to respect for them or a pretense that they are fair, neutral, unbiased, or free of self-serving motivations.
4. The Southern Poverty Law Center Exploits Hate
SPLC “act[s] like they have hegemony over how to conduct a civil rights debate in this country, which I find a strange posture coming from a group of white men,” says Loretta Ross , program director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta, Georgia-based white supremacy monitoring group. That is likely because SPLC’s concern for civil rights appears to be a facade to facilitate donor and victim exploitation.
In its expose, Harper’s says former SPLC lawyer Gloria Browne, who resigned to protest its behavior, “told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on ‘black pain and white guilt.'” They are not targeted to need or effective social solutions. Harper’s continues:
Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all ‘hate crimes,’ including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by ‘lone wolves.’ Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI’s history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC’s-was never credibly linked to any militia organization.
Of course, however, “news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees,” so SPLC sensationalizes the incidents of racial and anti-LGBT violence in the United States, which data shows is still the most racially tolerant country in the world . While of course this doesn’t mean any incidents of bigotry are alright, SPLC’s profits depend on mischaracterizing and and exploiting them in ways that damage social cohesion and do not benefit actual victims.
Even when it does spend a tiny percentage of its war chest on litigation, “the SPLC would pursue essentially meaningless but headline-grabbing cases, exploiting its uncollectible verdicts through sensational fundraising appeals that generated massive donations,” reports City Journal. “One disgruntled former SPLC attorney complained that ‘[Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on.’”
Because the SPLC depends on racism, violence, and division for its revenue and legitimacy, they have reason to want more of these terrible things, or at least the appearance of more. Their vested interest is not in solving and reducing these social blights, but in maximizing and perpetuating them. All the more reason polite society should starve their fire-stoking of the oxygen of attention.
5. The SPLC Foments Hatred, Fear, and Violence
The SPLC is infamous for offering a pretext for violence. When eminent social scientist Charles Murray, whose work has done more to lift U.S. minorities out of poverty than perhaps any other single living person, visited Middlebury College for a talk, because SPLC has falsely smeared him as a “white supremacist,” students rioted . They attacked Murray and a Middlebury professor as security escorted them out, blocking and rocking their car and yanking the professor’s hair so hard it caused a neck injury that required her to wear a brace afterward.
Murray remains on the “hate list” and SPLC’s website includes no statement about the incident.
In 2012, a young man guided by the SPLC “hate map” entered the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington DC with a gun and shot the security guard, who managed to disarm the shooter. Police later determined the young man intended to kill people at the office because the SPLC had labeled FRC an extremist organization. While condemning the violence, SPLC continues to designate FRC a “hate” group and defend that designation .
After it designated Muslim reformer Nawaz an “extremist” in 2016, the British Quilliam Foundation leader told The Atlantic : “They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m an target. They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.” Given the FRC shooting four years earlier and the real dangers of opposing radical Islamism, that’s not a specious claim.
City Journal further reports that SPLC speaks highly of convicted domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization Weather Underground fomented riots and bombed government offices and banks:
The SPLC’s education project, ‘Teaching Tolerance,’ and its companion website, tolerance.org, market Ayers’s books and describe him as ‘a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education.’ Failing to mention that Ayers dedicated the Weather Underground’s 1974 revolutionary manifesto, Prairie Fire , to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, the SPLC lauds Ayers for his ‘rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.’
Whatever credibility SPLC earned fighting some anti-KKK cases in the 1970s is long gone. It has squandered its moral authority many times over. Its proclamations exploit people to serve its bottom line, and should receive no furtherance from media or organizations like Amazon.
Treating SPLC as a good-faith arbiter of public discourse grants speech police power to an organization whose business model is to make money from poisoning public discourse. Those who care about free speech and justice will grant no such power to folks who, like SPLC, exploit these noble and necessary ideas for their own selfish, cynical, socially destructive ends.
