I go on a lot about the White nationalists on here, but the truth is that these racist characters are seriously irrelevant to US politics. Even most White racists in the US, I am certain, want nothing whatsoever to do with them. From the veneration or apologia for Hitler, to rampant anti-Semitism, to insane proposals like deporting all non-Whites, setting up White separatist enclaves, states or whatever, to worship of Nordicism to the detriment of all the other Europeans, to opposition to miscegenation, friendship and dating with non-Whites, the movement has been a serious failure from Day One and will continue to be one, since its ultra-radical ideas simply do not resonate with most Whites in the US. In fact, most US Whites are ethnocentric and do believe that US White culture is worth saving. A recent poll showed that 7 One would think that a pro-White movement would be so moderate as to represent the views of this 7 One would think a logical movement could appeal to this 7 Forget it. No pro-White movement will ever be sane enough to appeal to these folks. The problem is not just the fact anyone in the US that stands up and says they are pro-White nowadays is probably a ferocious racist. The problem also lies in maniacal organizations like the SPLC, named in the title. Any expressions of White ethnocentrism are immediately pounded by SPLC attack dogs as White Supremacism. Not only that, but the SPLC hearts illegal aliens. Seriously, passionately. I think the leadership actually wants to invite the illegals under the sheets with them, such is their love for the criminal invaders, the dregs of Mesoamerica. Every single organization that has tried to fight against illegal immigration has been slammed by the SPLC scum as “racist” and “White supremacist.” Their acolytes in the elite media echo along. Such that even reasonable Whites now think anti-illegal immigration means dangerous, wild-eyed nativist racism. Why do they think this? The elitists in the MSM told them so. Check out this sorry story here. Your average US Jew is sane, and many of them are open to the sane notion that millions of illegal aliens in the US really sucks. The Jewish elite in the Organized Jewish Community won’t have any of that. The message is so popular with ordinary Jews that they are shutting it down. The illegal immigration debate has always shown a vast elite – commoner disconnect in the US. Ordinary, working class and middle class Americans totally hate illegal immigration. Surveys show that adds up to 70-8 The mainstream anti-illegal organizations go to extreme lengths to keep their noses clean. They try to ferret out all the racists in their organizations. On their websites, racist commentary is deleted and the commenters are banned. They try very hard to make this an anti-racist movement. Sure there are racists in the movement. Of course racists hate illegals just like anyone else. Who would have thought otherwise? The truth is that while White nationalism is ludicrous joke in the US (Thank God!) the PC Nazis in the SPLC have essentially colonized American thought with their Cultural Marxist poison. It’s spread to the entire White West. The SPLC’s line is that some ghost-like White racists threaten the US. That’s hilarious. The truth is that assholes like the SPLC and their Identity Politics buddies are more dangerous to, and have done more harm to, this nation that the White nationalists could in countless centuries.
It’s called the Southern Poverty LAW Center, not the Southern Poverty LEADERSHIP Center – http://www.splcenter.org
“Young Black Thugs who refuse to follow the law, should not be incarcerated, but rather put down like the dogs they are!” (TRAINAISM)
lol, you’re just full of typos when you post rapidly like this. Incidentally you wrote “Moaist” on another post. A Moa is an extinct bird from New Zealand.
I should add, if it isnt obvious, that I think you’re a great writer apart from the misspellings, and that’s why I come here every day, along with apparently 1000 others who don’t post as much.
It’s interesting to see you use the phrase “our people.” I don’t see any whites outside of white nationalists speak that way.
The reason they attack anti-immigration organizations as racist is because the far left or Jewish definition of racist is different than the one you’re using.
White nationalism is indeed not getting much of anywhere, but WN have unique challenges that most other political ideologies don’t have to face. Like the organization you’re posting about here. Not to mention the lack of any real funding.
Whites are my people. I’m White. We is the plural of I. My people are our people. There is an old Jewish saying, “If I am not for myself, who am I for?” We Whites are not for ourselves anymore.
The Far Left/Jewish definition of racism is a bunch of shit. One of the purposes of this blog is to eviscerate that nonsense.
One of the problems with WN is the product it is selling. Most Whites are not interested, to put it mildly. Now, an explicitly anti-racist pro-White group that only promoted White self-respect and pride and defended our people from hate propaganda, racist attacks and discrimination – I think that could be a pretty big hit with Whites. Of course the Jews, the Left and the SPLC would go after it like madmen, especially if it was successful.
It’s never going to happen because Whites are either deracinated self-abasing PC-wrecked masochists, or, if they move beyond that, they’re full into out and out racism. There’s nothing in the middle.
