Posted on 01/10/2017 5:24:23 AM PST by SJackson
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two Alabama attorneys, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. The latter served as the Center's legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees, who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, who would emerge as the long-term face of the organization.
Identifying itself as a nonprofit civil rights organization committed to fighting hate and bigotry while seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society, SPLC describes the United States as a country seething with racial violence and intolerance against those who are different. Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant, says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims are not isolated incidents, but rather, commonplace. To combat this ugly state of affairs, SPLC dedicates itself to tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups and other domestic extremists throughout the United States. Specifically, the Center's Hate & Extremism initiative publishes its findings in SPLCs Hatewatch Blog and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report.
SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, when it won a $7 million verdict in a high-profile civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA). By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans emphatically rejected; the SPLC lawsuit merely drove the final nail into the UKA coffin. SPLC boasts that it has likewise won crushing jury verdicts that effectively shut down groups like the White Aryan Resistance, the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations.
This has been SPLC's modus operandi since its inception: to initiate lawsuits against prominent hate groups for crimes that their individual members commit. In these suits, declares Morris Dees proudly: We absolutely take no prisoners. When we get into a legal fight we go all the way. The leftist writer Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote a penetrating exposé of SPLC for Harper's magazine, has noted that the targets of these lawsuits tend to be mediagenic villains who are eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras. As Dees and SPLC well understand, such figures stand the best chance of triggering an emotional public response that translates, in turn, into financial contributions from donors eager to combat the perceived threat.
SPLC claims that there are currently 892 active hate groups in the U.S. Asserting that the vast majority of such organizations are right wing, the Center says they include the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, antigovernment militias, Christian Identity adherents, and a variety of anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, and alternative Right organizations. While also identifying a tiny smattering of black separatist entities as hate groups, SPLC takes pains to point out that black organizations must be judged by a different standard than their white counterparts, because much black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism.
SPLC contends that from 2000 to 2012, the number of hate groups in the U.S. increased by 67%a surge allegedly fueled by anger and fear over the nations ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nations first African-American president (Barack Obama). And America's racists, by SPLC's calculus, are almost all conservativesas evidenced by the caption featured in the Hatewatch section of SPLCs website: Hatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right. The radical left gets no mention at all.
SPLC's hate group counts have been shown to be devoid of legitimacy a number of times. Laird Wilcoxa researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movementsreports that many SPLC-designated hate groups are untraceable, due either to their inactivity or nonexistence. After analyzing the SPLC Klanwatch Project's list of 346 white supremacist groups in 1992, for instance, Wilcox concluded that in fact there were only about 50 such groups that are objectively significant, are actually functioning and have more than a handful of real numbersnot post office box groups or two-man local chapters.[1] In 2005, Wilcox reported: Several years ago with minimal effort I went through a list of 800-plus 'hate groups' published by the SPLC and determined that over half of them were either non-existent, existed in name only, or were inactive.
JoAnn Wypijewski, who writes for the far-left Nation magazine, once said: No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of [hate] groups than [SPLC's] millionaire huckster, Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging [i.e., fundraising] letter [by stating that] the danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years. To put Dees's claim in perspective, the Ku Klux Klan at that time consisted of no more than 3,000 people nationwidea far cry from the 4 million members it had boasted in the 1920s. Nonetheless, noted Wypijewski, Dees would have his donors believe that cadres of militia nuts are lurking around every corner.
In a similar vein, the late left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn in 2009 called Dees the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, a man who profited by selling the notion theres a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other. Ever since 1971, added Cockburn, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with [Dees's] fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America.
Regardless of how dramatically SPLC overstates their numbers, white racists like neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and skinheads indisputably deserve to be categorized as hate groups. But the Center irresponsibly extends that designation also to numerous conservative and libertarian organizations that harbor no ill will against any demographic group, but merely hold political positions contrary to those of SPLC. As syndicated columnist Don Feder writes: What makes [SPLC] particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that theres a logical relationship between, say, opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants.
