Southern Poverty Law Center Is Punished for the Wrong Crimes

Morris Dees and Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Credit Image: © Buchan / Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA Press)

A writer named Bob Moser is incensed at what became of the Southern Poverty Law Center where he worked for a few years in the early aughts.

The recent revelations of sexual harassment and racism unfolding at the Poverty Palace built by SPLC founder Morris Dees down in Montgomery, Alabama, caused Moser to pen a lengthy take-down of his old employer in the New Yorker. It sure took him long enough to build up the gumption. He worked there almost two decades ago.

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{snip} Dees is accused of expressing his sexual preference “for chocolate,” an intersectional violation if there ever was one. {snip}

Immediately one should note that SPLC is being punished for the newly minted violations of intersectionality — sexism and racism — rather than their real crimes of being legendary liars and hucksters. But Moser was in on that con, too, and how.

The specialty of SPLC is the made-up hate crime. They spy hate groups where none exist, so they can shake down gullible liberals in the north. And this was plenty remunerative until it became evident that racist groups were on the terminal decline. So, they booted up to con rich gays into believing that Christians were about to take away all their hard-fought rights. {snip}

What they came up with was that those vicious Christians were out to kill gays and the poor benighted gender confused men in dresses. In December 2003, SPLC’s Mark Potok actually wrote this: “A rage is growing on the right. Before it is done, untold numbers of men and women may have to die, casualties in America’s ongoing culture wars.” Read that again and ask yourself if this even remotely resembles anyone you know or have ever met? Of course not; it was part of the con. And Moser was in on it, too.

In that same month, SPLC published a piece by Moser called “Violence Engulfs Transgender Population in DC” in which he drums up panic that men posing as women were being killed in droves in the back allies of the capital city. It was a genuine panic at that time.

Moser’s lengthy pitch was that men posing as women were being killed because they were men posing as women — that is, they were killed for “transphobic” hate. On the night of August 12, 2002, still unknown assailants gunned down Wilbur Thomas who was sitting in his Camry at a stop sign in one of the worst neighborhoods in Washington D.C. (Trigger warning: I am both dead-naming and misgendering Wilbur who presented as a woman named Stephanie.)

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This was text-book LGBT hustling, right out of the Matthew Shepherd playbook. Shepherd was not killed by hate, by strangers who killed him because he was gay. He was killed by a sometimes-male lover and fellow drug dealer who wanted some of Shepherd’s new shipment of meth. That did not stop the hate industry from gearing up. The killing of Wilbur Thomas was supposed to be the same hustle for the “trans” community.

Moser’s 15-page piece included, of course, social science. Moser cited a sketchy 2000 study conducted by one Jessica Xavier, “a local activist and volunteer coordinator,” who claimed to have interviewed 4,000 “transgender residents” of Washington, D.C. The study purported to show that “17% said they had been assaulted with a weapon because of their gender identity.” {snip}

Here’s the problem. Moser offered no proof that any of these crimes were motivated by so-called “transphobia.” There were plausible explanations, like they were killed because a sex customer discovered they were really men. This very well could be true. A sex customer expecting a woman might get angry that he has been duped. This does not by any means justify violence, but the motivating factor is not the same thing as “transphobia.” In the end, Moser’s article is all that “someone said,” and “others reported” kind of journalistic nonsense about “the most powerful hatred on the planet.”

The fact is, these men were likely involved in the trade of prostitution which is very dangerous. Prostitutes die violent deaths at rates far higher than the general population. These men were most likely involved in drugs, too — also a risky proposition. And because of their station in life — drug-taking prostitutes — they spent their time in inordinately violent neighborhoods. These explanations are far too prosaic and do not get the public aroused to change laws and norms.

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So, here’s the thing. While it is delightful to see SPLC get some kind of comeuppance, it is only of the intersectional variety and not for their real crimes: consistently lying for gain, slandering good people like those at the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and my own organization, lying to pocket boatloads of cash from gullible liberals, and lying to the American people to change laws and norms. {snip}