Thread: Southern Poverty Law Center admits it does not monitor 'the extreme Left'

The SPLC is running the hotline for the illegals in the State of Alabama and has filed a lawsuit against the state over the immigration laws. I have often wondered why La Voz de Aztlan has never been named a hate group as well as quite a few others, maybe this is the reason.

Southern Poverty Law Center admits it does not monitor 'the extreme Left'

• Southern Poverty Law Center
• May 4, 2012
• By: Anthony Martin
• 
  
  Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
  

In a stunning display of candor the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of Montgomery, Alabama admitted today that it does not monitor "the extreme Left" although for years the organization has billed itself as a watchdog of hate groups.

The admission came during a phone interview conducted by Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, during which Cooke asked a spokesman for SPLC if the organization had plans to begin to track the Occupy movement in light of the foiled terrorist attempt to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio.

The suspects who were arrested in the case are connected directly to the Occupy movement.

According to Cooke the person who first answered his call at SPLC appeared stunned by the question. She then transferred him to a representative who was conducting an international conference on right wing extremism.

In an interview that took on the characteristics of a cat and mouse game, the spokesman offered various nebulous reasons for the Center's practice of avoiding the tracking of left wing groups.

Finally, Cooke managed to pin down the spokesman on a key point, which led to a stunning admission that SPLC has never been willing to make in the past. The following excerpt sets the stage:

And then he went on a long speech about “anti-abortion extremists” that had very little to do with what I was asking, but no doubt made him feel good. I met this with silence, so he said that, really, the SPLC only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology.

“Isn’t that exactly what happened in Cleveland?” I asked. “These five men, all linked with Occupy Wall Street, attempted to blow up a bridge as an overture to the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the name of anarchism. They also looked to blow up the Republican convention.”

“They were anarchists,” he repeated.

“Yes?”

He paused. “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”

The problem with the statement is that if SPLC is set up to cover the extreme Right, then it is also set up to cover the extreme Left, which leads to the logical conclusion that apparently the Center is not interested in monitoring left wing hate groups. Their motive is to track and attempt to destroy what they consider to be right wing extremist groups, some of which have not engaged in the type of extremism that has led to violence, although many such groups have done exactly that.

SPLC once issued a report on its blog in which it castigated this reporter and New York columnist and blogger Pamela Geller for exposing the violence of extremist Islam. The Center erroneously claimed that this reporter is the infamous "Ulsterman," the anonymous White House reporter who has made headlines by providing top secret information about the Obama Administration. But curiously, the Center never once commented on the extremism that is a key component of the Islamist element of Islam, or as they are often called, "Jihadis."

The Center also never provided any proof concerning its claim about Ulsterman's identity.

Further, the SPLC spokesman made another telling admission in the interview with Cooke. He stated that the Center covers left wing extremists only when there is a right wing component, such as a case in which a leftist anarchist group is infiltrated by a right wing group.

The logic of such an admission is in itself stunning. A leftist anarchist group may well be engaged in acts of extreme violence, such as, to use an example from the past, Bill Ayers' Weathermen. But the only way SPLC would monitor the group is in the event that a right wing anarchist group, such as Aryan Nation, infiltrates it.

One is pressed to comprehend how the Weathermen could become any more violent or dangerous simply because it had been infiltrated by Aryan Nation. One is further pressed to comprehend how the Weathermen, which was charged with blowing up federal buildings, could be considered unimportant enough to merit SPLC's attention, yet Aryan Nation, which has never been charged with blowing up federal buildings, would be considered such an imminent threat by SPLC that it must be closely monitored.

According to Discover the Networks, SPLC's history and activities expose its political and ideological agenda, which has more to do with advancing left wing causes than monitoring hate groups.

Southern Poverty Law Center admits it does not monitor 'the extreme Left' - National Conservative | Examiner.com

http://www.alipac.us/f19/liveprayer-...5/#post1299326

Just a guess here but perhaps because they are the extreme left no need to monitor themselves.

The SPLC is getting hammered each and every way right now. They are under duress and being caught in their lies more than ever before!

W

The SPLC may go the way of the dinosaur much like much of the MSM. The question is, where do they get their funding?

August 20, 2012
By Rosslyn Smith
The American Thinker

Last week's shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council (FRC) has placed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) back into the news. The SPLC recently had placed the FRC on its list of hate groups because the SPLC claims that in its opposition to gay marriage, the FRC defames gays and lesbians.

It should be noted that the not-for-profit SPLC ostensibly began its mission to help those who had been victimized by civil rights violations by filing suits on their behalf. In recent years, the SPLC greatly expanded its definition of civil rights and hate groups to the point where any organization that opposes the left's favored causes risks being labeled a hate group by the SPLC. It has also moved away from suing on behalf of the aggrieved to raising awareness of the presence of "hate groups." Most of all, for the last 35 years, it has become a real fundraising dynamo.

The labeling of opposing political views as hate by the SPLC has become so egregious that at the end of a report on a solidarity march in the Swedish city of Malmö by people protesting attacks on Jews by Islamists, William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection wonders:

Bonus question: Will pointing out the truth about Malmö land me on SPLC's "hate map" along with Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs?

Update: I just noticed that Danel Greenfields' Sultan Knish also is on SPLC's NY hate map.

A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor. I agree that it is, but I take issue with others about what is to be done. When I look at the entire history of the SPLC, I don't think the recent trend of inflate the hate is as much about political correctness run completely amok in the age of Obama as it is about the greed and self-aggrandizement of the founder of the SPLC and the gullibility of the donor base.

Yes, mock those who increasingly conflate disapproval of policy ideas with hate. It is a silly idea. But mock even more those who continue to donate to SPLC as dupes of pious-sounding con men. Make them doubt their self-image as serious-thinking people by showing that they are being manipulated by a shameless huckster whose principal agenda has always been to become very wealthy. For if you understand that motivation, it is easy to see why the definition of hate had to be expanded to include groups that were considered very mainstream just a short time ago.

