I have written so many times about the fundraising charade conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, in which “hate group” numbers are inflated and fear mongering is used to pump up SPLC’s massive endowment used to pay enormous salaries.
As with the proverbial broken clock, SPLC occasionally is right about a particular hate group and occasionally does good work, but mostly it has politicized itself as part of a strategy to demonize the Tea Party and those who disagree with SPLC on social issues in order to keep itself relevant to donors. SPLC even listed Rand Paul as a extremist to watch.
Charlotte Allen, writing in The Weekly Standard (via Five Feet of Fury h/t Joethefatman), has a must read history of the SPLC fundraising machine and the cynical attitude of the founders and executives, King of Fearmongers. The article recounts the long history of progressives complaining about SPLC’s manipulative fund raising, and the pathetic record of the SPLC in funding programs.
Really, read the whole thing and bookmark it, here is just a taste:
What has infuriated the SPLC’s liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has used the SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his direct-mail talents that generates a nice living for himself (the SPLC’s 2010 tax filing lists a compensation package of $345,000 for him as the organization’s chief trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high ranking SPLC officials plus luxurious offices and perks, but that does relatively little in the way of providing the legal services to poor people that its name implies.
CharityWatch (formerly the American Institute of Philanthropy), an independent organization that monitors and rates leading nonprofits for their fundraising efficiency, has consistently given the SPLC its lowest grade of “F” (i.e., “poor”) for its stockpiling of assets far beyond what CharityWatch deems a reasonable reserve (three years’ worth of operating expenses) to tide it over during donation-lean years. But even if the SPLC weren’t sitting on an unspent $256 million, according to CharityWatch, it would still be a mediocre (“C+”) performer among nonprofits.
SPLC treats its deep-pocket donors quite cynically:
Irony turns out to be what the SPLC is all about. Thanks to the generosity of four decades’ worth of donors, many of whom—as SPLC president Richard Cohen himself noted in a telephone interview with me—are aging Northern-state “1960s liberals” who continue to associate “Southern” and “poverty” with lynchings, white-hooded Klansmen, and sitting at the back of the bus, and thanks also to what can only be described as the sheer genius at direct-mail marketing of Dees, the SPLC’s 76-year-old lawyer-founder, who was already a multimillionaire by the late 1960s from the direct-mail sales of everything from doormats to cookbooks, the SPLC is probably the richest poverty organization in the history of the world…
Still, there may soon come a day when the SPLC’s donation-generating machine, powered by Dees’s mastery of the use of “hate” to coax dollars from the highly educated and the highly gullible, finally breaks down. That is why, according to Cohen, the SPLC has no intention of soon spending down much of that $256 million in stockpiled assets that has earned the center an “F” rating from CharityWatch. “We’ve tried to raise a substantial endowment, because our fundraising is on a downward trend,” Cohen told me. “Those 1960s liberals—they’re getting older, and the post office is dying. We’re likely to be out of the fundraising business within 10 years.”
It’s not just the fundraising, Allen notes. It’s the padding of hate groups, a point I have made repeatedly as to SPLC’s listing of Klan and Neo-Nazi groups in Rhode Island which do not appear to exist.
Critics have charged that the way the SPLC counts hate groups renders its impressive tallies essentially meaningless. One of the most vocal critics is Laird Wilcox, a self-described political liberal in Olathe, Kansas, who has been tracking radical-fringe organizations on both the left and the right for five decades, amassing an enormous documentary archive that is now housed at the library of the University of Kansas. According to Wilcox, many of the organizations on the SPLC’s expansive list “may be two guys and a post-office box,” while others might not exist at all. “Their lists of hate groups never have addresses that can be checked,” Wilcox said in a telephone interview. “I’ve had police departments across the country calling me and saying we can’t find this group [on the SPLC’s list]. All they can find is a post-office box, so I have to tell them that I don’t know whether they even exist.” In a self-published book, The Watchdogs, he criticized the SPLC for having “misleadingly padded” its list of white-supremacy organizations.
As I have mentioned before, I was once a consistent donor to SPLC in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That is why the SPLC’s politicized fear-mongering has me so upset and so determined to expose SPLC for what it now is.
I was once one of those (not so old) northern liberals who was milked.
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Comments
shorter version of the article.
racist leftist lies for money.
Doesn’t the SPLC have a map with little graphic icons pinned to locations where “hate groups” exist or supposedly exist?
Where is MSNBC’s headquarters? Al Sharpton works there.
Certainly they’ve heard of Crown Heights and Freddie’s Fashion Mart and Tawana Brawley and “Diamond Merchants” and “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” and Yankel Rosenbaum and anti-Mormon remarks …. (my fingers are tired from typing) …
I guess my question is … surely the SPLC has one of those graphic icons pinned to wherever Al Sharpton’s MSNBC office is, but … I guess my question is, seeing as there are surely extra, extra, big icons reserved for hate-speechers who, not only have access to the media, but actually have their own cable TV show!!!!
