The communists over at the Southern Poverty Law Center are among the
gravest threats to freedom in the United States, and are named as such in the AFDI Threats to Freedom Index. The enemedia eagerly laps up and repeats their designation of pro-freedom groups as "hate groups," and uses this designation as a propaganda tool to demonize and discredit us. But here is an excellent expose that shows what these subversives are really all about.
Atlas commenter Bethesda Dog: "The SPLC has been exposed as a shake-down money-raising con dreamed up by Morris Dees. The staff has inflated salaries, and they are always on the lookout for the next big thing they can target in order to continue scaring their donors. Sooner or later, their donors will die off, or realize they've been had. But then they'll just start tapping money from the Arab oil
countries and their allies. Inexhaustible supply of funds to advance
sharia. They should be known as the Sharia Promoting Law Center."
Summary: The Southern Poverty Law Center began
with an admirable purpose but long ago transformed into a machine for
raising money and launching left-wing political attacks. Lately it’s
become more of a threat to free speech and civil debate than a defender
of the weak or a foe of violent extremism. It has also taken in millions
from the Picower Foundation, whose own funds came largely from founder
Jeffry Picower’s “investing” in his old friend Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi
scheme.
On August 15, 2012, an angry gay rights activist named Floyd Corkins
stormed the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and
began shooting. Corkins shot a brave security guard in the arm, but the
guard still managed to wrestle him to the ground before he could kill or
injure others.
Corkins was carrying 50 bullets and two loaded magazines for his
9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol; 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches; and the
address of another potential target, the Traditional Values Coalition.
Before initiating his shooting spree, Corkins reportedly said, “I don’t
like your politics.”
Reacting to the shooting, Family Research Council President Tony
Perkins stated: “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by
organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been
reckless in labeling organizations as hate groups because they disagree
with them on public policy.”
Origins
Attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. founded the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) in 1971. It bills itself as “a nonprofit civil rights
organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking
justice for the most vulnerable members of society.” People familiar
with the SPLC may describe it differently. (For a previous CRC profile
of the Center, see “The Southern Poverty Law Center: A Twisted
Definition of ‘Hate,’” Organization Trends, November 2006.)
Early on it made a name for itself fighting genuinely extremist
groups like the Ku Klux Klan and breaking down barriers of
discrimination in the South. But today it is primarily a leftist attack
machine. It devotes most of its sizeable resources to a systematic smear
campaign against respected organizations and opinion leaders whose
legitimate policy differences put them to the right of the SPLC.
For example, prior to the shooting, the SPLC identified the Family
Research Council as an “anti-gay” extremist group, lumped together with
groups like the KKK, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, and the New Black
Panther Party.
Even liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who
describes the Family Research Council as “a mainstream conservative
think tank,” thought the SPLC went too far:
I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on
gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center
does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church.
Following a speech at a New York college in 2009, a student asked
former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) about a quotation attributed
to him in a textbook. It said, “illegal immigrants were ‘coming to kill
you and kill me and our families.’” Taken aback, Tancredo subsequently
called the publisher to learn where the fake quotation had come from.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center,” was the reply.
This is a familiar pattern. In 2007, SPLC labeled the Federation for
American Immigration Reform a “Hate Group” as part of an effort to smear
opponents of open borders and illegal immigration. In this effort, SPLC
had no qualms associating itself with the National Council of La Raza
(in Spanish, “the Race”), one of whose subordinate groups, the Chicano
Student Movement of Aztlan, is notorious for the motto, For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (“For The Race everything. Outside The Race, nothing”).
In a 2010 report detailing SPLC’s efforts, Jerry Kammer of the Center for Immigration Studies wrote:
Rather than engage in a debate, La Raza and its allies
have waged a campaign to have the other side shunned by the press, civil
society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the
reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce
others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and
democratic discussion.
SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok doesn’t mince words about
illegal-immigration opponents: “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.…” (See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnTz2ylJo_8&feature=relmfu.)
The SPLC has an improbably named program titled “Teaching Tolerance.” Perhaps Mr. Potok should take the course.
