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  1. #1
    MW
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    SOCIETYNEWS Sessions Calls Out Southern Poverty Law Center for Using ‘Hate Group’ Lab

    SOCIETY NEWS

    Sessions Calls Out Southern Poverty Law Center for Using ‘Hate Group’ Label to ‘Bully’ Conservatives

    Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / August 08, 2018 / 55 Comments



    The Justice Department "will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith," Attorney General Jeff Sessions, pictured here July 24, vows Wednesday in a speech to Alliance Defending Freedom's Religious Liberty Summit. (Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma/Newscom)

    In a speech highlighting “new hostility” against religious believers in the United States, Attorney General Jeff Sessions specifically called out the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal group known for labeling organizations it opposes as “hate groups.”

    Sessions spoke Wednesday to Alliance Defending Freedom’s Summit on Religious Liberty. Alliance Defending Freedom is a nonprofit religious liberty legal group that most recently defended Colorado baker Jack Phillips in his 7-2 victory in the Supreme Court.

    The SPLC, a liberal nonprofit group which tracks groups like the Ku Klux Klan, has labeled ADF a hate group, as well as other conservative-leaning organizations.

    “People of faith are facing a new hostility. Really some of it is a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith,” Sessions told the ADF conference. “You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts. They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals. They just call people names—like ‘hate group.’ Does that sound familiar?” Sessions asserted that the SPLC was once a legitimate group in identifying real hate groups. The SPLC has been a partner with the FBI in identifying certain hate groups.

    “They have used this designation as a weapon and they have wielded it against conservative organizations that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience,” Sessions said of the hate group label. “They use it to bully and intimidate groups like yours which fight for the religious freedom, the civil rights, and the constitutional rights of others.” He later said to the ADF, “You and I may not agree on everything—but I wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: You are not a hate group.”

    Sessions also announced a new review at the Justice Department.
    “Let me say this loud and clear: At the Department of Justice, we will not partner with hate groups. Not on my watch,” Sessions said. “I have ordered a review at the Department of Justice to make sure that we do not partner with any groups that discriminate. We will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith.”

    The SPLC took a pre-emptive strike with a public letter on Tuesday criticizing Sessions for speaking to the ADF conference.

    “If the ADF had its way, gay people would be back in the closet for fear of going to jail,” SPLC President Richard Cohen said in the letter to Sessions. “It’s inappropriate for the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lend the prestige of his office to this group. And it’s ironic to suggest that the rights of ADF sympathizers are under attack when the ADF is doing everything in its power to deny the equal protection of the laws to the LGBT community.”

    In May, ADF announced it had been removed from an Amazon program that donates a percentage from purchases to charities due to Amazon’s reliance on SPLC to vet the charities in that program. In 2017, charity tracker GuideStar noted which charities were seen as hate groups by Southern Poverty Law Center, although the organization eventually reversed course and removed the labels.

    The center has also reportedly worked with several of the big tech companies: “Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for ‘hate speech’ or ‘hate groups,’” wrote The Daily Caller News Foundation in June.

    Additionally, SPLC is regularly cited by media, including in references to ADF when Sessions spoke to the group last year.

    During the Wednesday speech, Sessions, a former Alabama senator, noted the SPLC was established in his home state initially fighting civil rights cases. The attorney general said:

    There were hate groups in the South I grew up in. They attacked the life, liberty, and the very worth of minority citizens. You may not know this, but I helped prosecute and secure the death penalty for a klansman who murdered a black teenager in my state. The resulting wrongful death suit led to a $7 million verdict and the bankruptcy of the Klu Klux Klan in the South. That case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    But when I spoke to ADF last year, I learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center had classified ADF as a ‘hate group.’ Many in the media simply parroted it as fact. Amazon relied solely on the SPLC designation and removed ADF from its Smile program, which allows customers to donate to charities.


    Sessions praised the ADF for having a 9-0 record in the Supreme Court for the last seven years, adding he wished the Justice Department had such a strong record.

    The attorney general also discussed the history of religious liberty in the United States.

    Sessions talked about attacks on religion in the Middle East, Russia, and the Philippines. But he said the Founders sought to avoid this in the United States. He quoted father of the Constitution and former President James Madison, who first declared religion an unalienable right, leading to the First Amendment.