Alan Greenspan (Jew) even argues that illegals are good for the economy.
So do Jews such as George (Saul) Bush and Edward (Haim) Kennedy. Oh wait those guys are goys.
ESSENTIAL piece by Alexander Cockburn from Counterpunch on SPLC:
http://tinyurl.com/nlgh7x
Excerpts from article linked to above (not sure about copyright?):
“As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.
…You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like Stephen Bright, who makes only $11,000 as president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center’s director makes less than $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about $1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue. Bright’s outfit is basically dedicated to two things: prison litigation and the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. Not the phony targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional system of oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC’s tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your check to Dees and send it to Bright,( http://www.schr.org/) or to the Institute for Southern Studies (http://www.southernstudies.org.html) run by Chris Kromm, which has been doing brilliant spadework on the economy, on poverty and on exploitation in the south for four decades. “
Rl write; “Yet a political – media – wealthy elite that runs our media and political parties has been lording it over us commoners and frankly the US proletariat. They can’t get enough illegals. As the elitists control the US, the opinions of 75% of Americans get tossed out with the trash.”
Hey Robert…a request: could you please tell me the name of that small ethnic minority group (you know, the one which is very elitist/hyperethnocentric/urban/overeducated) that ‘just happens to be’ disproportionately represented in the American political/media/financial/legal elite? I need you to run the name of that group by me again because I seem to have forgotten their name. Thanks.
Harper’s (to those that don’t know a left leaning magazine..) has skewered the $PLC a number of times:
By Ken Silverstein — Harper’s Magazine, November 2000
How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance
Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its “Teaching Tolerance” program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then.
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 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 program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC’s most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants . But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered “hate crime” with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of “armed Klan paramilitary forces” and “violent neo-Nazi extremists,” and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains-like Idaho’s arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras.
In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA’s total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald’s corpse.
Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all “hate crimes,” including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by “lone wolves.” Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI’s history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC’s-was never credibly linked to any militia organization.
No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. “Which race,” we are assured, “does not matter.” Nor apparently does the specific nature of “the racist acts directed at him,” nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. “I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt,” she confides. “His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white perspective of the world.” Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she undertake in order to “reach real peace in the world”? She doesn’t say but instead speaks vaguely of acting out against “the pain.” In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy–or the confession thereof–is an end in itself.
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 (including Favorite Recipes of American Home Economics Teachers), 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. “I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church,” Dees has said. “Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation-why, it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling.” Here, Dr. Dees (the letter’s nominal author) masterfully transforms, with a mere flourish of hyperbole, an education kit available “at cost” for $30 on the SPLC website into “a $325 value.”
This is one of the only places in this letter where specific races are mentioned. Elsewhere, Dees and his copywriters, deploying an arsenal of passive verbs and vague abstractions, have sanitized the usually divisive issue of race of its more disturbing elements-such as angry black people-and for good reason: most SPLC donors are white. Thus, instead of concrete civil rights issues like housing discrimination and racial profiling, we get “communities seething with racial violence.” Instead of racially biased federal sentencing laws, or the disparity between poor predominantly black schools and affluent white ones, or the violence against illegals along the Mexican border, the SPLC gives us “intolerance against those who are different,” turning bigotry into a color-blind, equal-opportunity sin. It’s reassuring to know that “Caucasians” are no more and no less guilty of this sin than African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. In the eyes of Morris Dees, we’re all sinners, all victims, and all potential contributors.
Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. 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.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. 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.”
The SPLC’s “other important work justice” consists mainly in spying on private citizens who belong to “hate groups,” sharing its files with law-enforcement agencies, and suing the most prominent of these groups for crimes committed independently by their members-a practice that, however seemingly justified, should give civil libertarians pause. The legal strategy employed by Dees could have put the Black Panther Party out of business or bankrupted the New England Emigrant Aid Company in retaliation for crimes committed by John Brown. What the Center’s other work for justice does not include is anything that might be considered controversial by donors. According to Millard Farmer, the Center largely stopped taking death-penalty cases for fear that too visible an opposition to capital punishment would scare off potential contributors. In 1986, the Center’s entire legal staff quit in protest of Dees’s refusal to address issues-such as homelessness, voter registration, and affirmative action-that they considered far more pertinent to poor minorities, if far less marketable to affluent benefactors, than fighting the KKK. Another lawyer, Gloria Browne, who resigned a few years later, told reporters that the Center’s programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.” Asked in 1994 if the SPLC itself, whose leadership consists almost entirely of white men, was in need of an affirmative action policy, Dees replied that “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”
Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC’s reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as “educational” so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of “militant right-wing extremists” and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
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. (“I felt the anger of a black person for the first time,” Dees later wrote of the case. “I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.”) In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. 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.” Soon the SPLC win move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace.