In the “Hate and Extremism” section of the SPLC website, the group
lists 1,274 “Patriot Groups.” This category includes nonviolent
conservative organizations like the Oath Keepers, the Constitution
Party, Tea Party Patriots, the Tenth Amendment Center, and Joseph
Farah’s WorldNetDaily.
In addition to fomenting hatred for groups with which it disagrees,
the SPLC is the author of dangerous provocations. For example, in 1996
SPLC hyped a story that black churches were being torched at alarming
rates in the South by white racists. As Michael Fumento wrote in the American Spectator at the time, this was soon proven to be false.
SPLC wildly exaggerates the number of groups genuinely associated
with hate and violence as well. Laird Wilcox, an independent,
non-conservative researcher found that of 800-plus “hate groups” over
half them were either non-existent, existed in name only, or were
inactive. (See
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_20_3/tsc_20_3_vinson.shtml.)
Wilcox has his own “extremist” lists. One is called “The Watchdogs …
organizations who ‘monitor’ and combat the activities of their
ideological opponents,” including many “organizations and individuals
who have nothing to do with racism.” SPLC tops the list. (See
http://www.lairdwilcox.com/tool/order00-01.html#Left.)
A Morally Bankrupt Organization Founded by a Morally Bankrupt Man
SPLC’s co-founder, Morris Dees, has been harshly criticized by former
SPLC employees, a former business partner, and many liberal critics.
They see him as little more than a rank opportunist and the SPLC’s chief
purpose as raising money for SPLC coffers.
Though trained as a lawyer, Dees is best known for his fundraising
ability. Raising $25 million for the George McGovern presidential
campaign in 1972, his payment was the donor list, the gold mine that
boosted SPLC’s funding. A position with Jimmy Carter’s presidential
campaign in 1976 added another sterling list. It paid off.
With over $238 million in net assets, the SPLC is one of the
wealthiest nonprofit organizations in the United States. Despite this
massive endowment, the Center devotes almost 20 percent of its $34.5
million operating expenses – $6.5 million in 2011 – to fundraising. This
includes $1 million for fundraising services and $5.5 million in
fundraising staff salaries and administrative expenses.
Meanwhile, the group spent only $11 million on its supposed primary
mission: “providing legal services to victims of civil rights injustices
and hate crimes.” The Center spent an astounding $12.5 million
maintaining, publishing, and promoting its “hate” list propaganda,
including a program to “educate” children, according to its 2010 tax
return.
SPLC received $36 million in contributions in 2011. Excess
contributions and investment income allowed the Center to boost assets
by $9.4 million. Its 2010 tax return shows the SPLC realized a net gain
of $28.8 million, following a similar net gain in 2009 of almost $30
million—roughly equivalent to its entire operating budget! Why fundraise
at all?
Each year the SPLC is able to add tens of millions of dollars to its
endowment. Despite being a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, supposedly
with nothing to hide, some of SPLC’s assets are squirreled away in
untraceable Bermuda and Cayman Island accounts. Why?
SPLC’s leaders are among the highest paid in the nonprofit field. As
Chief Trial Counsel, Morris Dees receives $343,676. Richard Cohen, the
Center’s president, is paid $339,764.
SPLC boasts many high-dollar donors. The top 10 for recent years are:
Picower Foundation ($3,813,112, 1999 – 2008); Cisco Systems Foundation
($1,620,000, 2001 – 2004); Grousbeck Family Foundation ($1,600,000, 2007
– 2011); Grove Foundation ( $875,000, 2001 – 2011); Rice Family
Foundation ($535,000 , 1999 – 2010); Rockefeller Philanthropy ($510,000,
2008 – 2010); Unbound Philanthropy ($500,000, 2006 – 2010); Public
Welfare Foundation ($500,000, 2008 – 2010); Vanguard Charitable
Endowment ($469,120, 2006 – 2011); Rocking Moon Foundation ($350,000,
2006 – 2010); and the Jewish Community Fund ($347,274, 1999 – 2010).
Space constraints prevent inclusion of the many more foundations and
small family funds that regularly contribute $10,000 to $25,000 per
year. Do these donors realize they are merely contributing to a
quarter-billion-dollar investment fund?
