Southern Poverty Law Center

It's the group that called abortion protestors and returning vets from war as potential terrorists against the United States. This is while the SPLC gave a pass to radical Muslims like the ones that hit Fort Hood injuring / killing 33, murdered soldiers at a Chattanooga military recruiting center, slaughtered innocent citizens at an Orlando Dance Club and then shot 14 innocent employees of a San Bernardino business at close range at their Christmas party. The SPLC always finds tons of funds from liberals sucked in by its hate driven money machine, tens-of-millions of dollars reported to be kept off shore.

It even found cooperation from the federal government in 2009 via Janet Napolitano while she headed up Homeland Security for Obama as one of his Czars. Today Czar Napolitano is President of the University Of California, advising staff to not call America an exceptional nation.

"Soros-backed front groups and armies of activists played a key part in these types of overthrows of legitimate governments and some have suspected that the same playbook is being used here to remove Trump from power. Today’s decision could be a sign that the Justice Department is looking for information on where the funding is coming from for the ongoing anti-Trump protests that continue to grow more angry and violent by the day while many in the media have become vocal apologists for ANTIFA." - SuckersOnParade Graphic Source: SuckersOnParade

George Soros To Provide Paychecks Again For More Rent-A-Thugs? $25 Million To Hillary And Other Democrats In 2016 Election - Politico

 

Google Involved In Machines To Learn To Discriminate Out Of The "Box." - Webmaster

"Google revealed in a blog post that it is now using machine learning to document "hate crimes and events" in America. They've partnered with liberal groups like ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to make information about [SPLC Defined] "hate events" easily accessible to journalists. And now, there are troubling signs that this tool could be used to ferret out writers and websites that run afoul of the progressive orthodoxy." - PJMedia

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Google Uses Southern Poverty Law Center For Reputation Research

David Codrea had a post where he linked the new Google guidelines for identifying “offensive” search results. Right there on page 44, we read this.

"Reputation research is important for identifying websites which promote hate and violence. The Pew Research Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are some reputable sources that can be used for reputation research."

“Reputable.” I needn't waste my time debunking this crap. My readers know better. - CaptainsJournal

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Apple Joins Google And Facebook To Embrace Soros-Funded Southern Poverty Law Center To Censor "Hate-Speech."

"As part of that list, the SPLC separately identified 623 'active patriot groups in the United States in 2016,' that the SPLC Intelligence Project identified as 'extreme anti-government groups' – a list that included many Tea Party organizations.

Included in the SPLC list of extreme antigovernment groups was conservative heroine Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, identified 25 separate time on the list, for 25 different states in which the group is active.

On Feb. 18, 2016, in an article entitled 'Does the Southern Poverty Law Center target conservatives,' the Christian Science Monitor noted that in 2014, the SPLC targeted GOP presidential candidate Doctor Ben Carson in their 'Extremist Files.' - InfoWars

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Google and the Liberal Thought Police

"Even worse, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been known to label groups advocating for things like traditional marriage or pro-life causes as hate groups. In fact, they once added Ben Carson to their 'Extremist Watch List.' A record of outlandish action like this begs the question: Are these really the people we want regulating our internet and flagging 'hate speech?'

Any decent, First Amendment-loving American understands that no company with a political agenda should be able to impose their way on the rest of the country. Conservatives must stand up against Silicon Valley liberals like Google who seek to censor us online and cement their power through support of so-called 'Net Neutrality' laws." - Newsmax

Southern Poverty Law Center Embedded Hate Comes From Its First President, Julian Bond

Southern Poverty Law Center

Warnings You Need To Be Aware Of Before You Donate

- “In March 2014 the FBI scrubbed any mention of SPLC from its hate crimes webpage, where the Center previously had been listed as a resource and described as a partner in public outreach.”

- “Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s.”

- “Perhaps the strongest rebuke comes from Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who in 1996 called [SPLC] Dees ‘a fraud and a con man,’ deriding him for 'your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.'”

- “The Baltimore Sun characterizes SPLC's operations this way: 'Its business is fundraising, and its success at raking in the cash is based on its ability to sell gullible people on the idea that present-day America is awash in white racism and anti-Semitism, which it will fight tooth-and-nail as the public interest law firm it purports to be.'”

- “I’ve been astounded at how many of the SPLC’s claims have gone unchallenged.”

PS: One has to admit the SPLC has an amazing fund-raising machine when it can convince George Clooney to part with one million dollars. But I wonder how the SPLC feels about Clooney leaving his home in England because he didn't feel safe with terrorists there mowing down everyday citizens? I guess with one million dollars in hand, the SPLC is not going to call the Clooney family Islamophobes. You couldn't make this up if you wanted to about the rampant political correctness the SPLC embraces . . . that is for the right price.

Hey George Clooney, Google, FaceBook And PayPal. Look How Your Millions Of Dollars Is Being Used To Attack Others!

British Muslim reformer is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for attacking him as an extremist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Blacklists Must Be Stopped - Frontpage

SPLC Releases New ‘Hate Map’ That Includes Public Schools - TruthRevolt

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Full History Of The Southern Poverty Law Center

SPLC Hate Machine Backs Down: Removes Innocent Iowa Town From Its 'Hate Map.' - PJMedia

Source of following research: DiscoverTheNetworks

"The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two young Alabama lawyers, 35-year-old Morris Dees and 28-year-old Joseph Levin, Jr. The latter served as the Center's legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees who would emerge as the long-term “face” of the organization. A leftist who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, Dees, upon launching SPLC, joined forces with an African American who would serve as a perfect complement to him ideologically—the civil-rights [black] activist Julian Bond.

