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12 Ways The Southern Poverty Law Center Is A Scam To Profit From Hate-Mongering

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Jeff Sessions Please Investigate

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Sep 27, 2017, 3:09:24 AM9/27/17
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The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Hate List’ has all the
authority of a mean girl’s burn book. Yet it is dangerously
provocative.

What makes the hate list of the Southern Poverty Law Center
different from the “burn book” a high school queen bee keeps in
the 2004 movie “Mean Girls”? Answer: not much. The burn book was
a compilation of insults, gossip, and rumors intended to repel
the diva’s “enemies,” label everybody, and keep herself on top
of the heap.

The SPLC uses its list of designated hate groups in much the
same way: to manipulate the lives of others, smear reputations,
control personal relationships, and reap the spoils. The dynamic
is the same, whether played on the adolescent scene or in the
political arena. Both lists serve mostly as power-mongering
tools.

In civilized societies, we supposedly grow out of that sort of
tribalism. But look around and you’ll see such behaviors
proliferating in every sphere: politics, journalism, education.
A recent headline in the Washington Examiner nailed it: “The
Bret Stephens Freak Out is a Reminder that the Media Is
Basically a Massive High School Clique.”

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.

1. It’s a Big-Money Smear Machine
The SPLC’s main role is as a massively funded propaganda smear
machine. The following information on the SPLC, provided by Karl
Zinsmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable, is an eye-opener: “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.”

2. The Center’s Work Has Incited Violence
The SPLC’s agitation and propaganda have proven to incite
violence. Any person or organization of note who doesn’t get
with the SPLC’s political agendas—whether they promote family
integrity, religious freedom, U.S. immigration law, or anything
else—is liable to end up smeared as an SPLC-certified agent of
hate.

The SPLC website keeps tabs on designated bad guys with a Hate
Map of the United States and an invitation for readers to
#reporthate. The SPLC’s hate list includes the Family Research
Council in Washington DC, and the 2012 shooting at FRC
headquarters was inspired through the influence of SPLC
agitprop, according to the gunman himself. He would have
committed mass murder if he wasn’t stopped.

The recent mob violence in response to social scientist Charles
Murray’s talk at Middlebury College, and the assault of a
faculty member there, were products of the SPLC’s smear of
Murray as an “extremist.” The list goes on.

3. SLPC Uses Emotion-Laden Images to Spread Innuendo
SPLC uses emotion-laden images with nary any evidence to “spread
stigma just by innuendo.” Zinsmeister from Philanthropy
Roundtable notes: “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.”

But “hate groups” and “extremist organizations” are great copy,
especially for fundraising. So the SPLC list of storm-troopers-
in-our-midst is catnip for journalists looking for dramatic
stories. SPLC’s lack of reasonable criteria for who goes on its
list of crazies combines effortlessly with careless reporting,
and spreads stigma just by innuendo. Mere proximity to SPLC’s
arbitrary “hate” list is enough to tar even the worthiest group.

4. The FBI Stopped Citing SPLC as a Resource
Two years ago, the FBI deleted the SPLC from its website’s list
of legitimate resources on hate crimes. This is a promising sign
of growing clarity that the SPLC’s designations for hate groups
lack legitimacy. There also seems to be growing boldness in
calling out the SPLC for its tactics intended to shut down
serious scholarship.

5. People On Its Political Team See the Problems, Too
Even some self-identified progressives are taking issue with
SPLC vilification campaigns after the 2012 SPLC-inspired
shooting at the Family Research Council. The SPLC’s emotionally
charged rhetoric ignites divisions among people rather than
healing anything. And there’s no telling where that can end up.
So even leftist Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote
that the SPLC’s labeling of the Family Research Center as a hate
group was a reckless act.

6. Its Nonprofit Status Masks Highly Political Fundraising
The SPLC operates far more as a political action committee than
as the nonprofit it claims to be. The hyper-partisan nature of
the SPLC’s operations makes its nonprofit status seem like a
joke. In a recent letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin,
the Federation for Immigration Reform argued that the SPLC’s tax-
exempt 501(c)3 status should be revoked because in the 2016
elections, the SPLC clearly violated the Internal Revenue
Service requirement that prohibits “participating in or
intervening (including the publishing or distributing of
statements), in any political campaign on behalf of (or in
opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

7. Its Public Activities Are a Ruse for Fundraising
The SPLC is little more than a “cash collecting machine” rooted
more deeply in fund-raising opportunism than in any do-gooder
impulse. The SPLC was founded in 1971, after much of the heroic
heavy lifting of the civil rights era was already over and the
Ku Klux Klan was pretty much beyond its death throes. But
invoking the imagery of pointy white hoods still seems to be an
irresistible fund-raising ploy for the SPLC.

