Rage on the Left: Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has quite a racket going on. Now, they don’t practice poverty law as their name suggests, but they do spread hate, and lots of it too. In the name of the almighty dollar, the SPLC will slander and defame anyone it chooses. Especially those with the temerity to oppose their extreme, leftwing ideological views.

Have you noticed that instead of questioning the “ulterior motives” of groups like the SPLC, members of the media and political establishment just go ahead parrot whatever irrational claims they make? Well, all you have to do is realize who the SPLC relentlessly libels, smears, and slanders to understand why. Because it’s the critics of the centralized, dictatorial, welfare/warfare/police state plantation we tax-slaves live under today, toward whom the SPLC directs its ritual defamations.

Seeing themselves as the link between policymakers and the “phantom public,” the mainstream media perpetuates narrative over truth. From their perspective you see, the purpose of journalism is to “manufacture consent” for whatever our dominant leaders desire. And what do our dominant “leaders” (of both monopoly parties) desire? More power and control over the populace of course.

Pitting one group of Americans against another with the help of the mainstream media, apparently isn’t enough in the eyes of our power-hungry “leaders.” They need criminals. Enemies. Terrorists! So Bush Jr.’s baby, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), enlisted the help of none other than the SPLC.

SPLC: The Obama Regime’s Private Cheka

For decades, the SPLC and like-minded leftist “watchdog” groups have indoctrinated police and other law enforcement agencies regarding the putative threat of “right-wing extremism.” Near the end of the Clinton reign, the SPLC helped the FBI compose the overheated and under-researched Project Megiddo report, which described millennium-minded “fundamentalists” and “anti-government extremists” as the most dangerous terrorist threat confronted by the U.S.

Now, under the rule of Obama the Blessed, it appears that the SPLC has been absorbed into the Homeland Security apparatus.

A group called Americans for Limited Government filed a Freedom of Information Act Request demanding to see the sources of the much-discussed Homeland Security Department “Report on Rightwing Extremism.” Not surprisingly, the “intelligence” behind that report consisted of roughly a single working day’s worth of internet browsing, with the SPLC badly over-represented among the second-hand and politically tendentious sources cited in this supposedly authoritative report.

Granted, work on the “Rightwing Extremism” document began under the Bush administration, which illustrates the continuity we’ve come to expect from collectivist administrations, irrespective of their partisan labels. But the eagerness of the Obama-Holder “Justice” Department to dismiss the case against the New Black Panthers indicates that the administration will be much more simpatico with the SPLC’s priorities, and thus more willing to defer to its supposed expertise in identifying the domestic “enemy.”

When the SPLC denounces anyone critical of the government as a “racist,” “terrorist,” or whatever venom they choose, it helps the ruling parties by effectively censoring speech. In other words, groups like the SPLC work as the anti-free speech arm of the state. But that’s only part of their scam, because more importantly, the SPLC’s “hate group” racket is used to scare the daylights out of elderly black people (and rich white progressives) to get them to write send in a check as fast as they can!

Yes. Poverty has been profoundly good to Morris Dees and his SPLC cronies.

The Church of Morris Dees

Today the SPLC spends most of its time – and money – on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti-death penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of [Morris] Dees, his former associate, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The center earned $44 million last year alone – $27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments – but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

Any good salesman knows that a products “value” is a highly mutable quality with little relation to actual worth, and Morris Dees – who made millions hawking, by direct mail, such humble commodities as birthday cakes, cookbooks, tractor seat cushions, rat poison, and, in exchange for a mailing list containing 700,000 names, presidential candidate George McGovern – is nothing if not a good salesman. So good in fact that in 1998 the Direct Marketing Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame.

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America … One pitch, sent out in 1995 – when the center had more than $60 million in reserves – informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history” … Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million … The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. “Morris and I … shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” recalls Dees’s business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). “We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.” They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan … Dees’s compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. “You are a fraud and a conman,” the Southern Center’s director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included “your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly.”

Besides soaking gullible liberals out of their money, the SPLC also specializes in hardcore leftist propaganda.