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, Hispanics, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims 'are not isolated incidents,' but rather, 'eruptions of a nation’s intolerance.'

To combat this [assumed] epidemic of 'bigotry,' SPLC dedicates itself to 'tracking and exposing' the activities of 'hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States.' Specifically, the Center's 'Hate & Extremism' initiative publishes its findings in SPLC's Hatewatch blog and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report, which claims to be 'the nation's preeminent periodical monitoring the radical right in the U.S.'

SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, its seventeenth year of activity, by winning a $7 million verdict in a civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA) for the role that organization had played in the death of a black Alabama teenager.

By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans had emphatically rejected; the SPLC suit 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 (with a $12 million judgment in 1991), the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations (with a $6.5 million judgment in 2001). 

This has been SPLC's modus operandi since its inception [not unlike the ACLU suing any small American town that may have a small cross in history as a tribute to how it was started.]: to initiate ' innovative 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, notes that the targets of these suits 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 Inflating the Numbers on “Hate”

As of 2016, SPLC identified 892 active 'hate groups' in the United States, 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 nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president”—i.e., Barack Obama.

In other words, white Americans' reflexive bigotry allegedly triggered a host of hate-filled responses to the increased political and cultural influence wielded by nonwhites. And America's racists, by SPLC's calculus, are almost unanimously conservatives—as evidenced by the caption featured in the ' Hatewatch' section of SPLC’s website: 'Hatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.'  The radical left gets no mention at all. 

In 1997, SPLC's hate-group tally received a substantial boost from a newly instituted procedure which conveyed the impression that 'hate' in America was rising at an unprecedented rate. That year, the Center's 'Intelligence Project' began counting all known chapters or branches of hate organizations as separate entities, whereas it had previously tallied them collectively as a single entity.

Thus, in 1998 the Council of Conservative Citizens (and its 33 chapters) accounted for more than half of the SPLC hate-group list’s growth over the previous year. Similarly, in 2000 more than 60% of the alleged increase in the nationwide hate-group tally was due to the first-time inclusion of the League of the South and its 90-plus chapters. By 2009, just 4 autonomous organizations and their many branches accounted for fully 229 'hate groups'—approximately one-fourth of all the entries in SPLC’s catalog.

SPLC's 'hate group' counts have been shown to be devoid of legitimacy a number of times. Laird Wilcox—a researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements—reports 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 numbers—not post office box ‘groups’ or two-man local chapters.'

In 2002, the Cleveland Scene investigated an SPLC claim that there were 40 active “hate or militia groups” in Ohio. Ultimately the publication concluded that 'while a few groups on the monitors' lists warrant attention, most have dissolved or amount to little more than a guy with a copy of Mein Kampf and a Yahoo! Account.' 'Between their peculiar theories and a proclivity for self-destruction,' added the paper, 'a majority of white-nationalist groups would have trouble staging a poker game, let alone a revolution.'

In 2007—when a news reporter in Rutland, Vermont could find no evidence of an active Klan chapter that SPLC claimed was operating in that town—the Rutland Herald noted that 'the SPLC does not attempt to confirm the validity of each listing.' The paper quoted SPLC research chief Mark Potok saying, “When a group claims chapters in a given place, we list them unless we have a reason to believe it [the claim] is false.'

Emphasizing the difficulty of actually tracking down hate groups, Potok added: 'Very frequently, authorities in a given community are surprised to find a hate group operating in their town or operating a mailbox, especially if it turns out to be a drop box. Especially in a state like Vermont, where the Klan is not very popular, you won’t see your local Klan in public.

Just because local police and local anti-racism groups don’t know about it does not make it not true.' According to Laird Wilcox, 'In private [Potok] concedes that there’s no overwhelming threat from the far right and in public [he] says something altogether different.' This, Wilcox explains, is because 'professionally [Potok] is just a shill. It’s his job. That’s what he’s paid for.'

On another occasion, when SPLC falsely reported that a Klan group had gained a foothold in Larkin, Kansas, Wilcox explained: 'What happened in this case is that someone rented a P.O. box for a bogus Ku Klux Klan group and then kept the rent paid on it for years, thus allowing [SPLC] to list Larkin as having a ‘KKK presence’ … This was pure disinformation and an example of the terrible things the SPLC does in its campaign to keep the money rolling in from frightened liberals and blacks.'[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 wrote: '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 [fundraising] letter,

'Dear Friend, 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 Klan, by that time, consisted of no more than 3,000 people nationwide—a far cry from the 4 million members it had boasted in the 1920s. Nonetheless, notes 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 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.' '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.'

To foment such fear, SPLC has shown itself to be capable of promoting a host of egregious falsehoods.

For example, in the mid-1990s—by which time most Americans understood that the Ku Klux Klan had degenerated into a virtual non-entity—SPLC, lest its fundraising begin to dry up, warned of an imminent, rising new menace. To fulfill that prophecy, the Center helped lead an elaborate campaign denouncing an epidemic of racially motivated arsons that purportedly had been targeting black churches across the South.

