According to The Southern Poverty Law Center, Black Lives Matter isn’t a hate group.  Originally, I had intended this blog to be about Black Lives Matter, but as I looked into the background of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose list of “hate groups” does not include BLM nor themselves (as it probably should) but does include scores of innocuous Christian groups, I realized that this needs to be a two-part blog, and in fact, had I used all the material I found in only a couple of day’s research, this could have become a book!  So here is part one:  an exposé of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC was begun at the end the Civil Rights Movement in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama. Founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph J Levin Jr., it was “a law firm originally focused on issues such as fighting poverty, racial discrimination and the death penalty in the United States” (Wikipedia).  Its first president, Julian Bond, later took control of the NAACP.  However, over the years, the SPLC has expanded their role, supporting a wide range of liberal causes:  they are pro-immigrant whether legal or illegal, pro-gay rights, pro-Muslim, pro-racial preferences, and the creator of the infamous “hate group” list, published yearly, which regularly lists any organization as a “hate group” which does not support gay rights, Muslim “rights”, racial preferences, illegal immigration, and so on.  They have, in short, become the arbiter of what is acceptable in our society (anything they support) and what is “hate” (anything that disagrees with their ideas.)

Some of the organizations on their “hate groups” list include the following:

  • Catholic organizations
  • Baptist organizations
  • Pentecostal organizations
  • American Family Association
  • Family Research Council
  • Illinois Family Institute
  • Parents Action League
  • United Families International
  • Christian Action Network
  • American Defense League
  • United States Justice Foundation
  • Watchmen Bible Study Group
  • Mission to Israel
  • Jewish Defense League

The SPLC has also defamed a liberal environmentalist publishing company, The Social Contract Press, whose crime was to republish the 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, by French writer Jean Raspail which warns of catastrophe in Europe from the boatloads of illegal immigrants who were arriving from South Asia.

Beyond their obvious liberal bias, the Southern Poverty Law Center has proven by their actions over the years that they can no longer be trusted to be either accurate or non-biased in their dealings.  Following the election of President Trump, for example, they surveyed teachers around the country to see if students of color were being bullied by white students as they assumed had no doubt was happening. And indeed, they did find reports of many students of color who had been bullied and they reported those numbers to national news media.  What they did not report, however, were that teachers across the country also reported that thousands of white children had been bullied by students of color following the election. That some students of all ethnic backgrounds were bullying others because of whom their parents had voted for did not fit the narrative that SPLC wanted to promote and so they carefully picked the statistics that they wanted to report and ignored the rest.

In their list of “Hate Organizations,” the Southern Poverty Law Center regularly lists Christians non-profit charitable organizations like those listed above, whose only “sin” in the eyes of the SPLC is that they believe what the Bible teaches: that marriage is between a man and a woman, that practicing homosexuality is a sin, and that abortion is akin to murder.  The fact that most Christians do not hate homosexuals, only disagree with their lifestyle, makes no difference to SPLC.  If you don’t toe their liberal line, you are a hate group.

These designations are wrong, unfair, and often dangerous.  For example, Floyd Corkins attempted to kill employees at the Family Research Council in Washington DC in 2012.  In his pocket was a list of conservative Christian organizations listed as “hate groups” by the SPLC.  Corkins told the FBI that, motivated by SPLC’s description of these groups as “hate groups,” he had intended to go down the list after the Family Research Council shooting, killing as many Christians as possible.

Even James Hodgkinson, the sniper who attempted to massacre Republican lawmakers during a baseball practice was a follower of SPLC.  Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, reports that in 2013, “SPLC published a false story alleging that Steve Scalise, gravely injured in the shooting, was a white supremacist” (“Blacklist of Hate Groups Lumps Christian NGOs with KKK and NEO-Nazis”).

In March of this year, the violent demonstration by students at Middlebury college in protest against author Charles Murray, resulted in the physical assault of a faculty member, and was a product of SPLC’s smear of Murray as an “extremist.”

