Leroy N. Soetoro
2018-08-28 23:10:17 UTC
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/southern-poverty-law-
center-essentially-a-fraud/
The Southern Poverty Law Center has less to do with justice than with
fundraising
It had to happen sometime. The Southern Poverty Law Center has made so
many vile, unjustified, hysterical, and hateful accusations over the
years, it was bound to pay a price. When it did, the bill due was $3.375
million. Such was the amount the SPLC agreed to pay the British Muslim
Maajid Nawaz and his think tank, the Quilliam Foundation, after smearing
them in a Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Nawaz, a former
Islamist radical turned whistleblower who calls for the modernization of
Islam in columns for the Daily Beast and on London talk radio, had
threatened to sue the SPLC for defamation traditionally and properly a
difficult case to make in U.S. courts. Yet the SPLC caved spectacularly.
The amusing but uncharacteristically groveling tone of the SPLCs apology
suggests fear of Nawazs lawyers: We have taken the time to do more
research, stated the SPLC (doing research what a novel idea!), noting
that Nawaz has made valuable and important contributions to public
discourse, adding that he is most certainly not an anti-Muslim
extremist, and concluding, We would like to extend our sincerest
apologies to Mr. Nawaz, Quilliam, and our readers for the error. The
settlement further stipulated that the SPLCs president, Richard Cohen,
would film a video apology, prominently display it on the outfits
website, and distribute the apology to every email address and mailing
address on the SPLC mailing list. Whether Cohen was further required to
come over to Nawazs house every week and iron his laundry could not be
learned.
The Nawaz settlement was the most damaging episode yet in what has become
an increasingly dire situation for the SPLCs floundering image. Image,
painstakingly built since its founding in 1971, is its chief asset. Image
is what keeps the dollars flowing in. The Right has long been calling
attention to the SPLCs questionable tactics, but these days even
Politico, The Atlantic, and PBS are running skeptical pieces about the
saints of the South. Politico wondered whether the SPLC was overstepping
its bounds and quoted an anti-terrorism expert, J. M. Berger, who pointed
out that the problem partly stems from the fact that the [SPLC] wears two
hats, as both an activist group and a source of information. David A.
Graham of The Atlantic wrote that the Field Guide was more like an
attempt to police the discourse on Islam than a true inventory of anti-
Muslim extremists, of whom there is no shortage, and opened SPLC up to
charges that it had strayed from its civil-rights mission. PBS
interviewer Bob Garfield suggested to its president that the SPLC is
increasingly seen not as fighting the good fight but as being
opportunists exploiting our political miseries and that this was
tantamount to killing the goose that lays the golden egg. In 2015 the
FBI dropped the SPLC from its list of resources about hate groups.
Lately the SPLC has taken on an increasingly desperate, self-parodying
tone, denouncing such mainstream figures as the psychologist, author, and
PJ Media columnist Helen Smith and the American Enterprise Institute
scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling them anti-feminist female voices
and adding them to its double-secret-probation list under the catch-all
term male supremacy. Former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who is
black, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the group had smeared her
after she questioned the SPLCs misguided focus. Mark Potok, then the
SPLCs national spokesman, denounced her as an apologist for white
supremacists in a story published on the front page of Swains local
newspaper, the Tennessean.
To sum up recent events: The SPLC has been crazily denouncing highly
respected writers who are Muslim, black, and female for being anti-Muslim,
anti-black, and misogynist. All of these contrived charges are in the
service of the SPLCs core mission, which is to separate progressives from
their dollars.
Founded in 1971, the Alabama-based SPLC, dubbed essentially a fraud by
Ken Silverstein in a blog post for Harpers back in 2010, discovered some
time ago that it could line its coffers by positioning itself as a scourge
of racists. Silverstein reported that in 1987, after the SPLC sued the
United Klans of America, which had almost no assets to begin with, over
the lynching murder of Michael Donald, the son of Beulah Mae Donald, the
grieving mother realized $52,000 from the court case but the SPLC used
the matter in fundraising appeals (including one that exploited a
photograph of Donalds corpse) that raked in some $9 million in donations.