A national database search in July 1996 found that more than 2,200 news articles had been written about these black church burnings.[2] Eventually, however, it was learned that in fact the incidence of such fires had increased only slightly, and temporarily, above their historically low levels. Moreover, on a per capita basis, black church fires continued to be significantly less common than white church fires.[3]

By the end of 1998, just three of the more than seventy black church fires investigated by the Justice Department could be tied to racial motives. The National Church Arson Task Force likewise found few racial links.[4] It turned out, in fact, that a number of the arsonists responsible for the infamous black church fires were themselves African Americans.[5]

Falsely Smearing Conservatives as “Haters”

Regardless of how dramatically SPLC overstates their numbers, white racists like neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and skinheads indisputably deserve the 'hate group' label. But the Center extends that designation also to conservative and libertarian organizations that harbor no ill will against any demographic group and merely hold positions contrary to those of SPLC on issues of social or political import.

As syndicated columnist Don Feder writes: “What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center 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 there’s 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.'

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 D’Souza, 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,' said Berlet incredulously, 'that civil rights activists actually help perpetuate racial tensions and division in the United States.' Such sentiments—notwithstanding the repeatedly divisive rhetoric and actions of racial arsonists like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and the late Julian Bond—are anathema to an organization whose income stream is largely dependent upon an ability to perpetuate public angst over black suffering. 

Berlet's report likewise denounced another AEI-sponsored scholar, Charles Murray—a 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 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 institution—slavery—that 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 slavers—not 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 Christians—Englishmen and Americans—created 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.'

In yet another illustration of SPLC's ability to detect 'hate' virtually everywhere, the Center in 2006 issued a report claiming that 'large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate' the U.S. armed services, as one might expect to occur in a nation rife with unbridled bigotry. Echoing the claims in that report, which were parroted repeatedly by major media outlets across the country, the Department of Homeland Security subsequently warned that American soldiers returning from active duty in Iraq might be particularly susceptible to recruitment and radicalization by ' rightwing extremists,' and thus could present a terror threat worth monitoring.

SPLC likewise saw the 2010 ascendancy of the Tea Party, which advocated reductions in government spending and taxes, as an odious development. In a piece titled 'Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism,' the Center's Intelligence Report claimed that the movement was 'shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism.'

'Anti-Gay' Groups

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 LGBT people—who, 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 homosexuals—such as same-sex marriage—as a 'hate' monger whose opinions have no more legitimacy than those of an Aryan militia. Thus does the Center list the conservative Family Research Council (FRC) 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.' 

On August 15, 2012, SPLC's allegations about FRC had serious ramifications. That morning, a domestic terrorist named Floyd Corkins walked into FRC's Washington, DC headquarters carrying a pistol, 100 rounds of ammunition, and a knapsack filled with 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. (The sandwiches were significant because in June and July of that year, Chick-fil-A's chief operating officer had made some public statements supporting the traditional family structure and opposing same-sex marriage.)

Corkins, who later acknowledged that he had intended 'to kill people in the [FRC] building and then smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich in their face,' was prevented from carrying out his deadly plan by FRC buildings operations manager Leo Johnson, who physically tackled him. When an FBI agent subsequently asked Corkins why he had chosen to target FRC, he 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.'

SPLC’s list of hate 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.

Focus on the Family (FOTF), which has long been a respected and influential evangelical ministry, is classified by SPLC as a ' fringe group' that uses 'smarmy tactics' to 'make schools less safe for LGBT students and more safe for their harassers.' Most objectionable to the Center is FOTF's suggestion that 'too often, classroom materials promoted in the name of 'safety,' 'tolerance' or 'anti-bullying' teaching go far beyond the realm of safety prevention into political advocacy, and even indoctrination.'

'Islamophobia'

SPLC defines 'hate groups' as those that 'have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics'—i.e., nationality, ethnicity, race, physical appearance, or sexual orientation. But in that definition, the word 'typically' provides a conspicuous loophole enabling the Center to also smear groups that hate 'atypically,' for reasons of 'mutable' characteristics like class, ideology, and religious belief.

As author Steven Menzies points out, 'scores if not hundreds of SPLC’s 'hate groups' are organizations whose 'beliefs and practices' include disagreement with groups over doctrine, ideology, or status rather than 'immutable characteristics.''

Indeed, SPLC sees 'Islamophobia'—hatred and fear based on the 'mutable' trait of religious faith—as yet another major defect in the American character, particularly post-9/11. 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 examines the actual raw numbers that SPLC omitted from its bold-faced alarm: According to FBI data, the number of “reported anti-Muslim hate crimes” nationwide increased from 107 in 2009 to 160 in 2010—technically a 50% increase, but hardly what could be characterized as an epidemic in a nation of 310 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 years—e.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 2007—and from 481 in 2001 (the year of the 9/11 attacks) to 155 in 2002—the 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, Accuracy in Media director Cliff Kincaid, and attorney David Yerushalmi. In an effort to marginalize these individuals, SPLC lumps them together with Klansmen and neo-Nazis.

SPLC's list of 'anti-Muslim groups' likewise conflates responsible expositors of hard truths, with bands of hate mongers. For instance, the Center has condemned such organizations as Concerned American Citizens, whose objective is to “develop a coalition with moderate Muslims ... for promoting Islamic reform in America”; the Sharia Awareness Action Network, which seeks to educate 'the American citizenry about how Sharia Law stands in opposition to Constitutional Law';

PoliticalIslam.com, a website that points out, quite accurately, that Islam is 'a political ideology' that 'divides the world into Muslims and unbelievers, the latter of whom “must submit to Islam in all politics and public life'; and the Christian Action Network, which produced a documentary, titled Homegrown Jihad, featuring footage of activities inside terrorist training compounds throughout the United States.