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.....“Numerous media outlets and watchdog organizations have documented this reality, and over several decades. The Atlantic and Politico have covered, albeit in friendly fashion, the organization’s decision to group with neo-Nazis, black power groups, and Klu Klux Klan chapters people and organizations like Sen. Rand Paul, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, ADF, the Family Research Council, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz. Publications that have exposed SPLC’s hate-profiteering include Tablet magazine ; a newspaper local to SPLC’s headquarters, the Montgomery Advertiser ; Philanthropy magazine, Harper’s magazine, Megan McArdle at Bloomberg; The Weekly Standard ; City Journal ; National Review ; and The Washington Free Beacon.
Simply put, SPLC is not a legitimate arbiter of public discourse. It poisons public discourse for profit. Its business model is to target groups and people, sometimes with baseless smears, to gin up fear and anger so people send SPLC gobs of cash it largely doesn’t use to benefit the oppressed. Neither Amazon nor major media outlets — such as CNN , The Los Angeles Times , The Boston Globe , The Washington Post , the Associated Press , CBS , and PBS — should amplify or give any credence to SPLC’s highly partisan, highly personal, self-interested fear-mongering.
Here are a few reasons why. (The Federalist senior contributor Stella Morabito offers more here .)..,..”
The SPLC has made false accusations and had to pay out millions of dollars in reparations.
It was enough that the FBI dropped relying on SPLC's accusations since they were not reliable, but how an organization that has been PROVEN to falsely slander others can garner any respect whatsoever is beyond me.
Too many groups despite potential lawsuits still use the SPLC hate designation as their own including a four letter acronym we all know here as the holy grail. Some groups have dropped that use to avoid legal trouble. Some haven’t received cease and desist letters yet, and of course Google, Facebook, Twitter will likely go to court to fight to keep their censorship tool. The religious liberty 🗽 part of the justice department may soon investigate the SPLC over their hate designation of various conservative and Christian groups that are ideological opponents of the hate mongers at the bigoted SPLC.
So this is the tactic? To sue everyone that dares to report anything?
Careful what you wish for.
If SPLC is biased in its findings; and labeling conservative groups falsely- then it needs to be sued, repeatedly, and often- as do those that use their opinion to ban/bar conservative groups from using their sources.
Don't like it; then crack down on the SPLC.
As for the slippery slope argument- there is far more liberal bias in the media- so yes, be careful what you wish far; because the left has far more to lose.
No, The FBI Hasn't Ditched The Southern Poverty Law Center
So a hate group has to have a permanent address and people on a payroll? What a load of shit.
That is your defense of the SPLC?
That was me picking holes in the so called offence.
No the offense is that the SPLC has slandered groups & individuals who are NOT racists. That is the issue here
What groups would those be?
So, either you didn't read the article or you are going to have me go through the exercise of putting it here.
Ok here:
"While listing among largely isolated and rare racist groups several constructive, nonviolent organizations that lean conservative such as ADF and the Ruth Institute , a small pro-family organization headed by a genial PhD who has taught at Yale University, SPLC’s hate list does not include violent leftist organizations such as Antifa ."
So in other words, you can't list any.
Other than the guy that (his name changes daily) listed that sued.
Which some think they should not have settled because he has a history of suing media organizations.
I just named two. So in other words you have no explanation now?
Where did you list two? You never once yourself said any, other than some link that lists nothing.
Tell me yourself a name.
The ADF and the Ruth Institute. Right out of the article! You have no comeback?
Ruth institute is fighting against same sex marriage and fights against homosexuality.
Fighting against rights.
The ADF is the same. Against gay rights.
Hell, they fought for sodomy laws.
So your only example is two organizations that hate gay people?
Not a rousing success there.
The Ruth Institute believes in traditional marriage. Do they have that right? Even Obama believed in that not long ago. Is he a bigot?
Gays have their rights. Not everybody has to embrace the idea of another lifestyle.
They can believe what they want. When they push their views onto others, it is a problem.
Then why are there groups actively trying to outlaw or diminish their life?
I disagree. I think the SPLC hates all those who won't conform to their way of thinking. Should Muslims conform? Why are they not on the SPLC list?
You have it backwards. You have the law. They only have their religion
Ask Bill Clinton & Obama. They had the same beliefs
We are all in this together. The point is to point out the hate.
