Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr created the Southern Poverty and Law Center (SPLC) in 1971. It was intended to be a civil rights law center, and SPLC focused initially on the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. As time went on, it began to include other civil rights topics, and has become a go-to group for journalists writing about “hate groups.” And over time, its information and slant on issues has become more and more misleading, and often outright false.
Over the years, the SPLC has shifted emphasis from its legal work to “educating the general public, public officials, teachers, students and law enforcement agencies and officers with respect to issues of hate and intolerance and promoting tolerance of differences through the schools,” spending about half its yearly reported budget on this task. As a part of that effort, the Southern Poverty and Law Center releases a report on hate groups and hate crimes each year, and this year the latest report claims that these organizations are on the rise. They claim that there are more than 1,000 of these groups for the first time since the 1980s.
The credulous AFP rewrites their press release this way:
And that’s typical of how the SPLC works. They tie conservatism together with extremism continually, labeling any group to the right of Harry Reid “extremist.” They call groups concerned about illegal immigration “anti-immigration” and “nativist.” They reflexively label people like Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner “right wing” and tie him to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Movement, despite ample evidence to the contrary and no evidence in support.
For example, the SPLC labels the Illinois Family Institute as a hate group because it considers homosexuality to be morally wrong. They list the blog Atlas Shrugs a “hate group” for warning of Islamic extremism. If the Klan holds an anti-illegal immigrant rally, then all such rallies are tied to the Klan. Experts at the SPLC warned Missouri police to watch out for “dangerous” people with Ron Paul and Bob Barr bumper stickers on their cars, suggesting that they may be “militia-influenced terrorists.”
The methodology of their hate group number gathering is questionable, at best. Warner Todd Houston writes at Big Government:
So when the SPLC counts hate groups, it counts multiples of the same group even in the same state. The website Watching the Watchdogs points out that several dozen of these alleged “hate groups” don’t even have a location on their hate map.
Watching the Watchdogs also noted that for a civil rights and race-hatred legal organization, their leadership is pretty monochrome. In fact, every single one of the top officers of the SPLC is white. According to the SPLC’s hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC has never hired anyone but whites to a highly paid position of power in its entire 40-year history, and only two non-whites as an attorney of any kind by 1995.
And in the end, a nation with the 1st amendment held in such high regard must be willing to tolerate ideology that we disagree with or find horrible. Diversity, the highest goal of many leftists, requires ideological diversity as well as physical difference; there has to be tolerance of ideas you dislike or find wrong as well as people you consider different and odd. So what is the point of the “hate list” to begin with?
Fundraising appears to be the primary answer.
In 2001, JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in The Nation magazine (a hard-left publication, to say the least) about the SPLC’s commitment to money, not civil rights:
Today the Klan has an estimated 3,000 members, down from four million at its height in 1925.
Yet for all this, the media takes the Southern Poverty and Law Center very seriously, and SPLC statements are reported on without question or deeper analysis. The media simply reports what the SPLC told them, without consulting any other sources or digging to find out if any of it was true, or disclosing the center’s own questionable operations. At some point, journalists need to start questioning these conveniently bias-confirming press reports, no matter how easy they are to turn into news articles.
Some day, they need to question the SPLC’s methods and conclusions.