Again, Zinsmeister at Philanthropy Roundtable calls it out: “The
SPLC is a cash-collecting machine. In 2015 it vacuumed up $50
million in contributions and foundation grants, a tidy addition
to its $334 million holdings of cash and securities and its
headquarters worth $34 million. ‘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 Jim Tharpe, managing
editor of the SPLC’s hometown newspaper, the Montgomery
­Advertiser, in a talk at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for
Journalism.”

Zinsmeister adds: “Though it styles itself as a public-interest
law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center does shockingly little
litigation, and only small amounts of that on behalf of any
aggrieved individuals.”

8. Its Founder Is a Direct Marketing Guru
SPLC founder Morris Dees was inducted into the Direct Marketing
Hall of Fame in 1998. That should tell you a lot. Dees’
experience as an ultra-successful direct mail marketer well
precedes his SPLC days. Perhaps he employed those skills while
working on George Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign in
Alabama and as finance director for George McGovern’s 1972
presidential bid, as well as campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Ted
Kennedy.

But critics say he got especially wealthy while at the SPLC,
building what they’ve called his “poverty palaces,” by guilt-
tripping and virtue-signaling a load of affluent white donors
who identify as progressives.

9. Civil Rights Activists Say Its Founder Is ‘A Con Man’
Bona fide civil rights activists have described the SPLC founder
as “a con man and a fraud.” A 2000 Harper’s Magazine article by
Ken Silverstein quotes anti-death penalty activist Millard
Farmer on Dees’ apparent fund-raising monomania: “He’s the Jim
and Tammy Faye Bakker [notorious televangelists] of the civil
rights movement, though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy
Faye.”

Take note also of the sentiment expressed (also cited in
Harper’s) by civil rights lawyer Stephen Bright in a letter to
the dean of the University of Alabama law school in 2007: “Thank
you very much for the invitation to speak at the law school’s
commencement in May. I am honored by the invitation, but regret
that I am not able to accept it due to other commitments at that
time.

“I also received the law school’s invitation to the presentation
of the ‘Morris Dees Justice Award,’ which you also mentioned in
your letter as one of the ‘great things’ happening at the law
school. I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris
Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S.
Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been
documented by John Egerton, Harper’s, the Montgomery Advertiser
in its ‘Charity of Riches’ series, and others. . . . Both the
law school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another
Dees scam.”

10.The Center Is Advertising For New Revenue-Raisers
SPLC is now advertising for help in “developing theories” to
support its litigation projects. The following is from a current
appeal to recent law school graduates at the Ivy League
University of Pennsylvania: “Penn Law and the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) have created a new, two-year, post-graduate
fellowship for a new or recent graduate to work with the SPLC’s
Special Litigation Practice Group. . .The Penn Law Civil Rights
Fellow will serve as an integral member of the SPLC’s legal
group, conducting legal research and analysis and developing
theories to support new litigation projects and advocacy
campaigns …” (emphasis mine). If you need to develop a “theory”
to support an argument intended to condemn those you’ve labelled
as haters, there probably isn’t any there there.

11. SPLC Propaganda Seems to Encourage Hoax Hate Crimes
SPLC propaganda seems to encourage hoax hate crimes. There has
been a recent surge of hoax hate crimes. In part, I believe this
is due to the far reach of the SPLC’s propaganda and agitation
machine, which has maligned legitimate think tanks and advocacy
centers like the Family Research Center, Alliance Defending
Freedom, and the Center for Security Policy. It also has smeared
eminent scholars like Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as well as
pediatric neurosurgeon (now secretary of Housing and Urban
Development) Ben Carson.

This indiscriminate free-for-all creates an easy climate in
which hoaxes can thrive. (For some background on fake hate
crimes, check Laird Wilcox’s publication “Crying Wolf” or his
database.)