Today the SPLC typically hauls in (as it did in 2015) $50 million. In its
2016 annual report it listed its net endowment assets at an eye-popping
$319 million. Its now quaint to recall that, when Silverstein called the
SPLC the wealthiest civil-rights group in America, it had a mere $120
million in assets. That was in 2000. President Richard Cohen and co-
foundercumchief trial counsel Morris Dees each raked in well over
$350,000 in compensation in 2015.
News that has anything to do with the South or with race has proven to be
a bonanza for the SPLC; after the events in Charlottesville last summer,
the SPLC swiftly took action to capitalize. It placed a digital picture of
Heather Heyer, the young Charlottesville resident who was killed when a
white supremacist drove into a crowd, on its Wall of Tolerance and
blasted out press releases about it. What is the Wall of Tolerance? Its a
gimmick to make donors feel important, neon-style virtue-signaling in the
pixels that light up a giant video screen that continuously scrolls the
names of 500,000 people who have taken a pledge to be tolerant. After
Charlottesville, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $1 million to the group and
put an SPLC donation button in the companys iTunes store. JPMorgan Chase
promised $500,000.
The SPLCs publicity machine turns such events into gold, creating the
impression that were forever a week away from a neo-Nazi takeover or a
rebirth of the KKK. As both the Nazis and the white-bedsheet fans have
done the SPLC the disservice of fading into tiny remnants of themselves,
the SPLC is forced to find new monsters, designating the likes of Rand
Paul, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Ben Carson as extremists.
Some on the left are well aware of what the SPLC is up to. As Alexander
Cockburn put it in The Nation, Dees is king of the hate business. Karl
Zinsmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable notes that the SPLCs two largest
expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual lists of haters
and extremists, and running a big effort that pushes tolerance
education through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. In 2015 the
SPLC said it had spent $10 million on direct fundraising, which is a lot
more than it has ever spent on outside legal services. The group has never
spent more than 31 percent of its donations on programs, Zinsmeister
pointed out, and at times has spent as little as 18 percent.
Earlier than others, the SPLC grasped the importance of the verb hate.
An easy way to ratchet up hatred, and the passion that makes people open
their checkbooks, is to accuse others of hate. Hate sometimes proves
tricky to control, however. In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center put
the Family Research Council (FRC) a conservative Christian group on
the hate map that appears on its website. A gunman guided by the map
later walked into the FRC building, his goal to kill as many as possible
and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims faces. The gunman who
shot Republican House majority whip Steve Scalise and three others in an
attack on Republicans last year was an SPLC fan. To the SPLC, the learned
social scientist Charles Murray is a white nationalist who peddles
racist pseudoscience. Professors and protesters at Middlebury College
opposed Murrays appearance there in a letter that cited the SPLC as its
(sole) source, and when Murray appeared there to give a lecture, the
protesters shouted him down and manhandled a woman professor who was
appearing at the same event.
The SPLC has become a kind of Weimar Republic of hate inflation. Its list
of hate groups looks increasingly like a way of attacking ordinary
conservatives. It tagged the Alliance Defending Freedom as an anti-LGBT
hate group. The Alliance Defending Freedom is simply one of the
multitudes of legal-activist groups trying dutifully to win its arguments
in the appropriate courtrooms. The ADF was targeted by the SPLC because it
defended the proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop on religious-liberty
grounds, arguing that the cake maker could not be forced to spell out
sentiments about gay marriage with which he did not agree. If the ADF is a
hate group, then I guess so is the seven-member majority of the U.S.
Supreme Court that gave Masterpiece a victory in the case.
In October 2014, the SPLC labeled the great neurosurgeon Ben Carson an
extremist. Because this designation made the SPLC look silly and risked
the groups coveted public perception as nonpartisan, it backed down. Sort
of: Weve reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet
our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson.
Then, in the same statement, the SPLC resumed hammering Carson as an
extremist for saying things such as Marriage is between a man and a
woman and for being one of innumerable talking heads on cable news to
make facile comparisons between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. Well take it
as a given that there are far too many Nazi analogies being made these
days, but if the SPLC is serious about policing those itll take note of
the many talking heads on the left who are making them.