SPLC’s biggest benefactor, the Picower Foundation, made the most of
its money from the Bernie Madoff scam. Founder Jeffry Picower, who was
friends with Madoff for 30 years, profited by $5 billion from his
“investments” with his friend, an amount larger than Madoff personally
“earned.” Picower died in 2009, but as ProPublica.org reported December
27, 2010, federal prosecutors and the trustee charged with recovering
money for Madoff’s victims took Picower’s estate to court. The estate
agreed to a settlement of $7.2 billion to compensate victims of Madoff’s
Ponzi scheme. Federal prosecutors apparently thought Picower, an
accountant, should have questioned returns on investment that ranged up
to 950 percent. The Picower Foundation has closed its doors, but will
the SPLC refund any of its ill-gotten gains?
Dees’ first business partner was Millard Fuller, who later went on to
found Habitat for Humanity. In an article in The Progressive, he
described their relationship:
Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership,
shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not
particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.
During the eight years we worked together, we never wavered in that
resolve. (See
http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Egerton-Poverty-Palace-July-1988.pdf.)
Many of Dees’s most virulent critics are on the Left. Nation
magazine’s Alexander Cockburn wrote a scathing article in 2009, “King
of the Hate Business.” Recent Republican electoral losses, Cockburn
wrote, were
horrible news for people who raise money and make money
selling the notion there’s 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. What is the arch-salesman of hate
mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to
do now? Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with
his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling
liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire
need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. (See
http://www.creators.com/opinion/alexander-cockburn/king-of-the-hate-business.html.)
Harper’s published a similarly critical analysis of the SPLC titled, “The Church of Morris Dees”:
Today, the SPLC spends most of its time—and money—on a
relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of
tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection
plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights
movement,” renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer (not Dees’s
business partner, ed.) says of Dees, his former associate, “though I
don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.”
Harper’s also published a letter from Stephen Bright, president of
the Southern Center for Human Rights, to the University of Alabama,
declining an invitation to a “Morris Dees Justice Award” presentation.
Bright called Dees “a con man and fraud,” and added:
The positive contributions Dees has made to justice—most
undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fundraising
potential—are far overshadowed by what Harper’s described as his
“flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money. He has raised millions
upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he
does not need the money because he has $175 million and two “poverty
palace” buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive,
well-meaning people—some of moderate or low incomes—who believe his
pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of
what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries,
and promote himself. (See
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/answering_our_critics/art2000nov.html.)
The Fairfax (Virginia) Journal counseled federal employees to forego contributions to the SPLC in the Combined Federal Campaign:
… give your hard-earned dollars to a real charity, not a
bunch of slick, parasitic hucksters who live high on the hog by raising
money on behalf of needy people who never see a dime of it.
(MDJonline.com, Sept. 30, 2011.)
SPLC’s first president was Julian Bond, a socialist who has supported
and participated in socialist, communist, and other radical leftist
organizations and activities his entire life. As a rising star in the
Left he received the early endorsement and support of the Communist
Party USA, and he assisted, endorsed, and campaigned for radical causes
and politicians, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.org.
In the 1960s Bond was elected to the Georgia legislature three times,
but each time the legislature refused to seat him because of his
agitation against the Vietnam War. Bond called on the communist lawyer
Leonard Boudin to represent him. Boudin’s other clients included the
government of Fidel Castro, Soviet agent of influence Paul Robeson, and
Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Boudin’s daughter, Kathie, was a
Weather Underground terrorist, who served 25 years for her
participation in the 1981 Brinks robbery that left two policemen and one
Brinks guard dead.
Along with radical activists such as Ella Baker, Bond co-founded the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. SNCC was later
led by black separatists Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who
openly advocated guerrilla warfare in U.S. cities. In 1967 Bond served
as co-chair of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP),
described by the late Sen. James Eastland as a group “working
hand-in-glove with the Communist Party” to foment “revolution in the
United States.”
