SPLC

A far left site created to fear-monger for money. Their platform is used to attack anyone on the right, and by their own standards, they would qualify as a hate-group, if they applied their standards to left-of-center institutions.

Who are they?

They were created by far lefties to attack people who don’t follow their political agenda

• The SPLC was created by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, and their writings were immediately favored by the Communist Party USA's newspaper (People's World), because it aligned with Social Marxism.
• They basically have two modes, ignore or defend the left (defended violent marxists as “flawed freedom fighters”), and attack and vilify the right (they list many non-violent conservative organizations as hate-groups if they are Christian, anti-Gay-Marriage, anti-Abortion, anti-creepy guys in women’s showers/restrooms).
• They basically manage a hate-list for left wingers.

According to their own standards, they should be listed as a hate group

• They have virtually no objective standards for vetting, quality control
• Many things are debunked and stay on their list, and anyone that sincerely looks at the quality of their lists or questions them, is often attacked as well (by them or their proxies)
• Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, Coral Ridge Ministries, these are grouped in with the KKK, White Aryan Resistance, the White Patriot Party militia.
• A domestic terrorist (Floyd Lee Corkins) even used their mislabelling of the FRC (Family Research Council) as justification to go in and shoot up the place.
• Imagine a right-wing group that went around “monitoring” anyone that didn’t pass their conservative litmus tests, then labeled them as “hate groups”, tried to delegitimize them or get them fired from their jobs, and some of their followers went and committed acts of violence in their name. That their "hate map" was a tool not to stop hate, but promote it: just against the other side. That’s what SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) does, just from the extreme left point of view. Then they exclude organizations like Black Lives Matters from being a hate group, despite far more acts of violence than happened in right wing organizations they list.

A few years ago Floyd Lee Corkins was volunteering at a center for gay, lesbian and transgender people. He read in the SPLC list of hate groups that the Family Research Council was one — so he took a handgun, two extra magazines of ammunition and sandwiches from Chick-fil-A to smear in the faces of his victims, and opened fire at the local FRC office. Fortunately he only hit one security guard who disarmed and apprehended him. If a conservative had done that after a sermon in a church, or based on anything a conservative group said, they’d be listed as a domestic terrorist organization by SPLC.

The SPLC exists to scare people for money, and it’s been quite lucrative

• Follow the money: if you pay people to scare others, they’ll find things to fear everywhere and exaggerate every problem (to exaggerate their reward).
• The SPLC has "raised an endowment of close to $100 million, by frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street, lynching blacks and putting Jews into ovens”.
• There are websites ([1]) dedicated to exposing the SPLC’s bad behavior.

Look, you don’t have to agree with right wing organizations views on many of these issues (I don’t), but that doesn’t mean you should be OK with labeling them hate-groups as SPLC does. They’ve successfully lowered the information and objectivity of folks that use them as a resource (especially media outlets), divided us more as a nation, and created false harassment of many legitimate organizations. But they made a lot of money in the process by scaring the gullible and uninformed (or worse, the informed polemics).

Examples

SPLC has a form on their website that allows anyone to reportanything as a hate crime, and it gets added to their list without any vetting whatsoever. Many of the items reported are later debunked, but there’s no system to remove false clams. The idea is to scare people for money.

• In the wake of an August 2012 shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, some columnists criticized the SPLC's listing of the Family Research Council as an anti-gay "hate group".
• Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, wrote that the SPLC was "reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions."
• Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council,” said, after the attack, “I believe [the gunman Floyd Corkins] was given a license to do that by a group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center who labeled us a hate group because we defend the family and stand for traditional orthodox Christianity.”
• Capital Research Center states that the SPLC "deliberately mischaracterizes conservatives and tea partiers as “extremists”.
• In 2010, the SPLC created a list entitled "Meet the Patriots", which included such people such as Chuck Baldwin, Orly Taitz, and Alex Jones as supporters of this "patriot movement". A supplement entitled "The Enablers" was also released, which included Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, and Judge Napolitano.
• Incidents where someone said, "build the wall" was counted as 467 as cases of "hate" in their report -- simple disagreement on immigration policy is the same as "hate"
• They went so absurd as to paint Lord of the Rings as an example of the White Patriarchy: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/splcworldview.html
• Steve Scalise shooter was inspired by the SPLC: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-insidious-influence-of-the-splc-1498085416
• SPLC gets sued for putting lots of non-hate groups on their list, the media ignores: https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2017/8/25/southern-poverty-law-center-gets-sued-by-christians-and-muslims-and-hardly-anyone-covers-it
• They created a hatelist of Confederate places for their violent followers to vandalize: http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/splc-1500-confederate-places

Questionable practices

Why would a domestic 501(c) tax-exempt charitable organization need to push millions of dollars to offshore entities (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda) as part of its business dealings? To quote the tax experts consulted, "It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas.... I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts." Somethings smells funky.