The SPLC is richer than Tonga:
Southern Poverty: richer than Tonga
Back in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper’s about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest “civil rights” organization. The Center earns more from its vast investment portfolio than it spends on its core mission, which has led Millard Farmer, a death-penalty lawyer in Georgia, to once describe Morris Dees, the SPLC’s head, as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement” (adding, “I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye”).
When in 1978 the Center’s treasury held less than $10 million, Dees said the group would stop fund-raising and live off interest when it hit $55 million. As he zeroed in on that target a decade later, Dees upped the ante to $100 million, which the group’s newsletter promised would allow it “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising.” At the time of my story seven years ago, the SPLC’s treasury bulged with $120 million, and the organization was spending twice as much on fund-raising as it did on legal services for victims of civil-rights abuses–yet its money-gathering machinery was still running without cease.
It’s still going. Last week, a reader sent me the SPLC’s 2005 financial filing with the IRS, which is required by law for charities. In five years, the SPLC’s treasury had grown by a further $48 million, bringing its total assets to $168 million. That’s more than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands, and has the SPLC rapidly closing in on Tonga’s GDP.
Revenues listed for the 2005 filing came to about $44 million, which dwarfed total spending ($29 million). Of that latter amount, nearly $5 million was spent to raise even more money, and over $8 million was spent on salaries, benefits, and other compensation. The next time you get a fund-raising pitch from the SPLC, give generously—but give to a group that will make better use of your money. Like Global Witness.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/03/sb-this-week-in-1172847076
The Southern Poverty Business Model
By Ken Silverstein
Many of you out there have no doubt received in the mail desperate cries for help from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the do-gooder group that does very little good considering the vast sums of money it raises. But before you pull out your checkbook, make sure to read the following letter that Stephen Bright, an Atlanta-based civil rights and anti-death penalty attorney, recently wrote in declining an invitation to an event that honors Morris Dees, head of the SPLC.
Kenneth C. Randall, Dean and
Thomas L. McMillan, Professor of Law
School of Law
University of Alabama
249 Law Center
Box 870382
101 Paul W. Bryan Drive
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0382
Dear Dean Randall:
Thank you very much for the invitation to speak at the law school’s commencement in May. I am honored by the invitation, but regret that I am not able to accept it due to other commitments at that time.
I also received the law school’s invitation to the presentation of the “Morris Dees Justice Award,” which you also mentioned in your letter as one of the “great things” happening at the law school. I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been documented by John Egerton, Harper’s, the Montgomery Advertiser in its “Charity of Riches” series, and others.
The positive contributions Dees has made to justice–most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund raising potential–are far overshadowed by what Harper’s described as his “flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two “poverty palace” buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people–some of moderate or low incomes–who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because he spends so much on fund raising, his operation spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other organizations accomplish on shoestring budgets.
The award does not recognize the work of others by associating them with Dees; it promotes Dees by associating him with the honorees. Both the law school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another Dees scam.
Again, thank you for the invitation to participate in your commencement. I wish you and the law school the very best.
Sincerely,
Stephen B. Bright
cc: Morris Dees
Arthur Reed
Dees award committee
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001573
The SPLC’s fundraising practices have provoked the disapproval of watchdog groups that monitor charities: In 1993, the American Institute of Philanthropy assigned the SPLC a ‘D’ grade on a scale of A to F. [American Institute of Philanthropy 1993 Charity Watchdog Report]…
Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses…
“What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing…? Mostly making money…
In 1994 the Montgomery Advertiser won a journalism award for a series of incisive and penetrating investigative articles exposing the unethical fundraising practices of Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center…
The SPLC which has crusaded for the rights of blacks for 23 years, is controlled by whites. It has hired only two black staff attorneys in its history, both of whom left unhappy. 12 of 13 former Black employees interviewed by the Montgomery Advertiser complained they experienced or observed racial problems during their employment. Several said the SPLC was “more like a plantation.”…
In 1986 the entire SPLC legal staff resigned in protest of Dees refusal to address issues such as poverty, homelessness, voter registration and other issues they considered more pertinent to poor minorities rather than to get rich fighting a Klan chimera….
Dees has actively campaigned for for laws in which “associations of two or more persons” who train in the use of firearms for defensive purposes are declared “illegal militias.”…
In an article titled Poverty Palace, Morris Dees told journalist John Edgerton that “I had a traditional white Southerner’s feeling for segregation.”…
“Morris Dees and I [Millard Fuller], from the first day of our partnership, shared one overriding purpose: to make 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.”…
In 1961 when Freedom Riders were beaten by a white mob at a Montgomery bus station, Dees [and Fuller] expressed openly his sympathies and support for what had happened at the bus station.