Dees, who earned a spot in (Im not making this up) the Direct Marketing
Associations Hall of Fame for his service to the cause of pitching
birthday cakes, cookbooks, tractor-seat cushions, and other junk-mail
items, is more than a little Trumpian himself, according to Politico. I
learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church, Dees
once said, according to a 2000 piece that Silverstein wrote for Harpers.
Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch
salvation why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling. Deess onetime
business partner Millard Fuller told Silverstein, Morris and I . . .
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.
Dees once told his donors that he would stop fundraising when the SPLC
endowment reached $55 million. When the SPLC blew by that milestone, he
upped it to $100 million. Today it continues to build its huge endowment
while its six-story, multi-million-dollar headquarters is the most
architecturally striking structure in downtown Montgomery, according to
Politico.
Stephen Bright, a lawyer and longtime director of the Southern Center for
Human Rights who actually defends the indigent in death-penalty cases,
wrote in 2007 that Morris Dees is a con man and fraud. . . . He has taken
advantage of naïve, well-meaning people some of moderate or low incomes
who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He
added that because Dees spends so much on fund raising, his operation
spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other
organizations accomplish on shoestring budgets.
The SPLC can no longer be fairly termed a nonpartisan watchdog group. It
has become a hate group itself. Actual political violence is of no
interest to it unless it can be deployed in service of the SPLCs thinly
veiled campaign to damage the Right. Bafflement ensued when, in 2012,
National Reviews Charles C. W. Cooke called up the SPLC to ask whether
the outfit was adding Occupy Wall Street to the list of hate groups it
tracks after three anarchists linked to the movement were caught plotting
to blow up a bridge in Cleveland (all three later pleaded guilty). An SPLC
flack explained that his group only tracks those who commit violence or
who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology. Since this
was exactly what the Occupy fanatics were up to, Cooke was puzzled. They
were anarchists, the spokesman told Cooke. Yeah. So?
Well, the spokesman added sheepishly, Were not really set up to cover
the extreme Left.
--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.
Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.
ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.
Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.
Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.
center-essentially-a-fraud/
The Southern Poverty Law Center has less to do with justice than with
fundraising
It had to happen sometime. The Southern Poverty Law Center has made so
many vile, unjustified, hysterical, and hateful accusations over the
years, it was bound to pay a price. When it did, the bill due was $3.375
million. Such was the amount the SPLC agreed to pay the British Muslim
Maajid Nawaz and his think tank, the Quilliam Foundation, after smearing
them in a Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Nawaz, a former
Islamist radical turned whistleblower who calls for the modernization of
Islam in columns for the Daily Beast and on London talk radio, had
threatened to sue the SPLC for defamation traditionally and properly a
difficult case to make in U.S. courts. Yet the SPLC caved spectacularly.
The amusing but uncharacteristically groveling tone of the SPLCs apology
suggests fear of Nawazs lawyers: We have taken the time to do more
research, stated the SPLC (doing research what a novel idea!), noting
that Nawaz has made valuable and important contributions to public
discourse, adding that he is most certainly not an anti-Muslim
extremist, and concluding, We would like to extend our sincerest
apologies to Mr. Nawaz, Quilliam, and our readers for the error. The
settlement further stipulated that the SPLCs president, Richard Cohen,
would film a video apology, prominently display it on the outfits
website, and distribute the apology to every email address and mailing
address on the SPLC mailing list. Whether Cohen was further required to
come over to Nawazs house every week and iron his laundry could not be
learned.
The Nawaz settlement was the most damaging episode yet in what has become
an increasingly dire situation for the SPLCs floundering image. Image,
painstakingly built since its founding in 1971, is its chief asset. Image
is what keeps the dollars flowing in. The Right has long been calling
attention to the SPLCs questionable tactics, but these days even
Politico, The Atlantic, and PBS are running skeptical pieces about the
saints of the South. Politico wondered whether the SPLC was overstepping
its bounds and quoted an anti-terrorism expert, J. M. Berger, who pointed
out that the problem partly stems from the fact that the [SPLC] wears two
hats, as both an activist group and a source of information. David A.