Bond’s most significant contact as co-chair of the NCNP was fellow
NCNP member Herbert Marcuse. A Marxist who fled Nazi Germany in 1933,
Marcuse ultimately took up residence in a number of American
universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University
of California, San Diego, where he mentored the black communist, Angela
Davis. Bond and Marcuse helped found the radical journal In These Times.
Bond visited Castro’s Cuba in 1959 and was “enchanted by the
revolution.” Following a repeat visit in 2006 he said that it “simply
reinforced my admiration for the Cuban people and the society they are
building.” (See
http://www.medicc.org/cubahealthreports/chr-article.php?&a=1027.)
Bond remains on SPLC’s board to this day.
SPLC’s board of directors also includes James Rucker, who co-founded
Color of Change in 2005 with self-described communist Van Jones. Before
that, Rucker was grassroots organizing director at the Soros-funded
activist group MoveOn.
Another board member, Patricia Clark, spent time as National Criminal
Justice Representative of the American Friends Service Committee. This
nominally Quaker organization was created by socialist Quakers in 1917
and began colluding with Communists in the 1920s, when it worked with
Soviet agents Jessica Smith, Harold Ware, and John Abt. (See
http://keywiki.org/index.php/American_Friends_Service_Committee.)
Gabrielle Lyon, an SPLC research fellow, has spoken glowingly of
domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers is famous for his Weather
Underground years and has yet to be tried, along with his wife,
Bernardine Dohrn, for the murder of San Francisco police Sgt. Brian
McDonnell in 1970. Larry Grathwohl, the only FBI informant to ever
successfully penetrate the Weathermen, has testified under oath that
Ayers told him of their complicity in the bombing that killed McDonnell.
This case is still open. (See
http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Grathwohl_names_Dohrn.pdf.)
More recently, an editorial written by SPLC’s Mark Potok was published in the Communist Party USA newspaper, People’s World.
Potok claimed the editorial was free for publication anywhere, and he
didn’t control where it appeared. When the Daily Caller news website
asked Potok last year if he objected to the Communist Party newspaper
printing his piece, he refused comment. Potok did say, however, that the
SPLC uses an organization called OtherWords to place SPLC’s op-eds in other journals. OtherWords
is a nonprofit editorial service of the Institute for Policy Studies
(IPS), one of the most influential far-left organizations in the United
States. (IPS was profiled in the February 2011 Foundation Watch.)
King of Sophistry
Radical leftists are extremely adept at the use of language and
propaganda. They have to be. An ideology that has brought more hardship,
misery, and death over the last century than all the wars of history
combined always needs image makeovers. The Soviet Union’s first leader,
Vladimir Lenin, explained, “We can and must write in a language which
sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who
disagree with us.”
The entire leftist movement has adopted this technique. Thus, any
person who opposes illegal immigration becomes a “xenophobe.” Any person
who cites the devastating adverse impacts of “anti-poverty” programs is
“selfish” or worse. Any person who opposes affirmative action is a
“racist.” Anyone who opposes ever-increasing taxes must be “greedy.”
Straw man arguments, misinformation, and other forms of sophistry,
coupled with vitriolic smears of opponents can easily intimidate average
citizens, who haven’t the time or inclination to look deeper and are
naturally anxious about being tarred with the same brush. With
sufficient media promotion, this fraudulent narrative becomes accepted
as the “truth,” even chic. Most people want to be seen as siding with
the “good guys.”
Critics are isolated and polarized, and despite the Left’s phony
characterization of a deep-pocketed Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the
Left’s critics are usually independent voices of little or no means, not
necessarily even conservative, with scant resources to defend
themselves against defamation campaigns and frivolous lawsuits, which
are favored tactics of the well-heeled SPLC and other leftist groups.
Far-left agitator Neal Rauhauser even admitted as much when he advocated
for a policy of “lawfare” against political opponents:
We’re dealing with people who have likely had no
interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential
for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance,
lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds.
The reality of travel, or frightful expenses, or summary judgments needs
to be made real. We probably need to make a very visible example of at
least one of them before the rest understand. (See
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/middle-class-guy/2012/jun/28/who-neal-rauhauser/.)
