Can you believe it? Because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
has labeled Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) a hate group, Amazon has pulled
ADF from receiving 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, 1st
Amendment-focused legal organization that has successfully argued in front of the
U.S. Supreme Court 7-times in the past 7-years.
SPLC rakes in millions of dollars a
year to fund its astronomical $432,723,955 endowment and management’s $200,000-$350,000
annual salaries (plus perks!).
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 as set
forth by Joy Pullmann (Executive Editor
of The Federalist):
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
SPLC 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-bed sheeted 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 bigtime 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 what
is 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
SPLC 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.”
“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
SPLC 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, news of a declining KKK does
not make for inclining donations, 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 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 (FRC) 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 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’
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.’
Listen: 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.
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