Neither the declared motives nor the public statements of these organizations call for any type of mistreatment of Muslims, but SPLC—convinced of its own ability to ascertain the hidden motives of its ideological adversaries—nonetheless maintains that 'anti-Muslim' bigotry is the animating force that drives them.

In June 2015, SPLC published 'Women Against Islam,' a survey of what it described as twelve conservative women who promote anti-Islamic messages.

The list included Ann Coulter (author and columnist), Pamela Geller (publisher of Atlas Shrugs.com and president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative), Laura Ingraham (political commentator and radio host), Cathie Adams (former chair of Republican Party of Texas), Ann Barnhardt (blogger), Brigette Gabriel (founder of ACT!), Cathy Hinners (former police officer and editor of Daily Roll Call), Clare Lopez (former CIA), Jeanine Pirro (Fox News host), Sandy Rios (American Family Association talk show host), Debbie Schussel (blogger), and Diana West (author and columnist).

In the introduction to 'Women Against Islam,' its authors, Mark Potok and Janet Smith, stated:

The radical right, and more broadly the political right, has generally been dominated by men. And there are certainly plenty of men in the world of Muslim-bashing activism — men like Robert Spencer, Geller’s partner; David Yerushalmi, who has led the charge against an imaginary plot to impose Shariah religious law in the United States; and a crew of terrorism 'experts' who see Islam as the enemy.

But the universe of American anti-Muslim activists is peculiarly dominated by women. They are a mixed bag of bloggers, politicos, authors, TV personalities, radio talk show hosts, and leaders of anti-Muslim organizations. Many of them have other windmills to tilt at, from gay rights to communism to President Obama, but most have increasingly focused on attacking Muslims. That has been even truer in recent months, in the wake of the horrific Islamist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris and the many barbaric murders carried out by the Islamic State.

The article then presented brief profiles of the (aforementioned) 'most hardline' of the 'anti-Muslim' female activists in the U.S., 'who do not merely criticize radical Islam, but effectively describe all Muslims as part of a serious global problem.' 

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, Steven Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Geller, John Guandolo, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Horowitz, Ryan Mauro, Maajid Nawaz, Robert Muise, Daniel Pipes, Walid Shoebat, Robert Spencer, and David Yerushalmi.

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 SPLC—rather than simply asserting that the arguments or conclusions of these authors are flawed—instead 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 verifiable—or at least arguable—statements SPLC has cited as evidence of unhinged bigotry:

• Corcoran's assertion that 'we have made a grievous error in taking the Muslim refugees, Somalis in particular, who have no intention of becoming Americans';
• Emerson's assertion that the Obama administration 'extensively collaborates' with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Europe has numerous 'no-go zones' which non-Muslims cannot enter without great peril to their own safety;
• Gabriel's assertion that any 'practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah' and embraces Sharia Law 'cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States,' and that Islamists' 'ideology … forbids them to assimilate' to Western culture;
• Gaffney's assertion that 'we’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it';
• Geller's assertion that Islam is 'the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth';
• Hirsi Ali's assertion that Islamic schools in the West should be shut down, and that 'violence is inherent in Islam';
• Horowitz's  2008 ad campaign  stating that the Muslim Students Association was 'founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the godfather of Al Qaeda and Hamas, to bring jihad into the heart of American higher education” (SPLC had once dubbed Horowitz himself as 'the godfather of the anti-Muslim movement');
• Muise's assertion that 'stealth jihadists … covertly seek to perpetuate sharia into American society,' and that '80% of the mosques in the United States distribute literature that promotes violence against nonbelievers';
• Pipes's assertion that the infamous terrorist organization ISIS is '100 percent Islamic' and 'profoundly Islamic';
• Spencer's assertion that 'traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful,' and 'is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers'; and 
• Yerushalmi's assertion that 'our greatest enemy today is Islam,' and that 'the only Islam appearing in any formal way around the world is one that seeks a world Caliphate through murder, terror and fear.'

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 Ali’s 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, it’s now about tribal identities, and any internal critique is seen as treachery.'

In response to the Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists, Islam expert Robert Spencer wrote:

'They [SPLC] wish to silence those who speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, blaming us for a supposed rise in 'Islamophobia.' If they really want to stamp out suspicion of Islam, of course, they will move against not us, but [against] the likes of ... Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam and justify it by reference to Islamic teachings.

The SPLC doesn’t do that because its objective is not really to stop 'Islamophobia' at all, but to create the illusion of a powerful and moneyed network of 'Islamophobes,' who can only be stopped if you write a check to the SPLC.

That’s what this is really all about. 

'In constructing this illusory edifice, the SPLC labels me and fourteen others 'anti-Muslim extremists.' We are, of course, no more 'anti-Muslim' than foes of the Nazis were anti-German, but note the word 'extremists.' That’s the mainstream media and Obama administration’s term of choice for jihad terrorists ... [A]ll we have done is speak critically about jihad terror and Sharia oppression. The SPLC is trying to further the libel that we are the other side of the coin, the non-Muslim bin Ladens and Awlak is....

'The SPLC’s hit list recurrently excoriates people for making true statements that it apparently regards as self-evidently false. For example, it says that Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch 'accuses immigrant-run stores of illegally trafficking in food stamps.' This is a case that Corcoran makes with evidence – evidence that the SPLC doesn’t bother to try disproving.

