Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label

Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label

by Rosslyn Smith
August 22, 2012
American Thinker
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...the not-for-profit SPLC ostensibly began its mission to help those who had been victimized by civil rights violations by filing suits on their behalf. In recent years, the SPLC greatly expanded its definition of civil rights and hate groups to the point where any organization that opposes the left's favored causes risks being labeled a hate group by the SPLC. It has also moved away from suing on behalf of the aggrieved to raising awareness of the presence of "hate groups."..

A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor... if you understand that motivation, it is easy to see why the definition of hate had to be expanded to include groups that were considered very mainstream just a short time ago...

By the mid-60s, Morris was rich. He also became deeply interested in the money side of leftist politics... If appealing to some of these rather naive donors meant tarring other Southerners as racist, bigoted hicks, so be it.

But by the late 1980s, a different problem was starting to develop: the Klan was all but dead, and few of the organizations labeled as white supremacists had more than a handful of members. But this didn't stop SPLC from using such groups for their direct mailing haul of shame. Still, the original donor base was aging....

In 2010, Ken Silverstein, the author of the 2000 Harper's article, noted that the SPLC had found a large new target: those immigration reform groups that supported almost anything more restrictive than amnesty and de facto open borders...

With net assets of $238 million as of the close of its last fiscal year, the SPLC is among the wealthiest of civil rights and advocacy organizations... Yet it spends almost 19% of its annual budget on fundraising each year despite the fact its net assets are already an extremely healthy seven times annual expenses.

According to Silverstein, the payoff is also always the same -- the SPLC is all about making guilty white donors feel good about themselves for being understanding by writing a check to the wealthy and largely white SPLC. Actual attempts to help the oppressed and downtrodden aren't just optional. They are almost superfluous...

What matters is that the targets feel they will become part of the solution by writing a check to SPLC...

The most damning quotes about Dees and the SPLC all come from former associates on the political left...

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