{"id":3877,"date":"2010-12-20T12:21:33","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T17:21:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedustininmansociety.com\/blog\/?p=3877"},"modified":"2011-05-05T18:17:32","modified_gmt":"2011-05-05T23:17:32","slug":"splc-a-dangerous-parody-of-a-huckster-race-baiting-fund-raising-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/20\/splc-a-dangerous-parody-of-a-huckster-race-baiting-fund-raising-scam\/","title":{"rendered":"SPLC: A dangerous parody of a huckster- operated, race-baiting fund raising scam…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tolerance Mafia <\/strong> <\/p>\n

Who watches the hate watchers? <\/strong>
\nBy W. James Antle III <\/p>\n

Ken Silverstein is an unlikely ally for those trying to get control of the nation\u2019s borders. A liberal journalist, he finds the Minutemen \u201ccrackpots\u201d and Arizona\u2019s immigration-hawk Sheriff Joe Arpaio a \u201ckook\u201d whose activities are \u201creprehensible.\u201d Silverstein\u2019s wife is Dominican, and he freely admits he does not know whether she originally came to America legally. Yet there he was at the National Press Club on a panel sponsored by the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).<\/p>\n

\u201cI have different immigration views than the center,\u201d Silverstein said in his presentation. \u201cBut I don\u2019t believe I have a monopoly on wisdom.\u201d What he does believe is that free speech is too important to be shouted down by ersatz civil-rights organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. \u201cThe SPLC squelches free speech and free debate,\u201d Silverstein argued. And, he would add, they raise an awful lot of money from unsuspecting liberals in the process.<\/p>\n

Silverstein was there to mark the release of a powerful CIS report entitled \u201cImmigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped its Donors.\u201d On that last point, Silverstein is something of an expert: he wrote \u201cThe Church of Morris Dees\u201d story for Harper\u2019s a decade ago documenting how Dees, the SPLC\u2019s founder, had enriched himself by posing as a defender of racial equality against a rising tide of hate.<\/p>\n

What calling could be nobler than working against the cross-burning knuckle-draggers of the Ku Klux Klan? But the country that elected Barack Obama president is not the America of \u201cMississippi Burning.\u201d Organizations like the Klan have been thoroughly marginalized, their racist ideologies soundly rejected by Americans of all colors and creeds. To raise money as if they constitute anything more than an unpleasant reminder of our Jim Crow past is to perpetuate a fraud.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Dees and his merry band of politically correct enforcers have had to branch out, endlessly expanding the list of \u201chate groups\u201d to include perfectly mainstream organizations with which they disagree. Advocates of reduced immigration levels and stronger border security are high on the SPLC\u2019s list of targets because of the obvious racial component of the immigration issue. <\/p>\n

Locating cranks who have made ill-tempered remarks about immigrants is not terribly difficult work for highly trained members of the thought police. But Morris Dees\u2019s marauders have not been content to stop there. In late 2007, the SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a hate group. This troubling designation by extension tarred organizations like CIS and Roy Beck\u2019s NumbersUSA\u2014and quickly achieved its intended chilling effect on the immigration debate.<\/p>\n

The SPLC\u2019s smear became the centerpiece of the National Council of La Raza\u2019s \u201cStop the Hate\u201d campaign. \u201cHate\u201d was loosely defined as any position that differed from La Raza\u2019s advocacy of loose borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. La Raza used the SPLC\u2019s \u201cfindings\u201d to try to silence its critics, and the mainstream media, always eager to portray conservatives as racists, cheerfully repeated the slur in its woefully biased coverage of the amnesty debate. Stop the Hate claimed its biggest scalp when Lou Dobbs stepped away from his microphone at CNN\u2014by most accounts, a voluntary move, but one hastened by the network\u2019s growing discomfort with the controversy surrounding Dobbs\u2019s outspoken views on immigration.<\/p>\n

FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are far from hate groups. They are wonky, white-paper-generating organizations committed to nothing more controversial than cutting back immigration from its post-1965 high of 1 million new immigrants a year to the more traditional level of 300,000. They shy away from the more racially charged aspects of the debate, which reflects their roots in the wing of the immigration-restrictionist movement animated primarily by environmental and economic concerns rather than blood and soil.<\/p>\n

But such facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of a good fundraising mailing\u2014or a malicious attempt to drum certain viewpoints out of polite society. In its fevered writings about immigration reformers, the SPLC has concocted conspiracies<\/a> so elaborate they would raise eyebrows within the John Birch Society. While the Birchers have David Rockefeller, the SPLC<\/a> has Michigan environmental activist John Tanton:<\/a> the \u201cpuppeteer<\/a>\u201d supposedly pulling the strings whenever leading immigration reformers Mark Kirkorian and Roy Beck speak, the all-purpose explanation for why seemingly colorblind arguments against mass immigration can be readily dismissed as thinly disguised racism.<\/p>\n