SPLC founder Morris Dees is a lawyer, but he began his career as a direct marketer, hawking everything from cookbooks to tractor seat cushions. Indeed, the SPLC was a latecomer to the civil rights movement, as many of the biggest legal and legislative battles had been won before the organization was formed in 1971.

Dees' first law partner, Millard Fuller, had this to say of him and their legal and direct marketing business ventures in the 1960s:

Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. ... We were not particular about how we did it. We just wanted to be independently rich. During the eight years we worked together we never wavered in that resolve.

By the mid-60s, Morris was rich. He also became deeply interested in the money side of leftist politics. The initial donor list of the SPLC consisted of those who had contributed to McGovern's political campaign, because Dees ran that campaign's direct mail operation and had requested the mailing list as his fee. The Southern-born Dees knew that many of the northern liberals on McGovern's donor list would get a vicarious thrill from sending a check to the Alabama-based SPLC to fight the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

If appealing to some of these rather naive donors meant tarring other Southerners as racist, bigoted hicks, so be it. Dees also raised money for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and wanted to be attorney general, but he and Carter's people had a falling out. After Carter left office, spokesman Jody Powell made no bones about his disgust with Dees and the use of appeals in SPLC mailings that were intentionally designed to play up to the stereotypes "ignorant Yankee contributors" had about Southerners.

It should also be noted that Millard Fuller took a different course from his erstwhile partner's. After he sold out to Dees, Fuller donated the money to charity and went on to found Habitat for Humanity. As contributions to the SPLC kept increasing, so did Dees' salary. Within two decades, he was among the most highly compensated of the heads of advocacy groups, earning much more than the heads of more widely known organizations such as the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. That something was seriously rotten at SPLC was noted along with the increases in Dees' salary. While the SPLC promoted its pursuit of lawsuits related to civil rights, especially those challenging the imposition of the death penalty on black offenders, fundraising was pursued even more fervently. By 1989, an ecumenical guide to charitable giving described the mission of the SPLC as "the aggressive distribution of junk mail, soliciting funds for more junk mail."

A decade later in Harper's magazine, a feature titled "The Church of Morris Dees" noted:

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, "though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye."

The results of one of the SPLC's most famous cases as detailed in that article certainly might lead even the most credulous donor to think the aim of the SPLC may have shifted a bit from helping victims of hate to greed and self-aggrandizement.

In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse.

In what Dees must have seen as icing on the cake, his battles against the fast fading and largely judgment-proof Klan even became the subject of a 1991 made-for-TV movie that depicted him as a huge hero in the civil rights movement. Again, the movie was used to feed the all-important fundraising beast.

The year 1998 saw Dees being inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame, a move that also should have alerted the SPLC donor base that just maybe the SPLC was not quite as cash-strapped as it always represented itself in its frequent solicitations.

Dees' reputation has long been beyond tarnished inside much of the civil rights bar. In 2007, Atlanta civil rights lawyer Stephen Bright was invited by the University of Alabama Law School to present its Morris Dees Justice Award. Here is what Bright wrote Dean Kenneth C. Randall:

I also received the law school's invitation to the presentation of the "Morris Dees Justice Award," which you also mentioned in your letter as one of the "great things" happening at the law school. I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been documented by John Egerton, Harper's, the Montgomery Advertiser in its "Charity of Riches" series, and others.

The positive contributions Dees has made to justice -- most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund raising potential -- are far overshadowed by what Harper's described as his "flagrantly misleading" solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two "poverty palace" buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people -- some of moderate or low incomes -- who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because he 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 award does not recognize the work of others by associating them with Dees; it promotes Dees by associating him with the honorees. Both the law school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another Dees scam.

None of this has ever seemed to dent the SPLC's ability to raise money by inflating the influence of what it calls hate groups. But by the late 1980s, a different problem was starting to develop: the Klan was all but dead, and few of the organizations labeled as white supremacists had more than a handful of members.

But this didn't stop SPLC from using such groups for their direct mailing haul of shame. Still, the original donor base was aging. So during the Clinton administration, the SPLC found Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a handy substitute for the Klan in its fundraising, despite failures to link his actions to any of the small militia groups the SPLC had earlier identified as hate groups. Eventually that appeal also ran its course, so the SPLC needed to "inflate the hate" by identifying another group as the boogieman for a new generation of naive souls eager to depart with their money for a righteous-sounding cause.

In 2010, Ken Silverstein, the author of the 2000 Harper's article, noted that the SPLC had found a large new target: those immigration reform groups that supported almost anything more restrictive than amnesty and de facto open borders.

For the record, I am totally opposed to CIS's stance on immigration, as I stated at the press conference. I accepted the invitation to speak on the panel because it came from my friend Jerry Kammer, of whom I am a big admirer.

I also agreed to the invitation because, much like CIS, I feel that the Law Center is essentially a fraud and that it has a habit of casually labeling organizations as "hate groups." (Which doesn't mean that some of the groups it criticizes aren't reprehensible.) In doing so, the SPLC 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.

Silverstein's good friend Kammer had this to say about Dees' manipulative methods as he demolished the SPLC in "Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped Its Donors."

While Dees was raised a Southern Baptist, he suggested to some donors that he had a more diverse background. For example, in a 1985 fundraising pitch for funds to protect SPLC staff from threats of Klan violence, Dees made conspicuous use of his middle name - Seligman, which he received in honor of a family friend. A former SPLC attorney told The Progressive magazine that Dees signed letters with his middle name in mailings to zip codes that had many Jewish residents. The article was titled "How Morris Dees Got Rich Fighting the Klan." A former SPLC employee told the Montgomery Advertiser that the donor base was "anchored by wealthy Jewish contributors on the East and West coasts."