Stella Morabito, a senior contributor to The Federalist reports that when she went to hear Nonie Darwish speak at Georgetown University about her conversion from Islam to Christianity, she was handed a flyer before she went in which warned that Darwish was an “Islamophobe” unapproved by the SPLC.  Ms. Darwish was forced to have a police escort and endured racist slurs and hostility from audience members.

Certainly SPLC administrators and lawyers did not personally perpetrate these attacks, but their irresponsible lumping of conservative groups who do not agree with their liberal ideas with real hate groups like the KKK and Neo-Nazis, has certainly created an atmosphere in which many believe these charitable organizations are evil and must be eradicated.

Not only conservatives, but liberals as well have rejected the SPLC’s hate list.  As soon as their 2017 list was published and announced by CNN, Emily Jashinsky of the Washington Post, wrote an editorial in which she said that “the SPLC’s claim to objectivity is nothing less than fraudulent.”

Liberal journalist Ken Silverstien has called out the SPLC more than once.  In 2010 in Harpers, he called the group “essentially a fraud” that casually labels organizations as “hate groups.” “In doing so,” he wrote, “the SPL shuts down debate, stifles free speech and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people” (Berkowitz).

Liberty Counsel, a non-profit organization that promotes litigation when Christian values are being infringed, made the 2017 “hate groups” list.  Its chairman, Mat Staver reacted with outrage at CNN’s promoting of the SPLC’s list as “authoritative.”  Speaking to the news organization, Breaking Israel News, he accused the SPLC of being a purely political group, attempting to silence groups with which they disagree.  “I work with many in the Jewish community and have many friends who survived the Holocaust or who lost family in the Holocaut.  I condemn racism, anti-Semitism, violence, and hatred.  The SPLC must stop this false, defamatory, and dangerous labeling of peaceful, nonviolent groups.”  Liberty Counsel, among others, are considering litigation against SPLC.

The Southern Poverty Law Center often uses intimidation to silence opposition to their ideas.  An example of intimidation which did not work so well for them occurred in 2005 when a writer, D. A. King, received a phone call from Heidi Beirich of the SPLC “Intelligence Report.”  Apparently there had been a rally on the steps of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery on June 3rd of that year, and she had called to inform Mr. King that she had a picture of him standing on the steps “next to a Nazi who was waving a Nazi flag.”  She also said they had caught him surveilling the SPLC buildings in May of that year.  Mr. King, had in fact been in Montgomery in May to visit family and had taken pictures of the “SPLC Palace,” but he had not been in Montgomery in June, had not participated in the rally, and emphatically did not associate with Nazis!  Ms. Beirich insisted that they had the photo and witnesses to place him there.  Mr. King repeated that he was not there and carefully explained to her what he would do if the SPLC dared print that lie about him.  Ms. Beirich later sent him the following email:

Dear Mr. King,
Based on your adamant denials and further investigation on our part, we
agree that your only visit to Montgomery was when you surveilled and
photographed our new Civil Rights Memorial Center on May 23rd (we actually
work across the street).

For us accuracy is always paramount. Thank you for taking my call.

Best,
Heidi Beirich

Many of SPLC’s own lawyers have lost faith with the organization over the years.  “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. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the center’s programs were calculated to cash in on ‘black pain and white guilt’” (“The Church of Morris Dees” quoted in “The Southern Poverty Law Center Expands”).

Karl Zinsmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable writes that “Its (SPLC) 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” (as qtd in The Federalist). Zinsmeister is referring here to the “tolerance.org” website run by SPLC and designed especially for teachers with “classroom activities” that can be used to teach so-called tolerance issues: Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual issues, or Gender Issues to the early grades.  Over 10,000 schools participate in its “tolerance” programs, resulting in situations like the elite charter school in California where a kindergarten class was read books by their teacher about transgender identity and then a male kindergartener was reintroduced to the class as a girl, and the more recent incident of the first grader in Rocklin Academy Gateway who was sent to the principal’s office for referring to a boy she had gone through kindergarten with the year before by his then name, not his new “girl” name.  Parents are understandably outraged by these incidents, and it is the Southern Poverty Law Center in large part who is pushing these gender issues in the schools.