Krikorian\u2019s CIS decided to strike back. Senior fellow Jerry Kammer, a respected journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for helping to uncover the Congressman Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, wrote their report slashing much of the SPLC\u2019s work to ribbons. \u201cThe SPLC\u2019s decision to smear FAIR was the work of a kangaroo court, one convened to reach a pre-determined verdict by inventing or distorting evidence,\u201d Kammer wrote. \u201cThe \u2018Stop the Hate\u2019 campaign would more accurately be labeled as a campaign to \u2018Stop the Debate.\u2019\u201d The tactic is so effective that liberals have begun deploying it in debates on issues with no obvious racial connotations\u2014healthcare reform, deficit spending, and Tea Party protests.<\/p>\n

Without denying either the SPLC\u2019s good early work on civil rights or the existence of bad actors in the immigration-reform movement, Kammer shows that Dees is no nonpartisan, dispassionate observer of the immigration debate, which may explain why the SPLC only detects hate on one side of the issue despite ample evidence of racist remarks by La Raza radicals<\/a>. Kammer also skillfully debunks the SPLC\u2019s immigration conspiracy theory, conceding that Tanton<\/a> has occasionally been reckless in his statements and associations but documenting that the SPLC has inflated both the charges against the early immigration reformer and his influence on the contemporary movement.<\/p>\n

Kammer\u2019s report also focuses on an aspect of the SPLC long denounced by liberal magazines and newspapers\u2014the excessive fundraising that has won Morris Dees a place in the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame but no comparable honor in the civil-rights movement. The SPLC took in over $32 million in contributions in 2008, an average of $88,755 per day. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, the SPLC had more than $174 million in the bank even after its investments lost over $48 million in the financial crisis.<\/p>\n

The CIS report claims Dees promised to stop his profligate fundraising after the SPLC\u2019s endowment exceeded $50 million, but continued shaking the money tree after it reached $200 million. The group\u2019s lavish headquarters, nicknamed the \u201cPoverty Pentagon,\u201d have made it a laughingstock among erstwhile allies on the Left. The Nation called Dees \u201ca millionaire huckster\u201d; left-wing journalist Alexander Coburn dubbed him the \u201carch-salesman of hatemongering.\u201d \u201cMorris Dees does not need your financial support,\u201d Silverstein wrote in Harper\u2019s. \u201cThe SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America. \u2026 The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the SPLC one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHate sells; poor people don\u2019t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC\u2019s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s,\u201d JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in The Nation in 2001. \u201cWhy the organization continues to keep \u2018Poverty\u2019 (or even \u2018Law\u2019) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.\u201d At the CIS event, Silverstein quoted a civil-rights attorney as calling Dees\u2019s operation \u201cthe Jim and Tammy Faye Baker of the civil-rights movement. And I don\u2019t mean to demean Jim and Tammy Faye.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even some of the SPLC\u2019s legitimate civil-rights work was exploited for profit. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million verdict against a Klan group that had brutally murdered a young black man. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that the SPLC \u201cused nationwide fund-raising letters to create the image of a mighty Klan that actually had $7 million\u201d to pay the victim\u2019s mother. In fact, the woman only received about $52,000, most of which she had to pay back to the SPLC, which had given her an interest-free loan. Meanwhile, the SPLC raised $9 million in two years from mailings highlighting her case.<\/p>\n

The SPLC\u2019s antics, ranging from the above outrage to the merely absurd\u2014Dees signing fundraising letters to Jewish potential donors as \u201cMorris Seligman Dees\u201d\u2014harm more than guilty liberals\u2019 wallets. To the extent that our current immigration policy is not in the national interest, the SPLC stands in the way of a solution. And it may ultimately foster the racism it claims to oppose.<\/p>\n

Consider the case of Carol Swain, an African-American law professor at Vanderbilt who has been sounding the alarm about \u201cthe new white nationalism.\u201d Because she approaches the subject from a scholarly rather than a fundraising perspective, she has raised the SPLC\u2019s hackles. \u201cWhen my face was smeared across the papers in my state with accusations that I was an apologist for white supremacy, I thought it was time to get involved,\u201d Swain said at the CIS press conference. Driving the immigration debate underground, she argued, will silence legitimate restrictionists and empower genuine racists. <\/p>\n

Swain concluded, \u201cIf we are concerned about extremists, the best thing we can do is include their voices in the dialogue. \u2026 [The SPLC] is actually making more converts to extremist organizations than they would if they let them talk about their concerns.\u201d For years, Morris Dees<\/a> has been expanding the number of hate groups on his fundraising lists. It would be a tragic result if his tactics helped them proliferate in real life. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

HERE<\/a>__________________________________________ <\/p>\n

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tolerance Mafia Who watches the hate watchers? By W. James Antle III Ken Silverstein is an unlikely ally for those trying to get control of the nation\u2019s borders. A liberal journalist, he finds the Minutemen \u201ccrackpots\u201d and Arizona\u2019s immigration-hawk Sheriff Joe Arpaio a \u201ckook\u201d whose activities are \u201creprehensible.\u201d Silverstein\u2019s wife is Dominican, and he freely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thedustininmansociety.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}