    The attorney general also said the Founders and Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson advanced religious freedom.

    “Adams and Jefferson were political opponents—but they agreed on the human right of religious freedom. But that consensus seems to be eroding,” Sessions said. “We’ve seen nuns ordered to pay for contraceptives. We’ve seen U.S. senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about their dogma—a clear reference to their religious beliefs—even though the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for public office.”

    The Justice Department, which recently established a religious freedom task force, has made defending the first freedom a priority, Sessions said.

    “Americans from a wide variety of faiths are asking themselves, how much longer until I am in Jack Phillips’ position?” Sessions said. “How much longer until the state, the media, the academy, the tech companies, or the global corporations come down on me because of my beliefs?”

    https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/08/08/sessions-calls-out-southern-poverty-law-center-for-using-hate-group-label-to-bully-conservatives/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTldFMlpqRTRNRGd3TVRBeCIsInQiOiI5N 2Y4NHBiazdkUE1sRkg4UWM2enBQc0d3emhBemhGMXJ0N0l4SFB yeHpJTVk3b2k3aVdlNzFQK0lFTDRBTnkrSk9yeG1NTzNSYkFCW llhancrRUZPdTdJVXhrWEpPb3dVWDAyWmVRbVp6c2VjTkZiREZ 5Tm5TTUJ3aVU5RCtTbSJ9


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    Jeff Sessions Calls Out SPLC; Conservative Leaders Optimistic FBI Will Cut Ties


    AP Photo/John Amis9 Aug 20184,289

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by name Wednesday as he spoke at the Religious Liberty Summit of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the successful Christian public interest law firm the SPLC designates a “hate group.”

    The ADF earned its SPLC “Anti-LGBT Hate Group” designation after a string of Supreme Court victories that enraged the far left, most notably the successful defense of a Christian Colorado baker who refused to adorn a cake with phrases condoning homosexual marriage in this year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

    His address to the ADF summit included Sessions first public mention of the SPLC since Fox News’s Tucker Carlson revealed the group’s ongoing, but ill-defined, relationship with the FBI last month. Just days after that report, on July 30, the attorney general seemed to make oblique reference to the SPLC as he announced his new DOJ Religious Liberty Task Force. “We have gotten to the point where … one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a “hate group” on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Sessions said.

    On Wednesday, Sessions was much more explicit, praising the SPLC for its past work to combat racism in the South while condemning it for abandoning that legacy to attack right-leaning groups with which it disagrees. In his prepared remarks, Sessions said:

    Yet people of faith are facing a new hostility. Really, a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith.

    You’ll notice that they don’t rely on the facts. They don’t make better arguments. They don’t propose higher ideals.

    No, they just call people names—like “hate group.”

    Does that sound familiar?

    You know I’m from Alabama—the home of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that did important work in the South, vital work at a pivotal time. As you know well, the law is only words on paper until there are people brave enough to stand up for their rights.

    There were hate groups in the South I grew up in. They attacked the life, liberty, and the very worth of minority citizens. You may not know this, but I helped prosecute and secure the death penalty for a klansman who murdered a black teenager in my state. The resulting wrongful death suit led to a $7 million verdict and the bankruptcy of the Klu Klux Klan in the South. That case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    But when I spoke to ADF last year, I learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center had classified ADF as a “hate group.” Many in the media simply parroted it as fact. Amazon relied solely on the SPLC designation and removed ADF from its Smile program, which allows customers to donate to charities.

    They have used this designation as a weapon, and they have wielded it against conservative organizations that refuse to accept their orthodoxy and choose instead to speak their conscience. They use it to bully and intimidate groups like yours which fight for the religious freedom, the civil rights, and the constitutional rights of others.

    You and I may not agree on everything—but I wanted to come back here tonight partly because I wanted to say this: you are not a hate group (Emphasis added).


    It had been known that the FBI used the SPLC as a listed resource on the “hate crimes” section of its website. Amid growing criticism of the SPLC’s methods and tactics, however, the FBI stepped back from this public connection with the controversial left-wing group in 2014, removing links from its site. The Defense Department quickly followed the DOJ’s lead, ending the use of SPLC content in its “training materials on hate groups or hate crimes.”