For instance, one noteworthy organization that SPLC has placed in its cross hairs is the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which the Center, in a 2003 report authored by researcher/writer Chip Berlet, identified as part of an array of right-wing foundations and think tanks [that] support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable. Especially objectionable to SPLC was AEI fellow Dinesh DSouza, an Indian-born scholar (and former Reagan Administration adviser) whose views, according to Berlet, are seen by many as bigoted or even racist. Specifically, D'Souza has written that affirmative action is an unjust, counterproductive policy; that many liberals have been peculiarly blind about black racism; that virtually all contemporary liberal assumptions about the origin of racism ... and what to do about it are wrong; and that the civil-rights industry ... now has a vested interest in the persistence of the ghetto, because the miseries of poor blacks are the best advertisement for continuing programs of racial preference and set-asides. D'Souza has suggested, wrote Berlet incredulously, that civil rights activists actually help perpetuate racial tensions and division in the United States. Such sentiments as DSouzas arenotwithstanding the repeatedly divisive rhetoric and actions of racial arsonists like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and the late Julian Bondanathema to an organization whose income stream is largely dependent upon an ability to perpetuate public angst over black suffering.
Berlet's 2003 report likewise denounced another AEI-sponsored scholar, Charles Murraya Bradley Foundation research fellow who in 1994 co-authored The Bell Curve, which SPLC described as a book that argues that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites and that most social welfare and affirmative action programs are doomed to failure as a result. Addressing unfounded critiques such as this, Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell wrote that widespread demonization by demagogues who were interested only in hearing what they want to hear, had rendered The Bell Curve one of the most misrepresented books of our time.
In SPLC's 2003 report as well, Berlet charged that conservative author David Horowitz has blamed slavery on 'black Africans ... abetted by dark-skinned Arabs'a selective rewriting of history. To this, Horowitz replied:
I never in my life blamed slavery on black Africans abetted by dark-skinned Arabs.' What idiot would not know that white Europeans conducted the Atlantic Slave Trade, which trafficked in 11 million black African chattel? The sentence Berlet mangles is not a historical statement about slavery but a polemical response to the proponents of reparations who are demanding that only whites pay blacks for an institutionslaverythat has been eradicated in the western world (but not Arab and black Africa) for more than 100 years. It is intended to remind people that the slaves transported to America were bought from African and Arab slaversnot to blame Africans and Arabs for sole responsibility for slavery.
Berlet also took issue with what he called Horowitz's false claim that there never was an anti-slavery movement until white ChristiansEnglishmen and Americanscreated one. Critics note, Berlet added, that Horowitz is ignoring everything from the slave revolt led by Spartacus against the Romans and Moses' rebellion against the Pharaoh to the role of American blacks in the abolition movement. And yet, Horowitz had already anticipated and discredited these very charges two years earlier, in his 2001 book Uncivil Wars: The Controversy About Slavery, wherein he wrote:
For thousands of years, until the end of the Eighteenth Century, slavery had been considered a normal institution of human societies. In all that time, no group had arisen to challenge its legitimacy. Of course, there were many slave revolts from the times of Moses and Spartacus, in which those who had been enslaved sought to gain their freedom. But that was not the point. The freedom they had sought was their own. They did not revolt against the institution of slavery as such. What had happened in the English-speaking countries at the dawn of the American Republican was entirely unique. Before then, no one had thought to form a movement dedicated to the belief that the institution of slavery was itself immoral. What was important in this historical fact was that it showed that white Europeans who were the target of the reparations indictment had played a pivotal role in the emancipation from slavery.
Berlets gross misrepresentations of Horowitzs work can only be understood in the context of Berlets own political and ideological track record. For instance, in the mid-1970s he volunteered to work on Counterspy magazine, an anti-CIA periodical founded by Philip Agee, the onetime intelligence officer who subsequently turned against the agency and spent years exposing the identity of undercover American spies who were stationed overseas. During the Cold War, Berlet was a supporter of Communist police statesmost notably Albania, one of the most backward and repressive. Indeed, in 1983 Berlet was a founding member of the Chicago Area Friends of Albania, a Communist front group that supported the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the repressive political rule of the Marxist-Leninist dictator Enver Hoxha. And for the past 35 years Berlet has been a paralegal member of the National Lawyers Guild, which throughout the Cold War embraced pro-Soviet agendas while systematically opposing the foreign policies of the United States, and which continues to depict America as the principal wellspring of evil on earth.
In 2010 SPLC denounced the Tea Party, which advocated reductions in government spending and taxes, as a movement that was shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism.
Another of SPLC's bedrock beliefs is its conviction that the U.S., in addition to being inherently racist, is also a homophobic nation that countenances all manner of injustice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered peoplewho, according to the Center, are far more likely to be victims of a violent hate crime than any other minority group in the United States. SPLC tars anyone objecting to transformative cultural changes involving homosexualssuch as gay marriageas a hate monger whose opinions have no more legitimacy than those of an Aryan militia. Thus did the Center once list the conservative Family Research Council as a hate group, chiefly because of its opposition to same-sex marriage and its view that homosexuality is an unnatural condition associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. It should be noted that FRC expresses no malice at all toward homosexuals, as demonstrated not only by its professed sympathy for those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, but also by its call for every effort
to assist such persons to overcome those attractions.