The SPLC’s Extreme Left-Wing Agenda

The Spring 2010 issue of an online journal, The Social Contract, published seventeen articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center by various scholars and journalists. In an article entitled “SPLC: America’s Left-Wing Hate Machine,” journalist Jerry Woodruff wrote of how the SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, proudly received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU in 1990. Baldwin was a communist who is quoted by Woodruf as having written such things as “I am for socialism” and “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class . . . . Communism is the goal.”

Baldwin was a companion of “Red Emma” Goldman, who publicly advocated murder and violence to further a communist revolution in America. She was eventually deported, and Baldwin wrote to her, “you always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life,” Woodruff documents.

Morris Dees’s cheerful acceptance of an award that is associated with such despicable characters is not an isolated example of the extremist background of the SPLC’s staff and directors. SPLC Director James Rucker is also the executive director of an organization called “Color of Change” that was founded by one Van Jones, who was forced to resign from the Obama administration after online videos appeared showing him publicly describing himself as an advocate of “urban Marxism” and “Third World Communism.”

Perhaps the most absurd thing the SPLC does is to sponsor a Web site called “Tolerance.org” and to purportedly teach “tolerance” in primary and secondary schools. The man in charge of Tolerance.org is none other than William Ayers, the “Weather Underground” terrorist of the 1960s who admitted to setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol building in his youth. “I don’t regret setting the bombs,” Ayers told the New York Times on October 4, 2008. “I feel we didn’t do enough” bombing, he said.

There appears to be no reason to suspect that Ayers has ever abandoned his revolutionary communistic ideology. Woodruff writes of how Tolerance.org works closely with another far-left group known as the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME), which raises money by selling bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and other trinkets with sayings imprinted on them by Karl Marx, Castro’s henchman/murderer Che Guevara, and Red Emma. NAME is said to have given a standing ovation for its 1997 convention keynote speaker, Ward Churchill, the fake American Indian/plagiarist/resume fraud who was forced to resign from the University of Colorado several years ago after he publicly compared the people killed in the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 to Nazis. Ah, tolerance.

But just you nevermind the SPLC’s extreme leftwing politics and blatant “fund-raising” scam, they’re just too good for promoting the narrative. Serious inquiry be damned.

Unasked Questions

No one seems to ask: How do you arrive at your information? What sources are used to determine the rise in “hate groups?” What standards are used to identify “hate groups?” Out of a nation of 300 million people, what is the percentage of far-right fringe group membership compared to the nation’s population base? What is the basis of the claim that there is “growing evidence that racial extremists” are infiltrating the ranks of the U.S. military? Just how many veterans are considered to be potential “domestic terrorists?”

The fact that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had to apologize to veterans’ groups over a DHS report that warned of veterans returning from service abroad as potential, future domestic terrorists should raise serious questions from media organizations about the extent to which SPLC influenced the DHS report and the reliability of SPLC’s information.

News organizations accept at face value [SPLC's] observations on whatever fits the prevailing narrative of a “news” cycle primarily because journalists share the same outlook and phobias of “disturbing trends” at the grassroots level of the political right. Consequently law-abiding citizens, including veterans, are being smeared with the broad brush of “extremism” for doing their civic duties as citizen activists—from the Tea Party movement to Second Amendment “Oath Keepers” to immigration reform—simply because it’s all the news that fits the incestuous narrative of the SPLC and mass media.

The SPLC is a racket. Contrary to it’s name, the Southern Poverty Law Center does not practice poverty law, but instead serves a 2-fold purpose: 1) lining the pockets of Morris Dees, the SPLC’s staff, its directors, and various cronies; and 2) serve as attack dogs for the government and radical left (did I repeat myself?).

Whether scaring people into sending them money, or silencing political debate, the SPLC specializes in the tactic of “ritual defamation.” That is, instead of engaging in thoughtful and civilized debate, they spread bald-faced lies to abusively slander the character of anyone they please. And yes, It’s Official: Southern Poverty Law Center Is Now Part of DHS.

Rage on the Left: Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a post from: The Classic Liberal Blog

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