    But at the time the FBI removed public links, the SPLC itself insisted it still maintained relations with the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. “We have frequent contact with FBI agents on a whole range of issues and we’ve trained them in the past,” the director of SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” Heidi Beirich, told Breitbart News at the time.

    The Tucker Carlson Tonight report confirmed this last month, with an FBI representative telling the program, the Bureau “continues to have a relationship with the SPLC.” The report revealed, for the first time, that a 2009 FBI internal memo referred to the SPLC as a “well-known, established and credible” group that had, as Beirich suggested in 2014, briefed FBI field agents on what constitutes “domestic terror threats.” In light of the report, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) wrote a letter to the FBI asking for clarification.

    Sessions’ spokeswoman, Sarah Flores, quickly suggested a change may be afoot. “The attorney general has directed the FBI to re-evaluate their relationships with groups like this to ensure the FBI does not partner with any group that discriminates,” she said in a statement to Carlson’s show.

    Sessions’ statements at the ADF summit is the strongest indication yet that an official policy against legitimizing the SPLC with a relationship with the FBI or other DOJ element may be in the offing. The prospect made the leaders of three conservative think tanks the SPLC has smeared with the “hate group” label enthusiastic.

    The Family Research Council (FRC), one of the country’s largest Christian conservative think tanks and one of the SPLC’s top targets as an “Anti-LGBT Hate Group,” suffered perhaps the most serious consequence of the SPLC’s campaign to foment hatred against conservatives in 2012. A gunman, Floyd Lee Corkins, marched into the FRC’s Washington, DC, headquarters with more than 100 rounds of ammunition. Miraculously, a building manager, Leo Johnson, was able to subdue Corkins before he could kill anyone but suffered a gunshot wound in the process.

    Some in the legacy media at the time saw no connection to politics, but it was quickly established Corkins had used the SPLC’s “hate map” to locate the FRC by name because it was a “hate group” and was looking for “anti-gays” to murder.

    FRC’s executive vice president, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William Boykin, spoke with Breitbart News in the aftermath of Sessions’ first, veiled remarks on the SPLC, shortly before the attorney general’s speech at the ADF summit. “Good for you, Mr. Sessions,” he said. “He gets it. … For the United States government to use data from an organization that is proven to be uncredible is just beyond the pale.”

    Boykin said he would like to see a government-wide policy against using SPLC materials. “We’re coming up on the sixth anniversary of a shooting in the lobby of FRC,” he said. “We were targeted because [the SPLC] listed us as a hate group because of our stance on marriage. … We have a background here of being very clear about what we stand for and what we believe. And that offends the Southern Poverty Law Center because they are an arm of the extreme left, and they used their money and their power and influence to go after conservative groups, conservative individuals, as well as Christians.”

    “The extremist SPLC has lost all credibility to fairly determine what constitutes a hate group, so it is troubling to see the FBI looking to them for guidance,” Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an SPLC-designated “Anti-Immigrant Hate Group,” told Breitbart News. “The Bureau should follow the lead of the Pentagon, which severed all ties with SPLC. Government agencies should not have a relationship with an organization that fosters hate while claiming to fight it.”

    Mark Krikorian, executive director of another “Anti-Immigrant Hate Group,” the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News, “It’s not clear how they decided. Obviously, it’s nothing to do with our own conduct because they had not liked us before January of 2017, but that’s when they magically declared us a so-called hate group. I think it was all about Trump.”

    “It doesn’t surprise me that there was still some FBI relationship with SPLC because it’s a bureaucracy, and inertia and momentum is going to continue from earlier administrations … but clearly, that needs to end,” Krikorian said. “I expect the attorney general’s comments are a signal that’s happening.”

    Krikorian noted that his group has not been sidelined by the SPLC’s attempts to remove immigration reductionist voices from the public sphere and is still widely cited in the press and call on to testify before Congress. “Luckily, we haven’t had any actual violence directed toward us, although that’s clearly part of the goal as we saw with the Family Research Council and the attack on the congressional [baseball] practice.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...-fbi-cut-ties/

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