Graham of The Atlantic wrote that the Field Guide was more like an
attempt to police the discourse on Islam than a true inventory of anti-
Muslim extremists, of whom there is no shortage, and opened SPLC up to
charges that it had strayed from its civil-rights mission. PBS
interviewer Bob Garfield suggested to its president that the SPLC is
increasingly seen not as fighting the good fight but as being
opportunists exploiting our political miseries and that this was
tantamount to killing the goose that lays the golden egg. In 2015 the
FBI dropped the SPLC from its list of resources about hate groups.
Lately the SPLC has taken on an increasingly desperate, self-parodying
tone, denouncing such mainstream figures as the psychologist, author, and
PJ Media columnist Helen Smith and the American Enterprise Institute
scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling them anti-feminist female voices
and adding them to its double-secret-probation list under the catch-all
term male supremacy. Former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who is
black, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the group had smeared her
after she questioned the SPLCs misguided focus. Mark Potok, then the
SPLCs national spokesman, denounced her as an apologist for white
supremacists in a story published on the front page of Swains local
newspaper, the Tennessean.
To sum up recent events: The SPLC has been crazily denouncing highly
respected writers who are Muslim, black, and female for being anti-Muslim,
anti-black, and misogynist. All of these contrived charges are in the
service of the SPLCs core mission, which is to separate progressives from
their dollars.
Founded in 1971, the Alabama-based SPLC, dubbed essentially a fraud by
Ken Silverstein in a blog post for Harpers back in 2010, discovered some
time ago that it could line its coffers by positioning itself as a scourge
of racists. Silverstein reported that in 1987, after the SPLC sued the
United Klans of America, which had almost no assets to begin with, over
the lynching murder of Michael Donald, the son of Beulah Mae Donald, the
grieving mother realized $52,000 from the court case but the SPLC used
the matter in fundraising appeals (including one that exploited a
photograph of Donalds corpse) that raked in some $9 million in donations.
Today the SPLC typically hauls in (as it did in 2015) $50 million. In its
2016 annual report it listed its net endowment assets at an eye-popping
$319 million. Its now quaint to recall that, when Silverstein called the
SPLC the wealthiest civil-rights group in America, it had a mere $120
million in assets. That was in 2000. President Richard Cohen and co-
foundercumchief trial counsel Morris Dees each raked in well over
$350,000 in compensation in 2015.
News that has anything to do with the South or with race has proven to be
a bonanza for the SPLC; after the events in Charlottesville last summer,
the SPLC swiftly took action to capitalize. It placed a digital picture of
Heather Heyer, the young Charlottesville resident who was killed when a
white supremacist drove into a crowd, on its Wall of Tolerance and
blasted out press releases about it. What is the Wall of Tolerance? Its a
gimmick to make donors feel important, neon-style virtue-signaling in the
pixels that light up a giant video screen that continuously scrolls the
names of 500,000 people who have taken a pledge to be tolerant. After
Charlottesville, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $1 million to the group and
put an SPLC donation button in the companys iTunes store. JPMorgan Chase
promised $500,000.
The SPLCs publicity machine turns such events into gold, creating the
impression that were forever a week away from a neo-Nazi takeover or a
rebirth of the KKK. As both the Nazis and the white-bedsheet fans have
done the SPLC the disservice of fading into tiny remnants of themselves,
the SPLC is forced to find new monsters, designating the likes of Rand
Paul, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Ben Carson as extremists.
Some on the left are well aware of what the SPLC is up to. As Alexander
Cockburn put it in The Nation, Dees is king of the hate business. Karl
Zinsmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable notes that the SPLCs two largest
expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual lists of haters
and extremists, and running a big effort that pushes tolerance
education through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. In 2015 the
SPLC said it had spent $10 million on direct fundraising, which is a lot
more than it has ever spent on outside legal services. The group has never
spent more than 31 percent of its donations on programs, Zinsmeister
pointed out, and at times has spent as little as 18 percent.
Earlier than others, the SPLC grasped the importance of the verb hate.