Cultural Marxism and Hate Crimes
This kind of sophistry also has roots in the teachings of Julian Bond’s
friend and leftist icon Herbert Marcuse. He was an influential member of
the Marxist Institute for Social Research that was founded in
Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 and modeled after Moscow’s Marx-Engels
Institute. It came to be known simply as “the Frankfurt School.” Marcuse
and other scholars affiliated with the Institute reestablished it in
the U.S. following their exodus from Germany, and developed
philosophical studies specifically dedicated to subverting American
culture.
Marcuse was often called the Father of the New Left, and he helped
pioneer the ideas of political correctness and hate crimes. In a 1965
tract called “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse declared:
This essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced
industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of
the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing
policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to
policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed….
As he explained, the way to fix the “repressive tolerance” that
Americans suffer because of the First Amendment is to suppress all
voices except those from the Left:
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance
against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the
Left.… Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be
equalization of the prevailing inequality.
Today you can see this tactic in operation every day when left-wing
professors, journalists, and politicians ridicule, misrepresent, ignore,
or threaten anyone they disagree with. The Southern Poverty Law Center
assists in this effort.
Even more ominously, but in line with Marcuse’s call to arms, the
SPLC is a consultant to both the FBI and Department of Homeland
Security, and the latter has labeled conservatives potential “domestic
terrorists.” The SPLC has not been identifying enemies of America. It
has been identifying enemies of the Left.
Some of the people and groups on the SPLC’s hate lists genuinely do
express hatred and bigotry, like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the
New Black Panther Party, the KKK, Nazi parties, and the like. But mixed
in are many well known, widely respected individuals and groups who have
taken principled positions on matters of national importance. Their
only sin is their outspoken opposition to the Left’s radical designs.
By cataloging the statements and writings of individuals and groups
with whom they disagree, the SPLC is also creating a paper trail to use
if and when hate crimes laws are strengthened sufficiently to provide
pretexts for lawsuits or other legal action. This is a not-so-subtle
threat. That sort of attack has begun to happen in Canada, Britain, and
Sweden.
The SPLC’s interaction with the Department of Homeland Security and
the FBI carries another threat. By deliberately mischaracterizing
conservatives and tea partiers as “extremists,” the SPLC implies they
have a potential for violence and thus offers a justification for the
government to keep tabs on these potential “domestic terrorists.”
The Left, on the other hand, has a firmly established record of
militancy, violence, and treasonous, unscrupulous and disgusting
anti-social behavior. Occupy Wall Street, for example, is an
anti-social, violent movement of the extreme Left. The Black Bloc is a
violent organization of the extreme Left, and the FBI recently conducted
raids on suspected Black Bloc members.
Why have we heard nothing about it from the SPLC? Are these genuine domestic terrorists on the group’s “Hate Map”? No, nor is Adbusters,
an “anti-consumerist” magazine that hatched Occupy Wall Street and that
has expressed support for the Black Bloc. (For more on the organization
behind the magazine, the Adbusters Media Foundation, see the profile in
Foundation Watch, January 2012.)
What about the blatantly terrorist Jumaat al-Fuqra and its 35
U.S.-based terrorist training camps? Crickets from the SPLC. (See
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/01/35-jamaat-al-fuqra-terror-training-camps-still-operating-in-the-us.html.)
The same is true for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Why are none of these groups listed in the SPLC’s “Intelligence”
files? What about the Communist Party? What about union thugs like
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, implicated in murder, or United
Steelworkers’ president Leo Gerard, who exhorted Occupy Wall Street to
“more militancy?” All prone to violence, and they proudly say so!
Despite a mountainous record of violence from left-wing individuals
and groups, there have never been any left-wing groups identified on the
SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
Come to think of it, why isn’t the SPLC listed?
After a bombing attempt on May Day this year by five Occupy Cleveland activists was thwarted, a reporter for National Review
asked the SPLC if it planned to put Occupy Wall Street on its “hate
group” list? SPLC’s stunning answer: “We’re not really set up to cover
the extreme Left.”