So, I guess my question is … just how big is that graphic hate icon pinned to SPLC’s map designating Al Sharpton’s MSNBC office? Please, someone tell me. It must be huge, right?
LukeHandCool (who ususally likes to cut to the chase and who is irritated by excessive verbiage, but with Reverand (cough, cough, hack, hack) Al, there’s just too much to work with … as surely the SPLC’s map graphic shows in bold relief)
This just proves you can do quite well by doing good.
you think the SPLC does good?
Completely off topic but just have to share this.
At home cramming for an exam (thus procrastinating by visiting LI) and just received a text from my Japanese, decidedly non-native English speaking wife.
She’s at our youngest daughter’s volleyball tournament today where they’ll play against four or five teams and just texted me the latest update:
“One won, lost won.”
This is what I have to put up with on a daily basis. You guys think you have it bad. I’m married to a language butcher.
That’s funny!
Even SPLC’s original “good” work in pursuing the KKK was just a denouement, after the Klan was in decline, devastated by federal prosecutions and changing times. Dees’ efforts did relieve one of the last Klans of their last reserves, but did it actually “make a difference” in the long run? No.
The reason they never pursue the hate groups on the left is the rich white liberals who fund them won’t give money to stop the New Black Panther Party or to expose Brett Kimberlin. And “pursue” is a pretty strong word for what they do, too.
The main focus of SPLC is to send out scary fundraising letters and emails, coordinated around their carefully crafted press releases and press conferences. They are all about raising money, not actually “doing” anything, constructive or not.
I laugh at Dees’ $345K salary. I bet he hasn’t bought his own Scotch, automobile, or plane ticket in 30 years or more. What do you suppose the co-pay is on his health insurance?
It’s a scam, nothing more. It may not have begun as a scam but as soon as Dees realized that the money comes in more relation to dramatics than to actions, the emphasis shifted entirely to drama.
By its own standards, SPLC is a hate group.
Their hateful rhetoric inspired the Family Research Council shooter.
By the way, NPR is a hate group too:
http://www.wcvarones.com/2010/03/is-npr-hate-group.html
There are two possibilities. One, SPLC is right twice each day. Two, they operate through manipulation of perception. Similar to journalists who appeared in Haiti after the natural disaster, only to be absent when people started to die in the man-made disaster which followed.
SPLC is also involved in creating K-12 curricula on teaching tolerance. http://www.tolerance.org/
It came up as I was looking into embedding admittedly false interpretations of the Civil Rights laws directly into classroom practice. Mostly unseen and designed to change beliefs, values, and behaviors. All as a means of getting around the intent language in the statute instead of merely a harmful effect. A very amorphous standard that basically requires reorganizing society to achieve Equality and eliminating whatever vestiges of free markets remain in our increasingly Cronyistic dirigiste economy.
Designed by an anthropology PhD, Mica Pollock, who teaches in ed schools to get SPLC and other agendas enacted despite a lack of case and statutory support. She works with SPLC among other projects to gain transformative social change. And even reparations if it can be disguised. All to get to Everyday Justice that is not just in the least for anyone believing in a rule of law.
We received the SPLC rag at the law firm where I worked (until recently.) I handed the mail to the founder, winked at him, and told him to be very afraid because it appeared that he had a dangerous radical working for him! What a scare-mongering headline about the “radical right.”
Lordy, if we just sit still for a decade, we’ll be so far right the Left will have backed itself into us.
It’s not as if the SPLC are the first people to figure out that there’s a huge amount of money (and power) to be made by registering as a non-profit and pretending to care about people. The non-profit sector is enormous just for that reason.
Charity would be processed more effectively, and with less corruption, if all men and women were to be taxed equally. This necessarily means a lower tax rate, so that everyone can afford to contribute. The reasons for disparate incentives are few and far between. The overriding concern with any compromise must always be sponsoring corruption.
The problem with SPLC, as well as other human and civil rights businesses, is that their business model relies on exploiting differentials and gradients. This model is especially corrupting when they are afforded credibility and a voice through official (e.g. government) channels. It is exacerbated when a label “charity” or “non-profit” is affixed which distorts the actual financial incentives enjoyed by the corporation’s leaders and employees. This is the same problem which afflicts all reactive movements which become organized and then incorporated.
SPLC is a microcosm of the dysfunctional behavior observed at higher (i.e. centralized) levels of organization, including the federal government, and our society as a whole.
Forward… to dysfunctional convergence.
A lot of people and groups are trying to cash in on the big Progressive money grab.
Thank you Professor.
The problem with the SPLC is the same problem faced by NOW and the March of Dimes.
They won. So, what do you do after your non-for-profit organization, which has real resources, wins? You can look for new goals (March of Dimes) or you get more radical (NOW) or you pretend that you are on the same mission for fundraising purposes.
Exactly right. The SPLC model is to expose and break “racists”. They are not organized to engender integration. As such they became part of the problem, rather than contributing to the solution. The solution, incidentally, is to stop sowing division through exploitation of “race”, gender, class, etc. politics. The SPLC model is reactive and and does not serve their proclaimed mission.
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