If a Muslim group is against society, they should be listed.
They have the law as well. Religion does not make them above the law nor does it grant them authority to declare law.
The Clintons can move to the dark side of the moon for all I care.
As far as Obama, he may have have his beliefs (although changing) yet he did not impose them on anyone.
A Muslim group? Homosexuality is considered to be a form of perversion in their religion. It is a religious belief. Just like acceptance of everyone and every lifestyle is almost a religious doctrine for progressives
He did uphold DOMA until 2011. How do you feel about that?
They don't have it on their side like progressives do. How did you feel about DOMA?
Do you think all Muslim people think the same? Do you think there are no gay Muslim people?
They are no different than Christian groups that think it is a perversion.
How are they different in that regard?
I think we need to get together here and not have several comments apiece. haha
I didn't like DOMA yet it was a compromise he made at the time.
Which I hate to admit but kinda the way it should be.
One is there to serve. It is not a reason for discharge though.
Nope
Do you think there are no gay Muslim people?
I'm sure there are
They are no different than Christian groups that think it is a perversion.
True
How are they different in that regard?
They are different in two ways. 1) there have been atrocities committed against gays in Muslim countries. 2) It is the one religion that get's a pass from secular progressives
You didn't like it, that's fine. Religious people did like it. You say Obama made a compromise on DOMA? What was it?
I would say you are wrong as there are no Muslim people (that I know of) killing gay people in this country.
If there are, they would be prosecuted, if it was a group, it should be on the list.
In this country? NO. I said in MUSLIM COUNTRIES.
Sorry I had to show it
Some religious people didn't like it as for some reason they thought that gay people shouldn't serve.
Or were afraid to share quarters with them.
I didn't mean Obama compromised. I meant the whole deal was a Clinton compromise.
If all the opposition has against the SPLC is certain Muslim countries, I would call that weak.
I have a little different take on it if I may....When Bill Clinton did what he did, the majority of the American people wanted the reassurance of something like DOMA. When Obama was President, attitudes were changing. There was evidence that the majority of Americans were ok with same sex marriage. Obama had changed as well and stopped enforcing the law in 2011. The Supreme Court, IMO, acted for the same reasons.
No far from it. Here is an article from the Washington Post which may interest you:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty-law-center-has-lost-all-credibility/2018/06/21/22ab7d60-756d-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.3f4cdbeade67
Nice talk. I need to get a walk in. Have a good one
Kinda have to agree with you there. yet even so, why support a group that wants to turn back time?
That website should be against the rules here. It is a subscription site that I cannot read.
Same to you. Walking? I need to exercise more.
That's not always true.
Sometimes they hang them from cranes instead, as in Iran. You know, "Death to America" Iran. The "you can trust" Iran.
That was a very good article from the Post. There are several articles from the msm questioning the practices and actions of the SPLC.
Sometimes the picture is worth a thousand words
The Washington Post should be against the rules here? I agree! Lol! What else do you expect of Amazon’s paper but to be a for pay site? That particular article was really good.
I just get pissed off when they do that. I have used them before yet I guess this month met my allotted quota.
So if I do seed from them it is usually through MSN. That way everyone can see it.
I hate the pay sites and especially when it comes to covering my particular sports interests.
The fact that SPLC is so hated among far right wing fascist hate groups means it is highly effective against them.
The SPLC is a terrorist inspiring hate group running a scam posing as a non profit charitable organization. They get an F grade by charity monitoring groups and stand accused of being a fund raising group instead. Dees needs to spend the rest of his life in prison for the racketeering his organization has been up to the last 25 years or so.
Translation: They point out our obvious and blatant religious based bigotry!! Those monsters!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Even if one assumes we should ignore political labels and focus on actions and ideology, as Megan McArdle notes , “the center offers bizarrely shifting rationales that suggest that the staff started with the target they wanted to deem hateful, and worked backward to the analysis.”
That is likely why its designated “haters” are those the organization deems most likely to stir up contributions from its mostly liberal donors, not groups and people who genuinely deserve calling out according to objective criteria.