But above all, whatever their stated goals, the Southern Poverty Law Center is about making money, lots of money.  In fact, SPLC founder Morris Dees was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 1998, and for good reason.  A February 1994 article in the Montgomery (Alabama) Examiner charges “The SPLC has reserve funds of $52 million…Just what the Law Center does with all that money is a source of concern. Some who have worked with Morris Dees call him a phony, the ‘television evangelist’ of civil rights who misleads donors… For 15 years, people throughout the country have sent millions of dollars to the (SPLC) to fight the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacists. But critics say the Law Center exaggerates the threat of hate groups…”

What the SPLC does with that money is becoming clear.  The Washington Free Beacon reports that although registered as a non-profit, tax-exempt charitable organization, their 2015 Form 990, the most recently available tax form, records more than $50 million in contributions, $328 million in net assets, and “Financial interests” in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda.  Records from the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) reports millions of dollars being transferred to accounts in the Cayman Islands alone.  The Washington Free Beacon article goes on to quote Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm who states “It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas.”  She continued, “I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts” (Joe Shoffstall, “Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities” The Washington Free Beacon News, 8 August 2017).

Shoffstall also lists the salaries paid to the administrators of SPLC as recorded on the 2015 tax form:

Richard Cohen, president and chief executive officer of the SPLC, was given $346,218 in base compensation in 2015 and $20,000 more in other reportable compensation and non-taxable benefits. Morris Dees, SPLC’s chief trial counsel, received a salary of $329,560 with $42,000 in additional reportable compensation and non-taxable benefits. No officer, trustee, or key employee got less than $140,000 in base salary, not including other benefits.  The total amount spent in salaries that year was $20 million.  That same year, the SPLC, which boasts of its legal work on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, spent only $61,000 on litigation. 

So how does this money raising work?  In one example, Morris Dees, the SPLC founder, won a settlement of $51,875 for a woman whose son was killed by a member of the KKK.  Mr. Dees accumulated $9 million from fund-raising solicitation letters that featured a gruesome photograph of the victim.  According to The Montgomery Advertiser, none of the $9 million went to the grieving mother (qtd. in “When a Hate Crime is something to Love).

Again, following the recent violence in Charlottesville, CNN ran a wire story originally titled “Here are all the active hate groups where you live” using SPLC’s list of 917 groups. According to The Free Beacon, money poured into the SPLC, over a million dollars from Apple Corporation and $500,000 from J. P. Chase Morgan alone.  On that “hate” list was Brad Dacus, the president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a Sacramento-based group that defends “religious freedom, parental rights, and other civil liberties without charge” (Shoffstall).

The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance no longer lists the Southern Poverty Law Center because they only list organizations who apply at least 50 percent of their total income from all sources “to programs and activities directly related to the purpose for which the organization exists.” Apparently a law firm with $328 million in net assets who only spends $61,000 a year in actual litigation does not fit that criteria.  In fact, the SPLC usually spends 89 percent of its total income on fund-raising and administrative costs alone.  Thus it has actually become a self-perpetuating money-maker with no real aim other than making money to make more money.

The Federation for Immigration Reform recently sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, arguing that SPLC’s tax-exempt 501(c)3 status should be revoked because during the 2016 election they had clearly violated the IRS’s requirement that tax-exempt organizations do not participate in political campaigns even in so much as simply issuing statements in support or opposition of a candidate.

Most telling, however, is the fact that two years ago, the FBI stopped using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” list, because of its bias and inaccuracy.

In 1994, Laird Wilcox wrote a book in which he listed bogus reports of hate crimes in the country.  In that book he writes, “Because bona fide organized racist and anti-Semitic incidents are relatively unusual today, and because they serve valuable functions for the victims and their constituencies when they occur, the temptation to fabricate incidents is strong.” Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America by Laird Wilcox, 1994).  This is a lesson that the SPLC has learned well.

Despite what the Southern Poverty Law Center and the media who slavishly support them would like us to believe, SPLC is not about helping the poor.  It is about enriching its administrators and promoting its agenda of hate in order to do so.  Accuse someone of a hate crime and money will come pouring in.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career of engendering hate in the guise of opposing hatred.  They are not fighting the monsters; they have become the monsters.