Attorney Tom Turnipseed, a former Dees associate, told Cox News Service, "Morris loves to raise money. Some of his gimmicks are just so transparent, but they're good."

Turnipseed described a fundraising letter whose return envelope carried "about six different stamps." The purpose of the ruse was to present the appearance of an organization struggling to keep going. As Turnipseed noted: "It was like they had to cobble them all together to come up with 35 cents."

After decades of claiming in his mailings that the SPLC was itself on the verge of poverty, Dees raised a few eyebrows in 2010 when a sixty-photo spread of his objets d'art-filled home, complete with guest house, pool, and grounds, ran in his hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser. As blogger Steve Sailer noted:

This shiny thing-a-mabob with the #20 on it is described as "A poolside rickshaw at the home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala," because nothing screams Equality! like a fancy rickshaw.

A look at the recent numbers reported by SPLC is highly informative. With net assets of $238 million as of the close of its last fiscal year, the SPLC is among the wealthiest of civil rights and advocacy organizations. Despite this endowment, the SPLC often implies that it is on the verge of cutting back operations vital to the quest for equality and civil rights due to lack of funds. Yet it spends almost 19% of its annual budget on fundraising each year despite the fact its net assets are already an extremely healthy seven times annual expenses. Note that this 19% figure is under cost allocation rules that allow some solicitations to pass as program expenses because educational material is included with the solicitation.

Last year, the SPLC generated a surplus of $4.1 million on revenues of $38.7 million. CEO J. Richard Cohen makes $299K/year, and editor in chief of the SPLC Intelligence Report and Hatewatch blog Mark Potok makes $150K/year. Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees, age 74, makes $305K/year. I wonder how many hours Dees spent on trial preparation compared to fundraising. The title Dees carries is Chief Trial Counsel, yet his chief bailiwick has always been direct mail marketing.

As the SPLC publicizes the names of ever more hate groups to "raise awareness" of intolerance and to tap into ever new sources of funds, its donors should keep in mind a genuine larger truth. Heightened awareness has never by itself helped the actual victims of anything, anywhere, at any time. At best, it is entirely self-referential. At its worst, it serves as a useful ploy to make a donor who hasn't done much in the way of due diligence about an organization's finances feel good about sending money to what appears to be a righteous cause.

The SPLC has more than mastered the exercise of raising awareness. In his 2000 article, Silverstein noted that during its then-29 years of existence, the SPLC had carefully adjusted its operations to fit the needs and self-image of its largely urban, white, and often Jewish donor base. Causes that garnered favorable early media attention but which also risked upsetting some donors, such as filing suits protesting the death penalty, were dropped, even if that meant the mass resignation of staff attorneys. Images of angry blacks and other minorities never appear in solicitations. Nor do concrete issues related to race and poverty get much attention in these appeals. Donors aren't called on to actually fight to improve housing, improve inner-city schools, or end violence at the borders. Everything is geared to the equal-opportunity and secular sin of being intolerant of those who are different. According to Silverstein, the payoff is also always the same -- the SPLC is all about making guilty white donors feel good about themselves for being understanding by writing a check to the wealthy and largely white SPLC. Actual attempts to help the oppressed and downtrodden aren't just optional. They are almost superfluous.

This is done with a tried-and-true formula Dees learned listening to evangelical preachers as well as TV hucksters. Silverstein writes:

No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy -- or the confession thereof -- is an end in itself.

What matters is that the targets feel they will become part of the solution by writing a check to SPLC. The comparison to Jim and Tammy Faye is really quite apt. The Bakkers always featured the power of the personal testimonial as panacea. The SPLC wants the potential donor to identify with the guilty white teacher. The idea behind Jim Bakker's testimonials was to get potential donors to identify with the one giving the testimony and not dwell on what actual changes must be made in one's life to truly get closer to God. Solutions were left intentionally quite vague. And, of course, both the SPLC and the PTL Club offer absolution for sins secular and sacred in nature by means of sinners' dropping a nice fat check in the mail.

While the formula is timeless, the pitch itself was badly in need of upgrading in the case of the SPLC. It's been two generations since the civil rights battles of the 1950s and '60s. America elected a black man president, and while few of the truly intractable social problems relating to race have been solved, those problems are for serious people willing to do real work -- not film flam artists writing empty prose for the crowd that prides itself on self-described awareness.

For some time now, the media culture has been suggesting that the battle for gay marriage has its parallels with the civil rights battles. Promoting gay marriage has certainly become a huge cause among the largely secular, affluent coastal elites who make up much of the donor base of the SPLC. It seems the perfect newly fashionable cause to adopt to attract a new generation of marks. Thus, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has followed the history of the SPLC that groups which promote traditional values suddenly find themselves on the SPLC hate map. I guess it is also not surprising that after so many warnings about its money-grubbing ways, the SPLC still has an audience for its exaggerations, misrepresentations, and outright distortions. As the man said, there is a sucker born every minute.

Perhaps if you personally know people who swear by the validity of the new SPLC hate map you may want to nicely inform them they are now charter members of the new secular version of the PTL Club and watch the reaction. If they get angry, remind them that this is not the assessment of the political right. The most damning quotes about Dees and the SPLC all come from former associates on the political left.

Articles: Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label

Published: 40 mins ago
Jack Minor
World Net Daily

Astonishing amount of money spent on massive smear campaign



The Southern Poverty Law Center – which has labeled WND and other conservative organizations “hate groups” – is spending massive amounts of money to promote hate-crime propaganda rather than funding its purported mission.

The SPLC bills itself as a nonprofit civil rights group dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry. However, WND has reported extensively on how the organization ignores left-leaning groups, choosing instead to exclusively list conservative groups as so-called “hate” organizations.