When one of the men charged with beating the Freedom Riders came to their office for legal representation, Dees and Fuller took the case. The legal fee was paid by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizen’s Council. [Fuller, Millard. Love in the Mortar Joints. New Century Press: 1980 and The Progressive, July 1988]…
Arrested and removed from court in 1975 for attempting to suborn perjury [bribing a witness] in the Joan Little murder trial in North Carolina….
Acted as a fundraiser for both Ted Kennedy’s 1980 and Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaigns and received their mailing lists as reward. [Ibid.]
Thx for these Stillwarm. I am really appreciating all this info about the SPLC. They sound like a bunch of crooks. I like Mr. Bright. He is actually doing something productive.
Yes, that’s great stuff, Stillwarm. Thanks.
One really must take issue with this mis-characterization of WN.
There is nothing at all Radical about Separatism. It has recently been practiced in Yugoslavia. The Mighty Soviet Union even broke up into several Separatist Units.
Worship if Noridicism???? Heck the mainstream society does that every-day as Dark haired females go out of their way to bleach their hair blonde! Luckily I am German-Norwegian so am already Blond! Ah being a member of the Master Race is good!
Worship of Hitler? Ok Hitler is really popular! There is even a video game coming out on Xbox 360 called Wolfenstein that is going to be totally filled with National Socialist imagery. Alot of People are into this stuff even at just a surface- aesthete level. Myself I think Uncle Adolf was great!
No, the thing that is keeping WN down is Jewish control of the media, but luckily the internet is here is to save the day!
Yes of course you are a Nordicist, as are the overwhelming majority of White nationalists. This will doom you worse than you are already doomed.
And of course you love Hitler. A large majority of White nationalists are either pro-Nazi, or blame the USSR for the war (Nazi lie), or say the USSR was the real enemy in the war. In so doing, you go against even the vast majority of the US South in WW2, which was fully behind war against Nazism. Once again, you are way outside of the US mainstream.
The nations that split off in the Yugoslavia and the USSR were actual nations. We do not have any actual nations in the US except for the American Indians and they are not going anywhere and anyway, they have already separated in a sense.
Excellent article and comments. It’s always a pleasure to read thoughtful material from intelligent people who “get it.”
My only critique is much of the info quoted in some of the comments is pretty dated. Last year, the SPLC’s “Endowment Fund” topped $200 million, though the treasure trove seems to have suffered a little from the recent recession.
Still, the numbers quoted are horrendous enough to shock most people, except those who refuse to hear any criticism of Saint Morris Magnus.
Thx Richard. As a Leftist, I am supposed to like these guys, but they just go way too far. Fighting racism is one thing, but these people are just off in anti-racist, White-hating, PC, nonsensical la-la land. They need to be taken on right now. They are spreading lies about all sorts of folks and too many people use these liars as reliable sources. The SPLC is about as reliable of a source as the Nation of Islam.
When everyone who opposes illegal immigration is automatically referred to by the SPLC as racist and White nationalist, this is a symptom of madness that just needs to stop.
I’ve watched the SPLC for years and it is so pathetic when so-called media pick up and reprint Mark Potok’s PR press releases as fact. I try to set the readers straight whenever possible, but the damage has already been done.
Still, it’s better to fight the propaganda in a small way than to do nothing at all. Usually the reward is to be smeared as a “racist” by knee-jerks who can’t even be bothered to look at the evidence.
Mo Dees is the sole arbiter of the label/smear “hate group.” As mentioned, even the FB I doesn’t use that designation because there is no legal definition of the term.
This year Potok has been hammering the shocking “50% jump in hate groups since 2000” to great effect, but in reality, it’s all smoke and mirrors.
The “facts” behind the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) “50% rise in ‘hate groups’ since 2000” are simple and few.
1. The SPLC takes in tens of millions of dollars each year from well-meaning, mostly elderly donors.
2. To keep the donations flowing in, the SPLC maintains an ongoing fear campaign. Since the SPLC is self-appointed and non-regulated, donors have only the SPLC’s word on the situation.
3. SPLC founder, Morris Dees instructs Potok, to bump the numbers up 4-6% each year, whether the groups exist or not.
Over the course of nine years of this constant padding, hitting an “increase of 50%” is no great feat.
Mr. Potok dumps his padded numbers into an online fund raising device they like to call the “Hate Map.”
