SPLC
The Southern Poverty Law Center is 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.
Contents
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, such as ([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: informed polemics).
Here's some examples of their behavior: 10 items
Who is the SPLC? - They basically manage a hate-list for the far left and their media:
Their "hate map" was a tool not to stop hate, but promote it: just against the other side. |
James T. Hodgkinson - In June 2017, James T. Hodgkinson was a Bernie Sanders supporter and left wing activist, who listened to all the hate rhetoric on the left about Trump and the evil Republicans and liked the SPLC page, decided to shoot House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (and other Republicans) while they were practicing baseball. During the 8 years of the Obama, he "Never let an opportunity go to waste" (to divide us). The usual tack after a shooting was vilifying cops, evading when it was Islamic radicals, and blaming guns or the NRA for the failures of the State, the legal system or the actions of a crazy person. Donald Trump's first speech after a shooting refreshing: far more Presidential and uniting. A few commentators took note, but mostly, the divisiveness from the left continued without a picosecond of introspection. Still, Trump handled this event far more graciously than Obama handled any of the shootings he commented on.
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2019.10.09 SPLC mis-labels Oath Keepers as Anti-Government - The SPLC refers to Oath Keepers as, "one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today". This is a libelous delusion that has no basis in reality. Oath Keepers has ≈35,000 present and former law enforcement officials, military veterans, and first responders as members, whose self-stated objective is "a non-partisan association... who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to 'defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic'". That is all: they voluntarily full-fill their oath of duty, even though they have left public service. Since the Constitution is in the way of some progressive power grabs, the far left likes to label the Oaths of our Military/Police/Firemen as anti-government, when it is just pro-law of the land. Of 35,000 members, the media has found a handful that did scummy things, and tars the whole organization by those exceptions. But by that standard, those media agencies or the SPLC would be labeled far worse.
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2019.04.29 SPLC dropped by Twitter - Twitter has quietly dumped the Southern Poverty Law Center from its “Trust and Safety Council”, which would mean more if they had never been on it in the first place. Still, baby steps.
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2016.12.05 Build the wall - The SPLC hate map and the increase in the number of hate crimes after Tump? Whenever someone said, "build the wall", it was counted as a "hate" incident in their report. 467 times. A simple disagreement on immigration policy is the same as "hate".
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2016.11.01 Greenville, Mississippi black church fire - Right before the election, a Greenville, Mississippi church (Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church) was set on fire and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump”, by Andrew McClinton. Of course all the leftist FakeNews outlets (Atlantic, NYT, CNN, SPLC) ran sensational headlines about how bad Trump and his white supremacist supporters were to foster such hate. Only it came out later that it was done by one of the churches black congregants, who hated Trump and it was a false flag effort. Many quietly updated their story, or ran a retraction a month after the damage had been done. SPLC left it on their hate map to mislead the public about how bad the problem is.
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2012.08.15 Family Research Council Shooting - 🇺🇲 Washington, DC: Floyd Lee Corkins was a gay activist who was triggered by the SPLC list of hate groups. So he went to the one: the near-by Family Research Council. He took a handgun, two extra magazines of ammo, 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 at a church or based on anything a conservative group said, that group would be listed as a domestic terrorist organization by SPLC, and the media would trash that organization. Since it was the SPLC, the story was buried and the tone was, "you can't use a fanatic to misrepresent a whole cause", a standard never applied to the right.
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2010.05.20 Meet the Patriots - 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 "antigovernment 'Patriot' movement". This is a misleading dog whistle for the left to imagine militias and separatists. The supplement entitled "The Enablers" included Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, and Judge Napolitano -- as if all these guys are training on weekends to commit mayhem on the innocent left.
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2005.07.24 HARRY POTTER: A 'Half-Blood Prince' Revealed - In a 2005 article on SPLC's Tolerance.org site, Colleen O’Brien's article on J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter book was that it embraces a racist worldview. Their intersectional trauma was caused because "half-blood" in magic was obvious, "Half-bloods come from two different worlds, and the idea of these bifurcated worlds conjures images of racial segregation". This goes to show that when you look for hate and trigger words under every rock or in fantasy books/films, you can find them and use them to scare your audience.
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2004.01.28 A 'Return' of the White Patriarchy - The SPLC's Tolerance.org website, did a review of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, titled “A ‘Return’ of the White Patriarchy?” by writer Andrea Lewis. Going full intersectional rage, “Almost all of the heroes of the series are manly men who are whiter than white. They are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good. Who but these courageous Anglo-Saxon souls can save Middle Earth from the dark and evil forces of the world?” The Matrix was good, because Blacks got more screen time: the standard for what's hate or not is the skin color of the actors.
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More
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.[1]
- 2019.03 Dees was fired for failure to live up to the low standards of the organization -- waiting for details to come out on what that failure was [2]
- 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”.
- Steve Scalise shooter was inspired by the SPLC [3].
- SPLC gets sued for putting lots of non-hate groups on their list, the media ignores[4].
- They created a hatelist of Confederate places for their violent followers to vandalize [5].
- They miscategorize scholars like Christina Hoff Sommers (resident scholar at the American Enterprise) as an 'enabler of "male supremacy,"', because while she's a feminist, she debunks the left's lie about the so-called gender wage gap. Basically, being a scholar in your field, doing research, and disagreeing with far left feminists disinformation campaign, makes you a Woman-hater male-supremacist? [6]
- They falsely label PragerU as a hate agency, for having the worlds most benign history lessons from various History Professors or specialists in their field. What's the hate? They don't regurgitate far-left revisionist versions of history or understanding, but a more conservative orientation of history. [7]
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.
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:
- be objective
- have no vested interest (incentives) in scaring the public
- 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. [8]