The Capital Research Center recently published “Southern Poverty Law Center, Wellspring of Manufactured Hate” by James Simpson, which details how the organization designates conservative groups as hate groups similar to the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations for the purpose of raising money.

The report noted that the SPLC has more than $238 million in assets, making it one of the wealthiest nonprofits in the country. Despite this, the organization spends nearly 20 percent of its budget on fundraising. In 2011, the group spent $6.5 million for fundraising, with $5.5 million going for salaries and administrative expenses.

According to the SPLC’s 2010 tax return, the group spent $12.5 million maintaining, publishing and promoting its hate group reports. However, when it came to fulfilling its primary mission, the group only spent $11 million.

The tax returns also noted the group enjoyed a net gain of $28.8 million, prompting Simpson to ask why it continues to raise funds. He said the group keeps adding tens of millions of dollars to its endowment fund, and some of its assets are tucked away in Bermuda and Cayman Island accounts.

While the SPLC does not appear to be breaking any laws, CRC Vice President Scott Walter said, at the very least, the expenditures violate good business practices.

“From a good business practice perspective, spending so much on fundraising while they are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars – along with their lavish offices – is contributing to their losing their respect and prestige,” Walter said. “When you compare the amount that is actually used to defend people in court, that is a very small amount compared to their bigger balance sheet and far less than what they spend on fundraising, even though they have enough money to get by for years and years.”

According to Simpson, the SPLC has benefited from the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scam. The group’s biggest benefactor was the Picower Foundation, founded by Jeffrey Picower, who was friends with Bernie Madoff for 30 years and made $5 billion in profits from his “investments” with Madoff.

Following Picower’s death in 2009, federal prosecutors took over his estate in an attempt to recoup money for Madoff’s victims. The estate eventually settled and agreed to pay $7.2 billion to compensate Madoff’s victims. The Picower Foundation has since closed its doors, but Simpson asked if the SPLC will ever refund any of Picower’s donations to help those who lost their life savings in Madoff’s scheme.

In an article for the Progressive, SPLC Co-Founder Morris Dees’ first business partner, Millard Fuller, who later founded Habitat for Humanity, offered a different mission statement for the SPLC than that presented on the group’s website.

“Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” Fuller said. “We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich. During the eight years we worked together, we never wavered in that resolve.”

The group’s disproportionate emphasis on fundraising over helping those it claims to represent has sparked criticism from left-wing groups such as Nation magazine and Harper’s.

In a Harper’s article titled, “The Church of Morris Dees,” Millard Farmer compared him to former evangelist Jim Bakker, who went to prison for accounting fraud.

“He’s the Jim and Tammy Fayer Baker of the civil rights movement,” Farmer said, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.”

Harper’s has also described Dees’ fundraising as “flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money, while the Nation called him “the arch-salesman of hate mongering.”

WND has noted that the SPLC also received funding from billionaire activist George Soros, who recently donated $1.5 million to help re-elect President Obama, and other left-leaning groups including the Daily Kos, SEIU, MoveOn.org, the Huffington Post and Media Matters.

The SPLC frequently accuses organizations such as WND, Family Research Council and even the American Constitution Party as adhering to “extreme anti-government doctrines.”

(The American Constitution Party in Colorado is officially a major political party in the state.)

The FRC, which advocates for traditional marriage, has said the SPLC’s designation of the organization as a hate group may have been what inspired a gunman to shoot a security guard in August.

Floyd Corkins II walked into the FRC headquarters with a backpack full of Chik-fil-A sandwiches. He pulled out a loaded weapon shot guard Leo Johnson. Authorities said Corkins made a “negative reference” about the FRC’s work prior to shooting.

WND columnist Matt Barber, who is affiliated with Liberty Counsel Action, noted the shooting was a logical outcome of the SPLC’s policy of designating conservative organizations “hate groups.”

“This was intended to dehumanize Christian organizations and smear as hate the biblical view of sexual morality,” Barber said. “I pointed this out months ago in a column I wrote for WND, titled ‘Liberal Violence Rising,‘ where I basically predicted this sort of thing.”

Walter said because the SPLC uses hate groups to raise money, designating pro-family and other conservative organization as such is directly beneficial to the organization.

“The problem with their using their policy of using hate crime lists to raise money is you always have to keep upping the ante over time,” he said. “That’s how you go from the Aryan Nations and KKK to listing the tea party and FRC as a hate group.”

Jack Minor is a former Marine who served under President Reagan. He has written hundreds of articles and has been interviewed about his work on multiple television and radio outlets. He is also a former pastor and has been acknowledged for his research ability in several books.

Hate List, Inc.

The Capital Research Center recently published “Southern Poverty Law Center, Wellspring of Manufactured Hate” by James Simpson, which details how the organization designates conservative groups as hate groups similar to the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations for the purpose of raising money.

Southern Poverty Law Center: Wellspring of Manufactured Hate
By James Simpson, Organization Trends, October 2012
(PDF here)


Summary: The Southern Poverty Law Center began with an admirable purpose but long ago transformed into a machine for raising money and launching left-wing political attacks. Lately it’s become more of a threat to free speech and civil debate than a defender of the weak or a foe of violent extremism. It has also taken in millions from the Picower Foundation, whose own funds came largely from founder Jeffry Picower’s “investing” in his old friend Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

On August 15, 2012, an angry gay rights activist named Floyd Corkins stormed the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and began shooting. Corkins shot a brave security guard in the arm, but the guard still managed to wrestle him to the ground before he could kill or injure others.

Corkins was carrying 50 bullets and two loaded magazines for his 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol; 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches; and the address of another potential target, the Traditional Values Coalition. Before initiating his shooting spree, Corkins reportedly said, “I don’t like your politics.”