(http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp)
If you actually take five minutes to look at the “Hate Map,” which, apparently, no one in the media has ever bothered to do, you will see that 127 of Mr. Potok’s alleged 926 groups are not affiliated with any locale. They merely float in space and serve only to pad the numbers.
Nine percent of Florida’s alleged total is composed of these phantom groups, 17% for California, and for states like Maine, Wyoming and New Mexico they comprise 100% of the totals.
Another 24% of Florida’s remaining total belongs to a secessionist group called the League of the South that the SPLC has dubbed “neo-Confederates”. (http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp#s=FL)
If you’ve never heard of the League, you’re not alone. They have never done anything, illegal or otherwise, but they do add nearly a hundred “groups” to Mr. Potok’s 926. Maybe Mr. Potok is convinced that the Confederate States of America are primed for a renaissance, but most people know better. More padding.
On March 10, 2008, Potok came right out and said, “Basically, for us, a hate group has nothing to do with criminality, with some kind of measure we’re taking of potential for violence; it is all about ideology.” Basically, “hate crimes” are “thought crimes” according to Potok. This doesn’t scare people?
Basically, the SPLC is only charging these people with “thought crimes,” but it does keep the millions rolling in each year. ((http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=301))
In fact, a “group” doesn’t even have to be a “group” to add its mite to the overall total. On April 2 of this year, Mr. Potok stated that “…inclusion on the list might come from a minor presence, such as a post office box.”
(http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/672197.html)
The reasoning behind this elaborate charade? As stated above, this slickly packaged public relations campaign brings in millions of dollars each year, nearly a billion since the SPLC was founded in 1971. That’s a pretty good incentive.
Mr. Potok is compensated $143,000 donor dollars each year for his efforts, up $4,500 from the previous year. That’s a pretty good incentive.
(See page 11 (http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLC990_2007.pdf)
Mr. Dees, who was a multimillionaire the day he opened the SPLC in 1971, now receives $350,000 donor dollars in compensation, which includes the $20,000 donor dollar raise he thoughtfully gave himself last year. (See page 40 (http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLC990_2007.pdf)
In addition, Mr. Dees also receives $10,000 a pop for his frequent speaking engagements. Sadly, a black civil rights group in Michigan could not come up with that fee and had to cancel Mr. Dees as the featured speaker at their Martin Luther King memorial dinner this past January.
Multimillionaire Dees, the great “Champion of Civil Rights,” could not even throw them a freebie in honor of MLK Day.
No dough? No Mo.
(http://www.mlive.com/news/chronicle/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1231154119210980.xml&coll=8)
In his 1991 autobiography, “A Season for Justice,” Dees brags about taking $5,000 dollars from the Klan, (over $30,000 in today’s dollars), for representing Klansman Claude Henley, (which one of your other members has pointed out previously.)
Not only does this meet all of the dubious criteria of Potok’s patented “smear by association” definition of a “Klan lawyer,” but it turns out that Dees has gotten more Klansmen OUT of prison than he’s ever sent there.
The Better Business Bureau no longer accredits the SPLC as a responsible charity due to “…a lack of commitment to transparency,” as opposed to “racist” groups like FAIR, which regulary receives BBB accreditation.
(http://www.bbb.org/us/Find-Business-Reviews/)
And in closing, one of the most ironic factoids the SPLC seems to omit from their regular fund raising propaganda is the complete lack of minorities at the top. Pages 11 and 40 of their IRS Form 990 pretty much spells out the true story. (http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLC990_2007.pdf)
The truth is just sitting out there for anyone to see.
I have long believed that if the small, socially-impotent groups of misfits that comprise the list of “hate” groups the SPLC pretends to guard the nation against did not exist, Dees would simply invent them.
Perhaps he already is.
Robert,
I agree with many points you make but you are clearly very PC yourself. In your piece, you practically trip over yourself in berating white nationlists. You try as hard as you can to distance yourself from those “horrible, racist, evil white nationalists” (yaaaawn).
Here’s the deal… EVERYONE is a racist to one degree or another. Yes, EVERYONE. It’s an innate quality of mankind to be racially tribal. The “R” word has become a joke to any thinking person. You are just as guilty of tar and feathering white nationalists as those on the left. In particular, this from your piece…
“The truth is that while White nationalism is ludicrous joke in the US (Thank God!)”
shows how PC you are.
James Miller
Check out my blog:
http://immigration-globalization.blogspot.com/
No to White nationalism. No to all racism. I am an anti-racist. Racism is wrong. Many people are either not racist or have very low levels of racism. No one is forced to be a racist, and racism in any individual can be reduced to a tolerable level or eliminated. Racism is a choice, period. People choose to be racists because the world feels so much better that way.