Racial Racketeering for Fun and Profit: The Southern Poverty Law Center Scam

When Rush Limbaugh attempted to buy into an NFL franchise, the political left spread spectacular lies about him, even falsely and absurdly claiming that he had defended slavery on his radio program. When the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., sponsored a public debate on immigration policy, the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) smeared and denounced AEI by claiming that it was “mainstreaming hate” by sponsoring the debate. Of course, Americans have been debating immigration policy ever since the Louisiana Purchase. The SPLC is the leading leftist group that engages in this kind of totalitarian behavior.

When a group of military and police officers organized a group called “Oathkeepers” to simply affirm the oath they had all taken to respect and live by the U.S. Constitution, they were denounced by the SPLC as a “hate group,” the exact same language the SPLC uses to describe the KKK. When in 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that “Ron Paul for President” bumper stickers “could identify likely threats,” their asinine statement came from information supplied to them by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The League of the South recently published its “Declaration of Cultural Secession” advocating a society that advances what it calls the virtues of “Celtic culture,” defined on its Web site as “the permanent things that order and sustain life: faith, family, tradition, community, and private property; loyalty, courage, and honour.” The SPLC lied about and defamed the League of the South by spreading the falsehood on its own Web site that by “Celtic culture” the League of the South means, and I quote, “white people.” Apparently the SPLC believes that only white people embrace family, tradition, community, private property, courage, etc.

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The SPLC’s Extreme Left-Wing Agenda

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Perhaps the most absurd thing the SPLC does is to sponsor a Web site called “Tolerance.org” and to purportedly teach “tolerance” in primary and secondary schools. The man in charge of Tolerance.org is none other than William Ayers, the “Weather Underground” terrorist of the 1960s who admitted to setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol building in his youth. “I don’t regret setting the bombs,” Ayers told the New York Times on October 4, 2008. “I feel we didn’t do enough” bombing, he said.

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The SPLC as a “Hate Group” Hedge Fund

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For example, it was the SPLC that spread the false stories during the Clinton administration that there was an “epidemic” of fires at predominantly black churches in the South. Investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere quickly proved the story to be false, which would have destroyed the credibility of any conservative or libertarian organization, but never an organization or individual on the extreme Left. That of course is where your typical member of the “mainstream” media sits.

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The teachers of tolerance at the SPLC responded to the creation of the TEA Party movement by issuing a 2010 “Intelligence Report” entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” claiming that the TEA Party movement is “shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism.” Most “mainstream” journalists support everything the SPLC stands for (radical socialism, essentially) and therefore reports such hysterical nonsense as though it were scientific fact.

The SPLC has become an extraordinarily wealthy organization, and its directors and employees profit very handsomely from it. Morris Dees long ago became a millionaire from this shady scam. Apparently, its main source of revenue is fundraising letters that are sent out to the least intelligent/most gullible liberals in America who actually believe the SPLC’s wild and unproven smears and respond by sending them a check. In a Social Contract article entitled “Bashing for Dollars: The SPLC’s Predatory Game,” Brenda Walker writes that by 2005 the organization had an endowment of $174 million. “Very little of the hoard is spent on actual civil right work,” writes Walker. “The major products are smear campaigns,” which are essentially fundraising campaigns.

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All of this is undoubtedly why leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote in the New York Press in 2007 that “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million . . .” Amen, Brother Cockburn.