Reacting to the shooting, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins stated: “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations as hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy.”

Origins

Attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. founded the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in 1971. It bills itself as “a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society.” People familiar with the SPLC may describe it differently. (For a previous CRC profile of the Center, see “The Southern Poverty Law Center: A Twisted Definition of ‘Hate,’” Organization Trends, November 2006.)

Early on it made a name for itself fighting genuinely extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and breaking down barriers of discrimination in the South. But today it is primarily a leftist attack machine. It devotes most of its sizeable resources to a systematic smear campaign against respected organizations and opinion leaders whose legitimate policy differences put them to the right of the SPLC.

For example, prior to the shooting, the SPLC identified the Family Research Council as an “anti-gay” extremist group, lumped together with groups like the KKK, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, and the New Black Panther Party.

Even liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who describes the Family Research Council as “a mainstream conservative think tank,” thought the SPLC went too far:

I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church.

Following a speech at a New York college in 2009, a student asked former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) about a quotation attributed to him in a textbook. It said, “illegal immigrants were ‘coming to kill you and kill me and our families.’” Taken aback, Tancredo subsequently called the publisher to learn where the fake quotation had come from. “The Southern Poverty Law Center,” was the reply.

This is a familiar pattern. In 2007, SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform a “Hate Group” as part of an effort to smear opponents of open borders and illegal immigration. In this effort, SPLC had no qualms associating itself with the National Council of La Raza (in Spanish, “the Race”), one of whose subordinate groups, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, is notorious for the motto, For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (“For The Race everything. Outside The Race, nothing”).

In a 2010 report detailing SPLC’s efforts, Jerry Kammer of the Center for Immigration Studies wrote:

Rather than engage in a debate, La Raza and its allies have waged a campaign to have the other side shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and democratic discussion.

SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok doesn’t mince words about illegal-immigration opponents: “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on … I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.…”

(See Mark Potok Speech 1 - YouTube.)

The SPLC has an improbably named program titled “Teaching Tolerance.” Perhaps Mr. Potok should take the course.

In the “Hate and Extremism” section of the SPLC website, the group lists 1,274 “Patriot Groups.” This category includes nonviolent conservative organizations like the Oath Keepers, the Constitution Party, Tea Party Patriots, the Tenth Amendment Center, and Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily.

In addition to fomenting hatred for groups with which it disagrees, the SPLC is the author of dangerous provocations.

For example, in 1996 SPLC hyped a story that black churches were being torched at alarming rates in the South by white racists. As Michael Fumento wrote in the American Spectator at the time, this was soon proven to be false.

SPLC wildly exaggerates the number of groups genuinely associated with hate and violence as well. Laird Wilcox, an independent, non-conservative researcher found that of 800-plus “hate groups” over half them were either non-existent, existed in name only, or were inactive.
(See The Social Contract - Fighting 'Hate' for Profit and Power: The SPLC's Political Agenda Up Close.)

Wilcox has his own “extremist” lists. One is called “The Watchdogs … organizations who ‘monitor’ and combat the activities of their ideological opponents,” including many “organizations and individuals who have nothing to do with racism.” SPLC tops the list. (See http://www.lairdwilcox.com/tool/order00-01.html#Left.)

A Morally Bankrupt Organization Founded by a Morally Bankrupt Man

SPLC’s co-founder, Morris Dees, has been harshly criticized by former SPLC employees, a former business partner, and many liberal critics. They see him as little more than a rank opportunist and the SPLC’s chief purpose as raising money for SPLC coffers.

Though trained as a lawyer, Dees is best known for his fundraising ability. Raising $25 million for the George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972, his payment was the donor list, the gold mine that boosted SPLC’s funding. A position with Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976 added another sterling list. It paid off.

With over $238 million in net assets, the SPLC is one of the wealthiest nonprofit organizations in the United States.

Despite this massive endowment, the Center devotes almost 20 percent of its $34.5 million operating expenses – $6.5 million in 2011 – to fundraising. This includes $1 million for fundraising services and $5.5 million in fundraising staff salaries and administrative expenses.

Meanwhile, the group spent only $11 million on its supposed primary mission: “providing legal services to victims of civil rights injustices and hate crimes.” The Center spent an astounding $12.5 million maintaining, publishing, and promoting its “hate” list propaganda, including a program to “educate” children, according to its 2010 tax return.

SPLC received $36 million in contributions in 2011. Excess contributions and investment income allowed the Center to boost assets by $9.4 million. Its 2010 tax return shows the SPLC realized a net gain of $28.8 million, following a similar net gain in 2009 of almost $30 million—roughly equivalent to its entire operating budget! Why fundraise at all?

Each year the SPLC is able to add tens of millions of dollars to its endowment. Despite being a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, supposedly with nothing to hide, some of SPLC’s assets are squirreled away in untraceable Bermuda and Cayman Island accounts. Why?

SPLC’s leaders are among the highest paid in the nonprofit field. As Chief Trial Counsel, Morris Dees receives $343,676. Richard Cohen, the Center’s president, is paid $339,764.

SPLC boasts many high-dollar donors. The top 10 for recent years are: Picower Foundation ($3,813,112, 1999 – 200; Cisco Systems Foundation ($1,620,000, 2001 – 2004); Grousbeck Family Foundation ($1,600,000, 2007 – 2011); Grove Foundation ( $875,000, 2001 – 2011); Rice Family Foundation ($535,000 , 1999 – 2010); Rockefeller Philanthropy ($510,000, 2008 – 2010); Unbound Philanthropy ($500,000, 2006 – 2010); Public Welfare Foundation ($500,000, 2008 – 2010); Vanguard Charitable Endowment ($469,120, 2006 – 2011); Rocking Moon Foundation ($350,000, 2006 – 2010); and the Jewish Community Fund ($347,274, 1999 – 2010).

