Corporate America, including Big Tech, credulously allows skewed “hate group” data from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a basis for de-platforming mainstream, responsible right-of-center commentators or groups, or others perceived to be politically conservative. Referencing a tell-all published by The New Yorker late last month, Washington Examiner columnist Becket Adams excoriates the civil rights organization loved by the mainstream fake news media, however, of actually functioning as a “vicious, left-wing attack dog” and money-making scam that smears “Christians and anti-extremist activists.”
“The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it’s an earnest effort to combat bigotry. The only thing worse than a snarling partisan activist is a slimy conman who merely pretends to be one,” Adams declared.
Writing in The New Yorker, ex-SPLC staffer Bob Moser claims the Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit entity with extravagant offices derisively known as the Poverty Palace, allegedly harbors an atmosphere of sexual harassment and racism. This hypocrisy controversy again underscores what the late New York City talk show host Bob Grant was fond of saying: Particularly in matters of race, liberals are the ultimate hypocrites. This is especially true of upscale limousine liberals. It’s also yet another example of the left accusing the right of misconduct that the left is actually doing.
“The SPLC, which is known to label pedestrian conservative organizations as ‘hate groups,’ is a key resource for Amazon, Google and other tech companies in policing ‘hate speech,'” The Daily Caller explained.
Despite the scandal, AmazonSmile is apparently still giving the SPLC veto power over which charities to approve.
SPLC Smear Merchants?
FNC’s Tucker Carlson quipped that maybe the SPLC, which PJ Media Editor Tyler O’Neill described in the clip below as a “biased, left-wing smear factory,” should have put itself on its list of hate groups:
A False Narrative?
The SPLC, which rakes in bug bucks through doom-and-gloom direct mail, recently parted ways with co-founder Morris Dees and president Richard Cohen.
From Reason:
“The leadership shakeup, fueled by allegations that black staffers were shut out of key positions and that Dees personally harassed female staffers, has brought the SPLC considerable media scrutiny, and it’s about time. Regardless of whether these specific accusations have merit, the SPLC should face a reckoning over its extremely shoddy work, which has mistakenly promoted the idea that fringe hate groups are a rising threat. Peddling this false narrative has long been the SPLC’s business model, and the Trump years have been especially profitable, since the group was almost perfectly positioned to capitalize on growing liberals fears about hate crimes…”
The SPLC now has amassed an endowment of nearly half a billion dollars and 300-plus employees.
SPLC Fear Mongering?
Added the Examiner:
“But the sleaziest thing of all, out of everything Moser details, is the allegation that his former employer’s business model centers entirely around keeping donors in a state of constant, wallet-opening panic. The SPLC, which enjoys a sterling reputation in the press as a serious and knowledgeable authority on bigotry and extremism in the U.S., does this to great effect with sleek gimmicks such as its infamous ‘hate maps” and ‘hate lists,’ all of which are shared widely by an extremely eager, fawning news media.
Ripping Off Donors?
The New Yorker is a left-wing, elitist publication that panders to the liberal echo chamber. That makes the tell-all by Bob Moser, which you can read in its entirety and draw your own conclusions, all the more revealing.
He implies that working in the organization turned idealists into cynics. One observation: the administratively and support staff were almost exclusively African-American while the liberal professional staff were virtually all white.
“In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade…The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a ‘super-salesman and master fundraiser’ who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals...Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed…But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.
“For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two, had been fired…. One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims….The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the center’s current leadership, stretching back many years….
“For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it…
“The firing of Dees has flushed up all the uncomfortable questions again. Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out? ‘Of course we did,’ a former colleague told me, as we parsed the news over the phone….”
In the clip below, ACT for America Founder Brigitte Gabriel discusses how Tech giants de-platformed her group as a result of SPLC mislabeling:
In a very lengthy article in Current Affairs, liberal/progressive writer Nathan J. Robertson raises numerous criticisms about the SPLC:
“[T]he story of Dees and the SPLC is useful for illustrating some of the worst and most hypocritical tendencies in American liberalism… The ‘workplace blindspot’ is common among wealthy liberals. I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve talked to who have worked at ‘progressive’ nonprofits that mistreated and exploited their employees…. The SPLC’s misuse of money is outrageous. Think of all the good it could have done with its millions and hasn’t done….The biggest problem with the hate map, though, is that it’s an outright fraud. I don’t use that term casually. I mean, the whole thing is a willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC….The Southern Poverty Law Center has long demonstrated tendencies that are common to American liberalism: hoarding wealth that could be used to fix things, condemning inequality while perpetuating it, and focusing on individual hatemongers rather than systemic injustices…”
Goodbye Biden?
Is it possible that liberal Democrats seem to be turning on the SPLC in same way that they are defecting from handsy Joe Biden, a.k.a Creepy Uncle Joe? Parenthetically, the Obama machine may be orchestrating the Biden bashing to clear the 2020 presidential field for Sen. Kamala Harris.
[Featured image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