Or while we're asking questions, why would they pay lucrative six-figure salaries to its top directors and key employees (a few making around ≈$400K/year), while spending little on legal services (despite its stated intent of "fighting hate and bigotry" using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy)? And Conservative Church or Charity that did this, would rightfully, have investigative journalists all over them, not to mention front page stories. The silence is both telling and deafening.

• http://freebeacon.com/issues/southern-poverty-law-center-transfers-millions-in-cash-to-offshore-entities/

Conclusion

I think there should be an organization that tracks hate groups, and provides the service that the SPLC claims to. But to do that, they'd need to:

1. be objective
2. have no vested interest (incentives) in scaring the public
3. and no political or ideological agendas

In other words, be the exact opposite of what SPLC is.

Tim Cook donated quite a bit of money to this hate group.

References

Links

• https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/12/the-hate-list/
• FBI severed all ties between the FBI and SPLC: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/03/26/fbi-dumps-southern-poverty-law-center/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_designated_by_the_Southern_Poverty_Law_Center_as_hate_groups
• http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/15/dale-wilcox-why-the-mainstream-media-must-stop-citing-anti-hate-crusader-southern-poverty-law-center/
• http://www.centerforimmigrationtruth.org/church-of-morris-dees
• Debunking SPLC "hate groups" myth: https://www.lc.org/newsroom/details/debunking-the-splc-hate-group-myth-1
• Bogus Hate Crime Study By Left Wing Hate Group Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kristine-marsh/2016/11/30/media-hype-bogus-hate-crime-study-left-wing-hate-group-southern
• SPLC - Mark Potok 12:19 (13:28 - Militia Fear Propaganda from The Southern Poverty Law Center) : https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-132-meet-the-southern-poverty-law-center/
• Summary: Obsessed with fundraising, the fabulously wealthy Southern Poverty Law Center exaggerates the scope of racism in the United States to frighten donors into opening their wallets. SPLC is nominally a public interest law firm, but it spends little on actual litigation. Instead, it uses politically skewed definitions of racism to indoctrinate children while smearing conservatives who question racial preference programs. Twisting hate: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-southern-poverty-law-center-a-twisted-definition-of-hate/
• http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/343115/splc-and-slant-patrick-brennan
• http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2001/feb/9/20010209-021048-2889r/
• * http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/03/academic-study-splc-hatewatch-biased/
• What it's like to be smeared by SPLC: http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-its-like-to-be-smeared-by-the-southern-poverty-law-center-1505171221
• Satire that's funny, because it's so close to truth: https://www.duffelblog.com/2017/09/southern-poverty-law-center-classifies-vfw-foreign-legion-as-hate-groups/

Manufacturing Hate

• http://splcwatch.org/
• http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/03/fearmongering-at-the-splc
• http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/17/short-of-actually-scary-people-splc-targ
• https://pjmedia.com/blog/southern-poverty-law-centers-enemies-list-a-fantasy/
• https://capitalresearch.org/article/southern-poverty-law-center-wellspring-of-manufactured-hate/
• King of Fearmongers: http://www.weeklystandard.com/king-of-fearmongers/article/714573
• Everyone who disagrees with SPLC is Hitler: http://www.weeklystandard.com/king-of-fearmongers/article/714573
• http://www.johntanton.org/answering_my_critics/southern_poverty_law_center_splc_info.html
• Fake Islamaphobia: http://cqrcengage.com/act/app/document/19153671
• http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/03/fearmongering-at-the-splc
• https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-07/southern-poverty-law-center-gets-creative-to-label-hate-groups
• Preying on Charlottesville for money: http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/08/southern-poverty-law-center-money-machine-cashes-in-on-charlottesville/

SPLC

• Mark Potok (SPLC) exposing what they do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTZEZ5GyXfc
• They claim to be non-partisan -- Federal Election Commission records reveals that its board members have contributed more than $13,400 to Hillary's campaign
• Lies of Omission, showing how they pointed out violence was up after Trump:
  • https://www.splcenter.org/20161128/trump-effect-impact-2016-presidential-election-our-nations-schools
  • https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election
• They did that report by omitting over 20% (and 2,000 bias-related incidents) were against white students by minorities, and that the gross majority of their claims of hate crimes are not crimes and constitutional protected speech: http://nypost.com/2016/12/05/report-buried-trump-related-hate-crimes-against-white-kids/
• Example: saying "build the wall" was counted as 467 cases of "hate".
• Partick Brennan documents their bias: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/343115/splc-and-slant-patrick-brennan
• Even NYT asks about their bias (but only when they target liberals unfairly, while ignoring how much worse they are to conservatives): https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/southern-poverty-law-center-liberals-islam.html

Incidents

• Another Killer Cites the Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.weeklystandard.com/another-killer-cites-the-southern-poverty-law-center/article/848241
• Craig Stephen Hicks was an SPLC "liker": http://www.ibtimes.co.in/chapel-hill-shooter-craig-hicks-anti-theist-who-opposed-all-religions-623194