Space constraints prevent inclusion of the many more foundations and small family funds that regularly contribute $10,000 to $25,000 per year. Do these donors realize they are merely contributing to a quarter-billion-dollar investment fund?

SPLC’s biggest benefactor, the Picower Foundation, made the most of its money from the Bernie Madoff scam. Founder Jeffry Picower, who was friends with Madoff for 30 years, profited by $5 billion from his “investments” with his friend, an amount larger than Madoff personally “earned.” Picower died in 2009, but as ProPublica.org reported December 27, 2010, federal prosecutors and the trustee charged with recovering money for Madoff’s victims took Picower’s estate to court. The estate agreed to a settlement of $7.2 billion to compensate victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Federal prosecutors apparently thought Picower, an accountant, should have questioned returns on investment that ranged up to 950 percent. The Picower Foundation has closed its doors, but will the SPLC refund any of its ill-gotten gains?

Dees’ first business partner was Millard Fuller, who later went on to found Habitat for Humanity. In an article in The Progressive, he described their relationship:

Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich. During the eight years we worked together, we never wavered in that resolve. (See http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp...-July-1988.pdf.)

Many of Dees’s most virulent critics are on the Left. Nation magazine’s Alexander Cockburn wrote a scathing article in 2009, “King of the Hate Business.” Recent Republican electoral losses, Cockburn wrote, were

horrible news for people who raise money and make money selling the notion there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of “Mein Kampf” tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other. What is the arch-salesman of hate mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now? Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. (See King of the Hate Business by Alexander Cockburn on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent.)

Harper’s published a similarly critical analysis of the SPLC titled, “The Church of Morris Dees”:

Today, the SPLC spends most of its time—and money—on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer (not Dees’s business partner, ed.) says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.”

Harper’s also published a letter from Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, to the University of Alabama, declining an invitation to a “Morris Dees Justice Award” presentation. Bright called Dees “a con man and fraud,” and added:

The positive contributions Dees has made to justice—most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fundraising potential—are far overshadowed by what Harper’s described as his “flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two “poverty palace” buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people—some of moderate or low incomes—who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. (See The Church Of Morris Dees - Article on the SPLC - Southern Poverty Law Center - Morris Dees and hate crimes.)

The Fairfax (Virginia) Journal counseled federal employees to forego contributions to the SPLC in the Combined Federal Campaign:

… give your hard-earned dollars to a real charity, not a bunch of slick, parasitic hucksters who live high on the hog by raising money on behalf of needy people who never see a dime of it. (MDJonline.com, Sept. 30, 2011.)

SPLC’s first president was Julian Bond, a socialist who has supported and participated in socialist, communist, and other radical leftist organizations and activities his entire life. As a rising star in the Left he received the early endorsement and support of the Communist Party USA, and he assisted, endorsed, and campaigned for radical causes and politicians, according to DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

In the 1960s Bond was elected to the Georgia legislature three times, but each time the legislature refused to seat him because of his agitation against the Vietnam War. Bond called on the communist lawyer Leonard Boudin to represent him. Boudin’s other clients included the government of Fidel Castro, Soviet agent of influence Paul Robeson, and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Boudin’s daughter, Kathie, was a Weather Underground terrorist, who served 25 years for her participation in the 1981 Brinks robbery that left two policemen and one Brinks guard dead.

Along with radical activists such as Ella Baker, Bond co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. SNCC was later led by black separatists Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who openly advocated guerrilla warfare in U.S. cities. In 1967 Bond served as co-chair of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), described by the late Sen. James Eastland as a group “working hand-in-glove with the Communist Party” to foment “revolution in the United States.”

Bond’s most significant contact as co-chair of the NCNP was fellow NCNP member Herbert Marcuse. A Marxist who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, Marcuse ultimately took up residence in a number of American universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego, where he mentored the black communist, Angela Davis. Bond and Marcuse helped found the radical journal In These Times.

Bond visited Castro’s Cuba in 1959 and was “enchanted by the revolution.” Following a repeat visit in 2006 he said that it “simply reinforced my admiration for the Cuban people and the society they are building.” (See Cuba Health Reports.) Bond remains on SPLC’s board to this day.

SPLC’s board of directors also includes James Rucker, who co-founded Color of Change in 2005 with self-described communist Van Jones. Before that, Rucker was grassroots organizing director at the Soros-funded activist group MoveOn.

Another board member, Patricia Clark, spent time as National Criminal Justice Representative of the American Friends Service Committee. This nominally Quaker organization was created by socialist Quakers in 1917 and began colluding with Communists in the 1920s, when it worked with Soviet agents Jessica Smith, Harold Ware, and John Abt. (See American Friends Service Committee - KeyWiki.)

Gabrielle Lyon, an SPLC research fellow, has spoken glowingly of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers is famous for his Weather Underground years and has yet to be tried, along with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, for the murder of San Francisco police Sgt. Brian McDonnell in 1970. Larry Grathwohl, the only FBI informant to ever successfully penetrate the Weathermen, has testified under oath that Ayers told him of their complicity in the bombing that killed McDonnell. This case is still open. (See http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Grat...ames_Dohrn.pdf.)

More recently, an editorial written by SPLC’s Mark Potok was published in the Communist Party USA newspaper, People’s World. Potok claimed the editorial was free for publication anywhere, and he didn’t control where it appeared. When the Daily Caller news website asked Potok last year if he objected to the Communist Party newspaper printing his piece, he refused comment. Potok did say, however, that the SPLC uses an organization calledOtherWords to place SPLC’s op-eds in other journals. OtherWords is a nonprofit editorial service of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), one of the most influential far-left organizations in the United States. (IPS was profiled in the February 2011 Foundation Watch.)