It says that Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism 'has claimed that the Obama administration extensively collaborates with the Muslim Brotherhood.' That he [Obama] actually has done so doesn’t seem to bother them.... The SPLC also hits Emerison for having 'asserted that Europe is riddled with no-go zones' [whose existence, in fact, had been cited in news reports numerous times in recent weeks]....

'The SPLC excoriates Brigitte Gabriel of ACT for America for saying that any 'practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah … who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.'

Yet it says nothing, of course, about the many teachings of the Qur’an that contradict American Constitutional principles: the denial of the freedom of speech, the death penalty for apostasy, the devaluation of women, and more. How to reconcile these teachings with U.S. citizenship, the SPLC did not bother to explain....

'Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, we’re told, 'is gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within.' The SPLC doesn’t bother to mention the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America, the captured Muslim Brotherhood internal document that explained that Brotherhood members 'must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.' ... 

'[The SPLC] ... even says that I [Robert Spencer] have 'referred to Barack Obama as the first Muslim president. This one epitomizes the dishonesty of the SPLC. The quote comes from an article I wrote in 2007 discussing how Obama was not a Muslim, stating that his obvious affinity for Islam and the Muslim world could make him into 'our first Muslim president' the way Bill Clinton was called 'our first black president.' ...

'The SPLC, finally, hits me for having 'even suggested that the media may be getting money to depict Muslims in a positive light.' The facts are once again deeply unfortunate for the SPLC: 

George Soros funded a report on 'Islamophobia' on Twitter and gave  $200,000 to the Center for American Progress for a defamatory report on alleged “Islamophobes.” He also spent $600,000 for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant inundation, bought favorable coverage of the Iran [nuclear] deal, and bought 'Islamophobia' propaganda after the San Bernardino jihad massacre....'

In 2017, SPLC reported that the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in the United States had virtually tripled, from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016. A major cause of that rise was the fact that in 2016, SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America  (AfA) as separate groups, whereas in 2015 it had counted AfA and its many local chapters as just one group.

Notably, AfA was founded in 2007, and most of its 1,000+ chapters had been in existence for a number of years. Why, then, did it list only 45 of them as hate groups in 2016? Author Daniel Greenfield offered this explanation: ' Look at it from the SPLC’s perspective. Next year, it can add 200 chapters and claim that anti-Muslim hate groups once again tripled. And then it can do the same thing again the year after that. That way the Southern Poverty Law Center can keep manufacturing an imaginary Islamophobia crisis.'

It should be noted, at this point, that SPLC's designation of AfA as an anti-Muslim 'hate group' is a result of nothing more than the fact that SPLC routinely applies that label to any organization whose political views differ from its own. Specifically, AfA: (a) accurately describes the Muslim Brotherhood as 'a militant, pro-sharia law organization that has used both violent and non-violent means to achieve its ultimate goal of restoring the Muslim caliphate and the glory of the Islamic empire; and (b) condemns 'the primitive and uncivilized practices of female genital mutilation and 'honor killings.'' A major cause of SPLC's antipathy towards AfA is the fact that at various times AfA founder Brigitte Gabriel has made the following five statements, which SPLC describes as examples of ' wild hate speech demonizing Muslims':

• 'Europe will no longer be Europe by 2050. Europe has already become Eurabia.'  
• 'They are people from Libya, Tunisia, Eritrea, Egypt, the Horn of Africa. They are not only people that are escaping wars, but they are people seeking economic freedom. They are people trying to suck off of the people from the West. They know they can get a free ticket for money. They are not coming here to build empires and become great business men and entrepreneurs. They are coming here to get the free checks from you and me who work very hard to pay our taxes.'
• '[A] practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah … who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.'
• 'Islamic terrorists … are really just very devout followers of Muhammad. They are following his example and doing exactly what the Koran teaches and their mullahs exhort them to do.'
• '[W]e are engaged in a brutal war against a brutal enemy, the enemy of Islamic terrorism, and so many people in our country choose to look the other way, so many people in our country choose to ignore it, so many people choose to be politically correct.'

SPLC also complains that:

• 'In 2008, [AfA] began a campaign called Stop Shariah Now. According to the Stop Shariah Now website, the project aimed 'to inform and educate the public about what Shariah is, how it is creeping into American society and compromising our constitutional freedom of speech, press, religion and equality what we can do to stop it.'
• 'In 2015, like many of the major anti-Muslim groups in the U.S., [AfA] began openly targeting Syrian refugees, launching a Refugee Resettlement Working Group that aims to make sure that 'potential terrorists are kept on the outside looking in' by attempting to stop Syrian refugee relocation in locales around the U.S.'

'[AfA] has a long history of targeting refugees. In 2011, [AfA] helped to pass anti-refugee legislation in Tennessee. Four years later, in email to supporters, [AfA] announced plans to take this effort to as many states of possible.'

Immigrant Justice

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 economy—for the least amount of pay,' are 'routinely cheated out of their wages'; are 'denied basic protections in the workplace'; are 'subjected to racial profiling and harassment by law enforcement'; and are 'increasingly 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 nation’s 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 the debate.

Condemning conservatives' supposedly mean-spirited ' war on immigrants,' SPLC in 2011 was incensed by the Alabama legislature's passage of HB 56, which the Center dubbed an 'anti-immigrant law' that sent 'a destructive message of intolerance' to the state's 'Latino residents.'