SPLCs list of hate groups and extremist groups also includes the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative organization that opposes homosexuality on religious grounds and rejects the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would designate transgendered people (cross-dressers) as a protected class whom employers would not be free to eliminate from job-applicant pools on that basis.
SPLC sees Islamophobiahatred and fear based on religious faithas yet another major defect in the American character. The June 2012 edition of Intelligence Report, for instance, featured a hit-piece titled 30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right, which claimed that an anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.
That seemingly ominous statistic seems less foreboding, however, when one considers that according to FBI data, the number of reported anti-Muslim hate crimes nationwide increased from 107 in 2009 to 160 in 2010technically a 50% increase, but hardly what could be characterized as an epidemic in a nation of more than 300 million people. Further, SPLC's report gives no indication that the anti-Muslim hate-crime count of 2010 was in fact consistent with the normal, slightly fluctuating incidence of such events in other yearse.g., 155 in 2002, 149 in 2003, and 156 in 2004. Equally noteworthy is the fact that when the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes had dropped from 156 in 2006 to 115 in 2007and from 481 in 2001 (the year of the 9/11 attacks) to 155 in 2002the Center never thought to suggest that bigotry against Muslims was steeply declining.
SPLC's 30 New Activists report dismisses, as purveyors of hate, a number of scholars, researchers, and journalists who have examined and discussed, in a thoughtful and responsible manner, the teachings, values, history, and objectives of militant Islamists. Among those smeared in the report are World Net Daily publisher Joseph Farah, American Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney, blogger/activist Pamela Geller, and Accuracy in Media director Cliff Kincaid. In an effort to marginalize these individuals, SPLC lumps them together with Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
In October 2016, SPLC published a report titled Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists, a blacklist profiling 15 Islam-bashing activists whose propaganda was allegedly responsible for fueling acts of public hatred against American Muslims, who purportedly have been under attack in the U.S. ever since the Al Qaeda massacre of Sept. 11, 2001. The subjects of these profiles included:
Ann Corcoran, founder of the blog Refugee Resettlement Watch
Each of these individuals seeks, in writings and speeches that are firmly rooted in factual information, to inform the American public about the beliefs, values, agendas, and activities of Islamic jihadists, and about the potential consequences of widespread Muslim immigration to the United States. But SPLCrather than simply asserting that it views the arguments or conclusions of these authors as flawedinstead smears them as wild-eyed Islamophobes who, as in the case of Gaffney, are gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within. Consider, for instance, some of the easily verifiableor at least arguablestatements that SPLC has cited as evidence of unhinged bigotry:
In a 2016 interview with the Tablet, the aforementioned Maajid Nawaz stated that the SPLC staffers who had collaborated on writing the Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists were a bunch of first-world, comfortable liberal Americans who are not Muslims [and] have decided from their comfortable perch to label me, an activist who is working within his Muslim community to push back against extremism, an anti-Muslim extremist. Emphasizing that because SPLC's blacklist had put a target on my head, Nawaz said he believed that his own life was now in danger: This is what putting people on lists does. When Theo Van Gogh was killed in the Netherlands, a list was stuck to his body that included Ayaan Hirsi Alis name. It was a hit list. When Bangladeshi reformers were hacked to death by jihadist terrorists, they were working off lists. The left is no longer about advancing progressive values, Nawaz added. For them, its now about tribal identities, and any internal critique is seen as treachery.
It is worth noting the serious ramifications that had previously occurred when SPLC in 2012 listed the conservative Family Research Council (FRC) as a hate group. On the morning of August 15, 2012, a domestic terrorist named Floyd Corkins walked into FRC's Washington, DC headquarters carrying a pistol and 100 rounds of ammunition with the intention of kill[ing] people in the building. His plan was thwarted by an operations manager who physically tackled him to the ground. When an FBI agent subsequently asked Corkins why he had chosen to target FRC, the would-be killer replied: It was a, uh, Southern Poverty Law lists, uh, anti-gay groups. I found them online. I did a little bit of research, went to the website. Stuff like that.
