SPLC FIGHTING HATE WITH HATE
We have previously written with dismay about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ongoing decision to fight hate with hate.
However, the recent statue removal protest in Charlottesville, Va., has given cover to the Montgomery, Ala., organization to fundraise with hate.
Even as CNN had to soften its wording surrounding its listing of SPLC’s “Hate Map” last week after protests from family organizations that were named, the SPLC continued to take in corporate cash from compliant businesses.
The organization that would put religious freedom advocate Alliance Defending Freedom and mainstream Christian Family Research Council on its list has received recent contributions from, among others, Apple, which is giving the organization $1 million and matching employee contributions, and J.P. Morgan Chase, which is contributing $500,000. Actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal, also kicked in $1 million to “fight for equality.”
If SPLC were only calling out so-called “alt-right” groups like those that originally sought to protest the removal of the Charlottesville statue, and the so-called “alt-left” groups that opposed them, we’d be supportive. But the SPLC is a far left outfit — antifa and Black Lives Matter do not fit its “hate” criteria — that masquerades as centrist. What it comes down to, as it has with so many on the left in the past decade, is unless you agree with it, you’re a hate group or a racist or a bigot or homophobic or Islamophobic or xenophobic or you name it.
Apple and Chase should know this, but big business is so cowed these days in fear of being tagged with a negative label that individual businesses are only too glad to throw in with those who would persecute them.
It easily could be seen as a form of blackmail. And it’s certainly wrapped up in hate, not the opposite of hate as the SPLC is depicted by the left and its media sidekick.
“An honest outfit tracking violent groups would keep to straightforward descriptions and facts,” Kimberley Strassel put it in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion. “Instead, the SPLC’s descriptions of people are brutally partisan, full of half-truths and vitriol designed to inspire fury.”
Its “hate map” web page is topped by white youths waving Confederate battle flags and making obscene symbols with their hands.
Among the 917 groups listed are the Ku Klos Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Hixson, Tenn., the Nation of Islam of Chattanooga, and the Southern National Congress of Morganton, Ga.
Only Alaska and Hawaii escape having any organizations painted with targets on their backs.
But not the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank which espouses anti-terror policies but is labeled “anti-Muslim,” and the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which is tagged as “anti-immigrant.”
The Family Research Council, which opposes gay marriage, and the Alliance Defending Freedom are both said to be “anti-LGBT.”
But the SPLC doesn’t stop with organizations. Respected social scientist Charles Murray has been tagged a “white nationalist,” and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and human rights activist who speaks out against Islamic extremism, and Maajid Nawaz, a British citizen who tweeted a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad, were named in the organization’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”
Ali, in a New York Times op-ed last week, said, “Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harper’s to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the [SPLC’s] founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else.”
Profiting may be the operative word. A recent Philanthropy Roundtable article charged that the SPLC’s “two largest expenses are propaganda operations” and that its 2015 IRS 990 form showed “$10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.”
And Millard Fuller, the business partner of SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, said of their association: “Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich. During the eight years we worked together, we never wavered in that resolve.”
Five years ago this month, a gay marriage supporter — who said he was prompted by the organization’s SPLC “hate group” status — smashed into the Family Research Council’s headquarters and shot a security guard. James T. Hodgkinson, the alleged shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and others at a Republican congressional baseball practice in June, was a fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center on Facebook, according to Washington Examiner.
It’s insidious, this hate.
As such, we don’t quibble with opposing actual hate groups. They should be opposed. But equating neo-Nazis with groups that advocate traditional marriage, decrying individuals who are against Islamic extremism and raising money by answering hate with hate is not our idea of working toward the day, as its says on SPLC’s website, “when the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity will be a reality.”