Specifically, the law: (a) required Alabama police to try to determine a detainee's immigration status if there was 'reasonable suspicion' that he was in the U.S. illegally; (b) barred illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits or attending publicly owned colleges; (c) prohibited the transporting or harboring of illegal immigrants; (d) forbade employers from knowingly hiring illegals; (e) criminalized the production of false identification documents; and (f) required voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering. By SPLC's reckoning, these positions were uniformly 'hateful.'

SPLC derides the American Legion's opposition to illegal immigration and amnesty as ' Legionnaires’ Disease—even though the Legion fully supports opportunities for legal immigration. The Center similarly denounces the Minuteman Project—a nonviolent, volunteer, grassroots effort initiated by private American citizens seeking to restrict the flow of illegal border-crossers—as 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 Mexico—the heart of a major smuggling corridor—is classified as a 'hate group'” dominated by 'anti-immigrant ideologues.' 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 group.' And the Center reserves that same designation for NumbersUSA, which, while favoring 'reductions in immigration numbers toward traditional levels,' explicitly rejects 'hostile actions or feelings toward immigrant Americans' and declares that “illegal aliens deserve humane treatment even as they are detected, detained and deported.'

By contrast, SPLC gives a free pass to left-wing groups that advocate on behalf of illegal immigrants and open borders, no matter how hateful or race-obsessed those groups' agendas may be. Consider the National Council of La Raza, whose name literally means 'The Race.' Hailed by SPLC research director Heidi Beirich as a venerable civil-rights organization,' La Raza views virtually any opposition to amnesty and to government assistance for illegal immigrants as 'a disgrace to American values.'

SPLC finds no fault with La Raza, even though the latter once gave money to a branch of MEChA, a 'Chicano Students' organization that: (a) calls for the people and government of Mexico to annex the American Southwest; (b) explicitly refuses (in its founding manifestos) to recognize 'capricious frontiers on the bronze continent [the United States]'; and (c) vows to repel the 'brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.' Not even MEChA's slogan—which translates to 'For the race, everything; Outside of the race, nothing'—draws the ire of SPLC. As Mark Potok puts it, 'we have found no evidence to support charges that [MEChA] is racist or anti-Semitic.'

In late 2007, SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—which seeks to 'improve border security' and 'stop illegal immigration'—as a 'hate group.' La Raza, in turn, exploited that 'hate group' designation for use in its own 'Stop the Hate' campaign, which it launched, on behalf of 'undocumented immigrants,' soon after FAIR had played a key role in persuading members of the U.S. Senate to reject a sweeping immigration-reform proposal that would have created a pathway to amnesty and citizenship for millions of illegals. As part of 'Stop the Hate,' La Raza president and CEO Janet Murguia cited SPLC’s designation and declared, 'FAIR is a known, documented hate group.' Similarly, La Raza policy analyst Cecilia Munoz denounced the ' wave of hate' underlying the anti-immigration-reform movement.

As the Center for Immigration Studies noted, the objective of 'Stop the Hate' was 'to have the other side shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials, … destroy the reputations of its targets, [and] intimidate and coerce others into silence.' Mark Potok candidly confirmed this, saying: 'What we are hoping very much to accomplish is to marginalize FAIR. We don’t think they should be a part of the mainstream media.'

To emphasize just how dangerous FAIR's rhetoric could be, SPLC announced, soon after commencing its 'Stop the Hate' initiative, that ' “hate crimes targeting Latinos increased again in 2007, capping a 40% rise in the four years since 2003'—from 426 incidents in 2003 to 595 incidents in 2007.

Why did SPLC choose 2003 as the starting point? Perhaps it was because in 2002, the number of reported anti-Hispanic hate crimes in the U.S. was 480, a fact that would have failed to advance the narrative of consistently rising levels of bigoted violence. Even more inconvenient was the fact that in 2001, there were 597 reported anti-Hispanic hate crimes—i.e., two more than in 2007, whose total allegedly represented the high point of an alarming trend.

So egregious has been SPLC's propensity to portray conservatives as racists, that even the left-wing Obama Administration at one point chastised the organization for its irresponsible rhetoric. After a March 2016 court hearing during which SPLC had accused FAIR of being a racist organization, Jennifer J. Barnes, disciplinary counsel for the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review, wrote a letter scolding an SPLC attorney as well as lawyers from a number of partner groups for having smeared FAIR as 'a discredited, extremist anti-immigrant organization espousing white supremacist, eugenicist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic views.'

Asserting that the attorneys' decision to 'engage in derogatory name-calling exhibited a lack of professionalism' that 'overstepped the bounds of zealous advocacy,' Barnes wrote: 'None of this language was related or relevant to the underlying factual or legal matters. Such language is not appropriate in a filing before the Board (or any judicial tribunal) because it constitutes frivolous behavior and does not aid the administration of justice.'

Criminal Justice

Lamenting that 'the number of prisoners per capita' 'has more than quadrupled' over 'the past four decades' and 'is now unprecedented in world history,' SPLC notes that 'this vast expansion of the corrections system has been called 'the New Jim Crow' [and is] a system marred by vast racial disparities – one that stigmatizes and targets young black men for arrest at a young age, unfairly punishes communities of color, burdens taxpayers and exacts a tremendous social cost.'