“The SPLC blacklist list contains practicing Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, foreign-policy think-tankers like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, and right-wing firebrands like David Horowitz—none of whom could be reasonably described as anti-Muslim bigots,” finds Tablet magazine. “…[T]he Southern Poverty Law Center is now aggressively defending the kind of violent supremacists [Islamists] it had once sought to prosecute, and attacking types like Nawaz it had once defended against violence.”
SPLC is entitled to its own opinions, but it is not entitled to respect for them or a pretense that they are fair, neutral, unbiased, or free of self-serving motivations.
I could say the same about any or all organizations. That is what I call an over generalization.
Free from any facts.
The article by the lead editor of The Federalist is spot on target 🎯 in its expose of the hate filled scam and fraud that is the SPLC.
I say the same about fox news.
Fox News doesn’t try to pose as a charity nor do they make pronouncements in an attempt to censor or destroy others.
Exactly.. They hate the fact that they point out their religious bigotry and hatred...
Im proud to associate myself with all the conservative and Christian persons and groups that have been defamed by the hate filled bigots who are the SPLC and it’s leader as so called hate groups. I proudly stand with Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council and all the rest mentioned in the Federalist article which is right on in its description of the SPLC and what it is.
So basically you are proud to stand with any group that disparages gay people.
Good article. Nobody could lay a glove on it!
Catholics don't believe in condoms.
Not true. I'm a Catholic and I believe in safe sex or maybe I should say PLANNING
That is the bottom line and this point must be restated:
SPLC’s “extremist” and “hate group” labels are not impartial designations that help citizens, media, and public leaders make better decisions about either local concerns or broader politics. At best, they are self-interested marketing. At worst, they are designed to execute partisan vendettas, to wield financial and political power against legitimate opponents in public discourse.
“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that
our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them,” SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok said at a 2007 conference .
Of course the ideas and methods of the KKK and other violent and bigoted groups that appear on SPLC’s listings are morally wrong and should be rejected. But since SPLC spends the vast majority of its funds on its own salaries and savings instead of tangible efforts to protect and serve victims of bigotry, it seems pretty clear that it uses the relatively few cranks and purveyors of reprehensible racism it can find in America to serve itself — both financially and ideologically — rather than the public good.
2. The Southern Poverty Law Center Is A Scam
“They’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs,” noted Montgomery Advertiser Managing Editor Jim Tharpe in a talk for Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
That’s because SPLC is basically a very effective scam organization that uses images of white-bedsheeted people and, now, Donald Trump policies, to scare donors into sending them piles of money. Trump-mongering has been very good for business.
The SPLC via its pronouncements and acts is simply exposing its own hatred and bigotry against legitimate American groups while wishing that they would be considered legitimate. They know that they are not and that they are nothing more than a bigoted money making scheme for their founder.
Yup, corruption is bad and intellectual corruption is always worse
No, they can’t. The points made by The Federalist are water tight and iron clad and can’t be refuted.
Indeed it is. The SPLC is a cesspool of fiscal and intellectual corruption.
No, opposition to gay marriage and resisting being coerced to participate in celebrating one is not disparaging gay people. As to the subject if I were a web site I’d not be allowed here.
As Hitler and Stalin hated one another
Exactly! They were two forms of socialism hating each other and the SPLC and the neo nazis/ kkk are all equally vile and evil hate groups that hate each other as well.
Why do so many folks treat the SPLC with undeserved reverence, the way too many high school kids treat a self-appointed nasty queen bee? Why do they accept the Southern Poverty Law Center as the nation’s Grand Inquisitor dictating who may speak and who must shut up? And why are its smears and caricatures so often blindly accepted at face value? What qualifies the SPLC to act as judge, jury, and social executioner of any human being who is not their blind supporter?
Those questions have been hanging in the air for decades. As with all vilification campaigns, the SPLC plays a dangerous and cruel game under the guise of defending victims. So let’s take a closer look at some of the SPLC’s history and behavior. Let’s count some ways it’s a con game.