King of Sophistry

Radical leftists are extremely adept at the use of language and propaganda. They have to be. An ideology that has brought more hardship, misery, and death over the last century than all the wars of history combined always needs image makeovers. The Soviet Union’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, explained, “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

The entire leftist movement has adopted this technique. Thus, any person who opposes illegal immigration becomes a “xenophobe.” Any person who cites the devastating adverse impacts of “anti-poverty” programs is “selfish” or worse. Any person who opposes affirmative action is a “racist.” Anyone who opposes ever-increasing taxes must be “greedy.”

Straw man arguments, misinformation, and other forms of sophistry, coupled with vitriolic smears of opponents can easily intimidate average citizens, who haven’t the time or inclination to look deeper and are naturally anxious about being tarred with the same brush. With sufficient media promotion, this fraudulent narrative becomes accepted as the “truth,” even chic. Most people want to be seen as siding with the “good guys.”

Critics are isolated and polarized, and despite the Left’s phony characterization of a deep-pocketed Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the Left’s critics are usually independent voices of little or no means, not necessarily even conservative, with scant resources to defend themselves against defamation campaigns and frivolous lawsuits, which are favored tactics of the well-heeled SPLC and other leftist groups. Far-left agitator Neal Rauhauser even admitted as much when he advocated for a policy of “lawfare” against political opponents:

We’re dealing with people who have likely had no interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds. The reality of travel, or frightful expenses, or summary judgments needs to be made real. We probably need to make a very visible example of at least one of them before the rest understand. (See Who is Neal Rauhauser | Washington Times Communities.)

Cultural Marxism and Hate Crimes

This kind of sophistry also has roots in the teachings of Julian Bond’s friend and leftist icon Herbert Marcuse. He was an influential member of the Marxist Institute for Social Research that was founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 and modeled after Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute. It came to be known simply as “the Frankfurt School.” Marcuse and other scholars affiliated with the Institute reestablished it in the U.S. following their exodus from Germany, and developed philosophical studies specifically dedicated to subverting American culture.

Marcuse was often called the Father of the New Left, and he helped pioneer the ideas of political correctness and hate crimes. In a 1965 tract called “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse declared:

This essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed….

As he explained, the way to fix the “repressive tolerance” that Americans suffer because of the First Amendment is to suppress all voices except those from the Left:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.… Not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.

Today you can see this tactic in operation every day when left-wing professors, journalists, and politicians ridicule, misrepresent, ignore, or threaten anyone they disagree with. The Southern Poverty Law Center assists in this effort.

Even more ominously, but in line with Marcuse’s call to arms, the SPLC is a consultant to both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, and the latter has labeled conservatives potential “domestic terrorists.” The SPLC has not been identifying enemies of America. It has been identifying enemies of the Left.

Some of the people and groups on the SPLC’s hate lists genuinely do express hatred and bigotry, like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the New Black Panther Party, the KKK, Nazi parties, and the like. But mixed in are many well known, widely respected individuals and groups who have taken principled positions on matters of national importance. Their only sin is their outspoken opposition to the Left’s radical designs.

By cataloging the statements and writings of individuals and groups with whom they disagree, the SPLC is also creating a paper trail to use if and when hate crimes laws are strengthened sufficiently to provide pretexts for lawsuits or other legal action. This is a not-so-subtle threat. That sort of attack has begun to happen in Canada, Britain, and Sweden.

The SPLC’s interaction with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI carries another threat. By deliberately mischaracterizing conservatives and tea partiers as “extremists,” the SPLC implies they have a potential for violence and thus offers a justification for the government to keep tabs on these potential “domestic terrorists.”

The Left, on the other hand, has a firmly established record of militancy, violence, and treasonous, unscrupulous and disgusting anti-social behavior. Occupy Wall Street, for example, is an anti-social, violent movement of the extreme Left. The Black Bloc is a violent organization of the extreme Left, and the FBI recently conducted raids on suspected Black Bloc members.

Why have we heard nothing about it from the SPLC? Are these genuine domestic terrorists on the group’s “Hate Map”? No, nor is Adbusters, an “anti-consumerist” magazine that hatched Occupy Wall Street and that has expressed support for the Black Bloc. (For more on the organization behind the magazine, the Adbusters Media Foundation, see the profile in Foundation Watch, January 2012.)

What about the blatantly terrorist Jumaat al-Fuqra and its 35 U.S.-based terrorist training camps? Crickets from the SPLC. (See 35 Jamaat al-Fuqra "terror training camps" still operating in the U.S. - Jihad Watch.) The same is true for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Why are none of these groups listed in the SPLC’s “Intelligence” files? What about the Communist Party? What about union thugs like AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, implicated in murder, or United Steelworkers’ president Leo Gerard, who exhorted Occupy Wall Street to “more militancy?” All prone to violence, and they proudly say so!
Despite a mountainous record of violence from left-wing individuals and groups, there have never been any left-wing groups identified on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.

Come to think of it, why isn’t the SPLC listed?

After a bombing attempt on May Day this year by five Occupy Cleveland activists was thwarted, a reporter for National Review asked the SPLC if it planned to put Occupy Wall Street on its “hate group” list? SPLC’s stunning answer: “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”

Conclusion

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a wealthy, well-connected, organized attack machine of the extreme political Left. It shares strategies, goals, and tactics with other similar organizations and colludes with them in campaigns of defamation, disinformation and legal threats to silence and/or criminalize political opponents.
The SPLC has unjustifiably secured itself a position of influence within our government and society. Its very presence threatens our freedoms and First Amendment rights. It abuses our system of justice, while hiding behind a Constitution for which it has little respect.