The "Anti-Government" "Patriot Movement"

In the spring of 2013, SPLC issued a report asserting that there had recently been a dramatic proliferation of radical anti-government 'Patriot' and militia groups which 'believ[e] that the federal government is conspiring to take Americans’ guns and destroy their liberties as it paves the way for a global ‘one-world government.’' According to SPLC, the total number of such groups had skyrocketed from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 by 2012.

The report attributed this trend to the fact that 'for many, the election of America’s first black president [Barack Obama] symbolizes the country’s changing demographics, with the loss of its white majority predicted by 2043.' Further, the report speculated: 'Now that comprehensive immigration reform is poised to legitimize and potentially accelerate the country’s demographic change, the backlash to that change may accelerate as well.'

Said SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok: 'We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace. It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.'

'Teaching Tolerance'

One of SPLC's most highly touted initiatives is its Teaching Tolerance program, which works to 'foster school environments that are inclusive and nurturing,' and to help teachers 'prepare a new generation to live in a diverse world.' The program produces a biannual publication, Teaching Tolerance magazine, which reaches more than 400,000 educators nationwide, as well as multimedia teaching kits, online curricula, and professional development resources.

All of these are provided to educators at no cost. The Teaching Tolerance lesson kits contain reading materials and suggested classroom activities designed to steer K-12 students toward the conclusion that America is an inequitable, racist, and sexist society. As such, they bear the unmistakable imprint of Morris Dees. Click here for examples of Teaching Tolerance's classroom lessons.

The Spring 1998 edition of Teaching Tolerance magazine featured an interview with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, under the title 'An Unconditional Embrace.' In the prologue to that interview, Ayers, who had become a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was described variously as 'a highly respected figure in the field of multicultural education'; a man who 'has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection'; a professor who 'helps aspiring teachers recognize and tap the potential of every child'; and someone who believes that 'challenging stereotypes and reforming inner-city schools is as much about fighting for social justice as about improving the quality of teaching and learning.'

SPLC's Immense Wealth

In 1978, when SPLC's assets were below $10 million, Morris Dees pledged that as soon as that total reached $55 million, the Center would thenceforth discontinue its fundraising efforts, use its investment interest income to cover its operating expenses, and focus exclusively on its civil-rights work. But as SPLC's assets approached that figure, the organization in 1989 revised its estimate, stating that it would actually need to accumulate $100 million before it could finally 'cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising.' As money continued to fill its coffers, the Center persisted in depicting itself as a cash-strapped organization working on a shoestring budget. In 1995, for instance, when SPLC had more than $60 million in cash reserves, it informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.”

SPLC's endowment passed the $100 million plateau in the late 1990s, at which time the Center was spending about twice as much on fundraising as on legal services for victims of civil-rights violations. Yet even after reaching that lofty milestone and securing its status as the wealthiest civil-rights group in America, SPLC's obsession with fundraising did not diminish.

In 2010 alone, the Center took in more than $36.1 million in contributions and grants, plus another $2.3 million in investment income.By the end of that fiscal year, its total assets amounted to $260,547,642. These funds were derived not only from many thousands of individual donors, but also from scores of charitable foundations.

Among these are the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Minneapolis Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ploughshares Fund, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Vanguard Public Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

To view a list of additional SPLC funders, click here.

Today, some 80% of SPLC's money is stockpiled in a massive endowment fund that is invested in a variety of mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, and is not used to bankroll civil-rights programs. Further, the Center has a bank account of undisclosed size in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven.

An April 2013 exposé by the Weekly Standard shows that SPLC, in comparison to other nonprofit organizations, spends an inordinately high percentage of its revenues on salaries, overhead, and fundraising:

'CharityWatch (formerly the American Institute of Philanthropy), 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 (three years’ worth of operating expenses) to tide it over during donation-lean years.'

But even if the SPLC weren’t sitting on an unspent $256 million, according to CharityWatch, it would still be a mediocre ('C+') performer among nonprofits. The SPLC’s 2011 tax filing reveals that the organization raised a total of $38.5 million from its donors that year but spent only $24.9 million on 'program services,' with the rest going to salaries, overhead, and fundraising.

And even that 67 percent figure is somewhat inflated, according to CharityWatch, which notes that the SPLC takes advantage of an accounting rule that permits nonprofits to count some of their fundraising expenses as 'public education' if, for example, a mailer contains an informational component. CharityWatch, ignoring that accounting rule, maintains that only 60 percent—about $19 million—went to program services during the year in question....

Furthermore, the SPLC spends a relatively high $26 on fundraising (according to CharityWatch, $18 according to the SPLC) for every $100 that it manages to raise.'

SPLC has accumulated its wealth mainly through the calculated maneuverings of Morris Dees, who has repeatedly tailored his fundraising tactics to suit the needs of the moment. The renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer (and former Dees associate) Millard Farmer points out, for instance, that the Center, at one point, largely stopped taking capital-punishment cases for fear that a visible opposition to the death penalty might alienate would-be donors.

Similarly, Ken Silverstein notes that 'in 1986, the Center's entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees's refusal to address issues—such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action—that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK.' In 2001, left-wing writer JoAnn Wypijewski wrote:

'Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s.'

Whatever the specifics of a given case, SPLC's profits invariably dwarf those of its clients. Consider the $7 million judgment Dees won in 1987 against the United Klans of America (UKA) on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son Michael had been killed by two Klansmen. At the time, UKA's sole asset was a warehouse, the sale of which netted $51,875 for Mrs. Donald.