An easy way to ratchet up hatred, and the passion that makes people open
their checkbooks, is to accuse others of hate. Hate sometimes proves
tricky to control, however. In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center put
the Family Research Council (FRC) a conservative Christian group on
the hate map that appears on its website. A gunman guided by the map
later walked into the FRC building, his goal to kill as many as possible
and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims faces. The gunman who
shot Republican House majority whip Steve Scalise and three others in an
attack on Republicans last year was an SPLC fan. To the SPLC, the learned
social scientist Charles Murray is a white nationalist who peddles
racist pseudoscience. Professors and protesters at Middlebury College
opposed Murrays appearance there in a letter that cited the SPLC as its
(sole) source, and when Murray appeared there to give a lecture, the
protesters shouted him down and manhandled a woman professor who was
appearing at the same event.
The SPLC has become a kind of Weimar Republic of hate inflation. Its list
of hate groups looks increasingly like a way of attacking ordinary
conservatives. It tagged the Alliance Defending Freedom as an anti-LGBT
hate group. The Alliance Defending Freedom is simply one of the
multitudes of legal-activist groups trying dutifully to win its arguments
in the appropriate courtrooms. The ADF was targeted by the SPLC because it
defended the proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop on religious-liberty
grounds, arguing that the cake maker could not be forced to spell out
sentiments about gay marriage with which he did not agree. If the ADF is a
hate group, then I guess so is the seven-member majority of the U.S.
Supreme Court that gave Masterpiece a victory in the case.
In October 2014, the SPLC labeled the great neurosurgeon Ben Carson an
extremist. Because this designation made the SPLC look silly and risked
the groups coveted public perception as nonpartisan, it backed down. Sort
of: Weve reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet
our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson.
Then, in the same statement, the SPLC resumed hammering Carson as an
extremist for saying things such as Marriage is between a man and a
woman and for being one of innumerable talking heads on cable news to
make facile comparisons between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. Well take it
as a given that there are far too many Nazi analogies being made these
days, but if the SPLC is serious about policing those itll take note of
the many talking heads on the left who are making them.
Dees, who earned a spot in (Im not making this up) the Direct Marketing
Associations Hall of Fame for his service to the cause of pitching
birthday cakes, cookbooks, tractor-seat cushions, and other junk-mail
items, is more than a little Trumpian himself, according to Politico. I
learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church, Dees
once said, according to a 2000 piece that Silverstein wrote for Harpers.
Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch
salvation why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling. Deess onetime
business partner Millard Fuller told Silverstein, Morris and I . . .
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.
Dees once told his donors that he would stop fundraising when the SPLC
endowment reached $55 million. When the SPLC blew by that milestone, he
upped it to $100 million. Today it continues to build its huge endowment
while its six-story, multi-million-dollar headquarters is the most
architecturally striking structure in downtown Montgomery, according to
Politico.
Stephen Bright, a lawyer and longtime director of the Southern Center for
Human Rights who actually defends the indigent in death-penalty cases,
wrote in 2007 that Morris Dees is a con man and fraud. . . . He has taken
advantage of naïve, well-meaning people some of moderate or low incomes
who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He
added that because Dees spends so much on fund raising, his operation
spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other
organizations accomplish on shoestring budgets.
The SPLC can no longer be fairly termed a nonpartisan watchdog group. It
has become a hate group itself. Actual political violence is of no
interest to it unless it can be deployed in service of the SPLCs thinly
veiled campaign to damage the Right. Bafflement ensued when, in 2012,
National Reviews Charles C. W. Cooke called up the SPLC to ask whether
the outfit was adding Occupy Wall Street to the list of hate groups it
tracks after three anarchists linked to the movement were caught plotting
to blow up a bridge in Cleveland (all three later pleaded guilty). An SPLC
flack explained that his group only tracks those who commit violence or
who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology. Since this
was exactly what the Occupy fanatics were up to, Cooke was puzzled. They
were anarchists, the spokesman told Cooke. Yeah. So?
Well, the spokesman added sheepishly, Were not really set up to cover
the extreme Left.
--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.
Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.
ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.
Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.
Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.