Adhering to the theme of a profoundly hateful United States, SPLC charges that Latin American immigrants, who perform some of the hardest, most dangerous jobs in our economyfor the least amount of pay, are routinely cheated out of their wages; denied basic protections in the workplace; subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement; and targeted for violent hate crimes. These trends, says SPLC, have been encouraged by politicians and media figures guilty of spreading false propaganda that scapegoats immigrants for our nations problems and foments resentment and hate against them. The growth of this civil rights crisis, as SPLC calls it, has been driven almost entirely by the immigration debate. Conspicuously absent from the foregoing assertions is any acknowledgment that it is illegal immigration that sits at the heart of that debate.
SPLC derides the American Legion's opposition to illegal immigration and amnesty as Legionnaires Diseaseeven though the Legion fully supports opportunities for legal immigration. The Center similarly denounces the Minuteman Projecta nonviolent, volunteer effort initiated by private American citizens seeking to restrict the flow of illegal border-crossersas an organization whose ideals and tactics are rooted in racism. The Arizona-based American Border Patrol, which monitors traffic across Southeastern Arizona's border with Mexicothe heart of a major smuggling corridoris classified by SPLC as a hate group dominated by anti-immigrant ideologues. And Americans for Immigration Control, which contends that illegal immigration is a lawless phenomenon that puts the future of our country in jeopardy, is branded an anti-immigrant hate group.
As is typical of organizations on the left, SPLC is ever-prepared to label its political and ideological adversaries as purveyors of hate and intolerance. But in reality, that is nothing more than psychological projection. Hatred and intolerance for the opinions and values of others are prime components in the very lifeblood of SPLC.
Yet another major component of that lifeblood is money. Although SPLC possesses reserve assets valued at more than a quarter of a billion dollars, it spends, in comparison to other nonprofit organizations, an unusually small percentage of its revenues on actual program servicesand a great deal on salaries, overhead, and fundraising. As The Weekly Standard reports: CharityWatch, an independent organization that monitors and rates leading nonprofits for their fundraising efficiency, has consistently given the SPLC its lowest grade of 'F' (i.e., 'poor') for its stockpiling of assets far beyond what CharityWatch deems a reasonable reserve
to tide it over during donation-lean years.
More than any other organization in America, the Southern Poverty Law Center has turned hate-based identity politics and grievance mongering into a highly profitable scam.
.
SPLC is an evil organization, and Morris Dees profits handsomely from the evil it does.
SPLC has chosen a horse to ride - one that was honorable and ethical in it's time (the civil rights movement of Martin L King Jr, CORE, SNCC, and other brave Americans) and they've transformed that movement into an elitist's weapon - a weapon to damage anyone who disagrees with liberal elite positions.
No proof was offered. It was a bald faced lie.
No 'dead cops' were ever tied to right wing groups... because there were NONE.
Liberal elite groups that chanted 'death to cops' were ignored by the SPLC BECAUSE the SPLC didn't give a damn about dead cops... they only wanted to use the idea of 'dead cops' as a weapon against conservative Americans.
These are horrible people...
Their plans were designed to destroy traditional Americans in a structured totalitarian take-over by white liberal elites.
The black community was a pawn in their hands.
Cops were pawns in their hands.
The black community was a weapon to use against anyone speaking truth against white liberal elites.
Traditional middle class Americans of all colors were the victims of the white elites and globalists who funded the SLPC.
I believe these are people who are grooming and training marginal white racists and the mentally ill to become 'racists' they can show off on college campuses to 'prove their point'.
Much like the BRAVO special on the KKK that was faked to create 'the story' white liberal elites want to use against middle class citizens - they are a lie. THEY ARE the lie.None of this is innocent.
SPLC is a Marxist-inspired, anti-American organization of lawyers working feverishly to damage our Constitutional Republic. They need to be sued under the RICO statutes for conspiracy to foment civil insurrection.
The question remains, why in the name of truth do these guys get any media or Government attention at all?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Because they are Marxist-inspired, anti-Americans and their mission is to advance the goals of all the like-minded American haters who have infiltrated our government at every level, our school systems from pre-school through the PhD programs, our labor unions, many of our churches, and, of course, the entire news and entertainment media.
Uuuuh, they have been doing “it” for decades, through progressive as well as Republican (progressive lite) administrations and still they are regarded as the source for hate stats.
You asked “why do they have credibility?” I explained why. They have “credibility” because they advance the agenda that “progressives” want advanced.
“Progressives” do not care about truth or honesty.
You’re right, and every GOP lawmaker who gets confronted by any stat from the SPLC should immediately fire back that this comes from “highly edited” and “manipulated” reports from a “discredited source”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.