12. Its Blacklist Foments the Campus Anti-Speech Movement
The SPLC is no doubt heavily invested in the campus anti-speech
movement. It stands to reason that to control “hate speech,” one
must control all speech. That’s a major reason any speaker on a
college campus who is unapproved by the SPLC can end up shut
down in riotous fashion as Murray at Middlebury or Milo
Yiannopoulos at Cal Berkeley or Gavin McInnes at New York
University. If you plan to attend such an event, you’ll notice
that even lesser-known speakers often need police escorts after
the SPLC has blacklisted them.

A society of people who can reason isn’t good for direct mail
marketers.
Anti-speech activists on campus will often cite even an
association the speaker might have with someone on the SPLC
list. They will also direct students to attend another event
deliberately scheduled to conflict with it. This happened to me
at Georgetown University when I went to hear Nonie Darwish speak
about her conversion from Islam to Christianity. She had at
least three police escorts, and endured a lot of slurs and
hostility from audience members. The flyer I was handed before
going into the talk warned that Darwish was an “Islamophobe”
unapproved by the SPLC, as though that actually meant something.

Now, why would the SPLC want to demean good people who take
views contrary to its own?

A society of people who can reason isn’t good for direct mail
marketers. A society of people who have serious concerns about
the erosion of religious liberties or free speech is not good
for propagandists of any stripe. The term “hate” has been
remarkably effective at suppressing independent thought and
speech. Nobody wants to be labeled a bigot, and if faced with
that prospect will tend to flee from “offending” views. This is
the behavior modification propaganda aims for. It contributes to
the noxious effects of groupthink.

The flip side is that the SPLC’s abuse of the term “hate” will
attract support from a certain segment of the population that
wants to suppress the views of those who disagree with them.
That is good for direct mail marketers who are interested in
generous contributions from the fatuously self-righteous.

Sadly, history has revealed time and again that organized
vilification campaigns endanger human dignity and freedom. The
SPLC treads perilous ground, trading in explosively hostile
language in return for what else but money and power?

http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/12-ways-southern-poverty-law-
center-scam-profit-hate-mongering/
 

a322x1n

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Sep 27, 2017, 4:52:19 AM9/27/17
to
"Jeff Sessions Please Investigate" <bigots.f...@splc.org> wrote in
news:e9f3911b6710f6d1...@dizum.com:

> The Southern Poverty Law Center’s...

Doubtless, Mr. Sessions will mobilize the entire Justice Department
based on nothing more than your disinformation and propaganda.

David H

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Sep 27, 2017, 8:43:23 AM9/27/17
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote

>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.
>

a bunch of racist niggers and joos who hate trump and when we
shoot negros and lynch them. if trump had any balls and wasn't
controlled by the democrats, he's throw the lot of them in prison
and throw away the key.

Byker

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Sep 27, 2017, 1:58:29 PM9/27/17
to
"Jeff Sessions Please Investigate" wrote in message
news:e9f3911b6710f6d1...@dizum.com...
>
> Sadly, history has revealed time and again that organized vilification
> campaigns endanger human dignity and freedom. The SPLC treads perilous
> ground, trading in explosively hostile language in return for what else
> but money and power?
>
> http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/17/12-ways-southern-poverty-law-center-scam-profit-hate-mongering/

It should have been the subject of "American Greed" on CNBC a long time
ago...

David H

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Nov 20, 2018, 11:54:39 AM11/20/18
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote

>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.
>

Byker

unread,
Nov 20, 2018, 3:11:01 PM11/20/18
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote
>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.

https://tinyurl.com/y94gbm5o

The SPLC has been a scam from the get-go. If it ever winds up on "American
Greed" on CNBC, I'll just think, "What took so damn long?"

David H

unread,
Sep 24, 2019, 9:07:09 PM9/24/19
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote

>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.
>

David H

unread,
Mar 10, 2020, 10:18:33 PM3/10/20
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote

>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.
>

David H

unread,
Mar 13, 2020, 8:00:36 AM3/13/20
to
Jeff Sessions Please Investigate wrote

>
> The Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate List' has all the
> authority of a mean girl's burn book. Yet it is dangerously
> provocative.
>

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