James Simpson is an economist, businessman, and freelance writer. His writings have been published in Accuracy in Media, American Thinker, Big Government, Washington Times, WorldNetDaily, FrontPage Magazine, and elsewhere.
OT
Southern Poverty Law Center: Wellspring of Manufactured Hate | Capital Research Center

Other Research from James Simpson

http://www.alipac.us/f9/casa-de-mary...-acorn-239180/

See Also:
http://www.alipac.us/f19/black-pasto...d-more-248721/

WND columnist Matt Barber, who is affiliated with Liberty Counsel Action, noted the shooting was a logical outcome of the SPLC’s policy of designating conservative organizations “hate groups.”

“This was intended to dehumanize Christian organizations and smear as hate the biblical view of sexual morality,” Barber said. “I pointed this out months ago in a column I wrote for WND, titled ‘Liberal Violence Rising,‘ where I basically predicted this sort of thing.”

Liberal Violence Rising


By J. Matt Barber
November 21, 2011

While necessity is the mother of invention, sloth and envy beget mediocrity and upheaval – the twin siblings of secular-socialism. It is in this vein that a rebellious and increasingly violent spirit of incoherent anarchy continues to fester in urban centers across the nation.

This is most evident in the form of the envy-driven "Occupy wherever" nonsense embraced by the "progressive" establishment. Still, this Obama-supported effort to supplant, through lawless imposition, our free-market constitutional republic with some misguided conception of an outcome-based equalitocracy is rooted in much more than just good old-fashioned class warfare.

Part and parcel of secular-socialism is secularism. It's fascinating in its predictability. Wherever you find an entitlement-minded Marxist, you're likely to find a "progressive," counter-biblical moral relativist.

Case in point: The "Occupy D.C." protesters, who have squatted – in more ways than one – at Washington's McPherson Square, have posted a list of rules by which "occupants" are expected to abide. Rule No. 10 requires that folks not "assume anyone's gender," but, instead, "go with gender-neutral pronouns" like "comrade." (Who knew that a so-called "99 percent" of Americans were gender-bending commies?)

Indeed, the opposite of order is disorder. While rebelling against the natural order – whether related to economic liberty or issues surrounding transcendent moral values – many of the less stable elements on the left are exhibiting an increased willingness to move beyond mere disorder to outright violence.

Examples of such violence continue to mount. But, beyond the fiery "Occupy" riots in Oakland, and the shootings, murders, rapes and thousands of arrests occurring throughout the dozens of disease-riddled "Occupy" chaos camps around the country, a less publicized example of left-wing violence took place last month in Illinois. The "Gay Liberation Network" – a militant homosexual activist group of self-described "Trotskyites" – announced that it would be protesting an award ceremony held at the Christian Liberty Academy, an Arlington Heights, Ill., church and school.

In the past, when GLN has protested this particular event, Christian attendees have been spat upon and even physically threatened by protesters. This time, things got worse. The night before the event someone threw two paver bricks through the church's plate glass doors with a dire warning: "This is just a sample of what we will do if you don't shut down Scott Lively and AFTAH. … [F---] Scott Lively. Quit the homophobic [s---]!"
The Christian organization, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), was giving an award to Pastor Scott Lively, a pro-family advocate who, in recent years, has been falsely maligned by leftist groups and media-types like Rachel Maddow, for supposedly supporting the death penalty for homosexual behavior – a patently false charge.

The assailants later posted an al-Qaida-like statement on the "progressive" website IndyMedia.org, taking credit for the attack and calling it a "consequence for hatred and homophobia in our community." They further threatened the church, warning that "if this event is not shut down … the Christian Liberty Academy will continue to be under constant attack."

Unbelievably, the threat remains posted to this day. Fortunately, no one has yet been hurt; however, according to the FBI, by definition this attack meets all the elements of domestic terrorism. But, none of this is surprising. The flames of violence against Lively, AFTAH and Christian Liberty Academy were ignited long ago.

On the other end of the fuse is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-left outfit known in past years for monitoring true hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis. After partnering with the admittedly communist GLN, the SPLC had declared, with much media fanfare, both AFTAH and Lively's organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, along with several other highly respected Christian organizations, official "hate groups."

This propagandist smear tactic has been increasingly used by the SPLC in an effort to marginalize Christian and conservative organizations with which the group disagrees. Unfortunately, however, we now see that this strategy to dehumanize, can also have unintended (presumably) consequences. As in Illinois, the SPLC's dangerous and irresponsible disinformation campaign can embolden and give license to like-minded, though less stable, left-wing extremists, creating a climate of true hate.

Such a climate is ripe for violence. After all, these "hate groups" are just like the KKK, right?

Despite all this, even today the SPLC has somehow managed to maintain some level of mainstream credibility. But as it quickly moves further from its left-of-center moorings toward the far fringes of left-wing extremism, its own deceptive activities threaten to undo much of the good for which the organization was once recognized.

After the anti-Christian attack, Bob Schwartz, cofounder of GLN, refused to condemn the violence noting precisely that the victims were "SPLC-designated hate groups." This comes as little surprise in that Schwartz once threatened to push AFTAH founder Peter LaBarbera into oncoming traffic.

Still, what is a bit surprising is that, like its GLN ally, the SPLC – a self-styled domestic terrorist watchdog organization – has additionally refused to condemn this overt act of domestic terrorism. Instead, the SPLC released a statement, dripping with sarcasm, that piled on the victims. Rather than denouncing the attack, the organization simply lamented that the violence "only strengthened the absurd argument, promulgated by many [Christians]" that left-wing extremists "want to take over America and persecute Christians."

Yes, it's official. The SPLC has abandoned all pretense of objectivity. And so, as left-wing violence continues to spike in coming months, not only should we expect to hear little about it from a sympathetic mainstream media; we should also expect little help from the once-respected Southern Poverty Law Center.

Indeed, it's hard to do much about the problem when you're a driving force behind it.

Liberal Violence Rising | CNSNews.com