The case was much more lucrative for SPLC, which raked in $9 million from subsequent fundraising solicitations built around Michael Donald's murder, including one solicitation that featured a photo of the young man's corpse. So profitable was the Michael Donald case, in fact, that as of 2010 the Center was still citing it in fundraising appeals.

Dees's fundraising tactics are as varied as they are creative. In a 1985 fundraising letter to zip codes where many Jewish residents lived, he made conspicuous use of his Jewish-sounding middle name, Seligman, in his signature at the end of the document. Attorney Tom Turnipseed, a former Dees associate, recounts how, on another occasion, Dees distributed a fundraising letter with ' about six different stamps' affixed to the return envelope, so as to make it appear that ' they had to cobble them all together to come up with 35 cents.' 'Morris loves to raise money,' Turnipseed told Cox News Service. 'Some of his gimmicks are just so transparent, but they’re good.' 

'He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil-rights movement,' attorney Millard Farmer says of Dees, 'though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.' According to former SPLC legal fellow Pamela Summers, 'What they are doing in the [SPLC] legal department is not done for the best interest of everybody [but] is done as though the sole, overriding goal is to make money. They’re drowning in their own affluence.'

The Baltimore Sun characterizes SPLC's operations this way: 'Its business is fundraising, and its success at raking in the cash is based on its ability to sell gullible people on the idea that present-day America is awash in white racism and anti-Semitism, which it will fight tooth-and-nail as the public interest law firm it purports to be.'

Perhaps the strongest rebuke comes from Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who in 1996 called Dees ' a fraud and a con man,' deriding him for 'your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.'

Media's Acceptance of SPLC's Claims

Notwithstanding SPLC's history of making inflated and reckless charges of racism and 'hate,' the mainstream media, for the most part, have dutifully accepted the Center's self-characterization as a courageous foe of those vices. Laird Wilcox puts it this way: 'The SPLC has exploited the patina of the old civil-rights movement. And this has a mesmerizing effect on people, especially reporters who are naturally attracted to heroic images of racial struggles and stark contrasts of good vs. evil.

'I’ve been astounded at how many of the SPLC’s claims have gone unchallenged.' Wilcox further describes SPLC as emblematic of the 'anti-racist industry afoot in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics.' 'They want to marginalize certain points of view in our society,' he says, 'and they do it by acting like a kind of certifying agency that decides who is extremist and who isn’t.'

FBI Removes SPLC From Its Hate Crimes Web Page

In March 2014 the FBI scrubbed any mention of SPLC from its hate crimes webpage, where the Center previously had been listed as a resource and described as a partner in public outreach.

The FBI's move apparently came in response to a letter that Family Research Council executive vice president William G. Boykin had written to the U.S. Department of Justice. Signed also by 14 other conservative and Christian leaders, Boykin's letter called SPLC 'a heavily politicized organization producing inaccurate and biased data on 'hate groups' -- not hate crimes.'

As Breitbart.com pointed out: 'Where once SPLC's hate list was reserved for groups like the Aryan Nation and the KKK, in 2010 SPLC started citing as hate groups those Christian groups that oppose same-sex marriage or believe homosexuality is not inborn, or are otherwise critical of homosexuality.' 

Boykin's letter further noted that SPLC was 'providing findings that are not consistent with trends found in the FBI statistics.' That is, whereas FBI findings indicated that the incidence of hate crimes and the prevalence of hate groups had declined significantly during the preceding decade, SPLC was claiming that the number of hate groups had increased by 67.3% since 2000. Demanding that all ties between the FBI and SPLC be severed, the letter concluded that 'it is completely inappropriate for the Department of Justice to recommend public reliance on the SPLC hate group lists and data.'

'We commend the FBI for removing website links to the Southern Poverty Law Center,' said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, 'an organization that not only dispenses erroneous data but has been linked to domestic terrorism in federal court. We hope this means the FBI leadership will avoid any kind of partnership with the SPLC.'

SPLC's Smear of Conservative Author Is the Basis of Campus Violence

In early March 2017, demonstrators who violently protested an appearance at Middlebury College  by Charles Murray, the American Enterprise Institute scholar who co-authored the 1994 book The Bell Curve, attributed their rage against Murray to SPLC's claim that he 'us[es] racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women, and the poor.'

Each time Murray tried to speak, the protesters turned their backs to him and chanted slogans like: (a) 'Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away,' and (b) 'Your message is hatred. We cannot tolerate it." Some, meanwhile, stomped their feet and set off fire alarms to drown out Murray's voice. At that point, the college moved Murray to another location to livestream a discussion. Then, as Murray was leaving the campus after the event, he was physically assaulted by protesters who surrounded him and stomped on the hood of his car and and pounded on its windows."

NOTES:

[1] Cited by William Norman Grigg in The New American, April 12, 2005.
[2] Michael Fumento, 'A Church Arson Epidemic? It's Smoke and Mirrors,' The Wall Street Journal (July 8, 1996), p. A8.
[3] 'Hiding Behind the Smoke,' Washington Post (June 18, 1996), p. A 13.
[4] Deroy Murdock, 'Everyday America's Racial Harmony,' The American Enterprise(November/December 1998), p. 25.
[5] 'Hiding Behind the Smoke,' Washington Post (June 18, 1996), p. A 13. 'Indiana Man Admits to 50 Church Arsons,' The New York Times (February 24, 1999), p. A 18.

(Information on granters courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)

 

Source of above research: DiscoverTheNetworks