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Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center
Racial discrimination. Sexual harassment. Off-shore accounts. Inflated and biased attacks on “hate.” These are some of the many reasons Americans should mistrust the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center started with noble intentions and has done much good over the years, but a pernicious corruption has undermined the organization’s original mission and contributed to a climate of fear and hostility in America. Hotels, web platforms, and credit card companies have blacklisted law-abiding Americans because the SPLC disagrees with their political views. The SPLC’s false accusations have done concrete harm, costing the organization millions in lawsuits. A deranged man even attempted to commit mass murder, having been inspired by the SPLC’s rhetoric. How did a civil rights group dedicated to saving the innocent from the death penalty become a pernicious threat to America’s free speech culture? How did an organization dedicated to fighting poverty wind up with millions in the Cayman Islands? How did a civil rights stalwart find itself accused of racism and sexism? Making Hate Pay tells the inside story of how the SPLC yielded to many forms of corruption, and what it means for free speech in America today. It also explains why Corporate America, Big Tech, government, and the media are wrong to take the SPLC’s disingenuous tactics at face value, and the serious damage they cause by trusting this corrupt organization.
- GenresNonfictionPolitics
242 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 19, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 8, 2022
The writing style is easy and casual. The content is just what you’d expect from the title. Tons of footnotes. There are some editing errors, unlikely to be noticed by the general population. The author works for PJ Media and is a conservative commentator.
In summary: The SPLC has a troubling history. It was founded more to make money than to help poor and minorities with legal aid. Even at the beginning, it focused on big sensational cases that would bring in lots of fundraising cash and dismissed real people in need for being unprofitable. It raised big money in the 80s targeting the KKK, even though it was pretty defunct and powerless by then.
It kept this gravy train going by creating a list of hate groups, taken as gospel by the government and media. Many of these groups don’t exist, consist of a single person with a blog, or are the same group listed multiple times. It’s used to push the narrative that there are more hate groups than ever before (and thus more donations are needed), but that’s just an illusion.
Many of the listed “hate groups” are political enemies of SPLC’s far-left ideology. Any Christian organization is guaranteed to make the SPLC’s enemies list, as are Muslim groups that are opposed to terrorism. These charities become victims of harassment, violence, and cancel culture.
About a third of donations go to actual charitable causes; most is in off-shores accounts and makes the executives extremely wealthy. The SPLC is embroiled in accusations of racism and sexism within its organization. Organizations are starting to fight back with libel and defamation lawsuits.
Language: Clean
Sexual Content: None
Violence: Some mentions of violence in news
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
============================================
The SPLC singles out “hate” on the far-right but not the far-left. It faced a very public sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal. It has a history of raising far more money than it spends n programs and keeping millions in Cayman Island accounts. It has a malleable definition of hate that it applies to its political enemies. It has paid millions to settle a defamation lawsuit after acknowledging it falsely accused someone of being an extremist. Former staffers have admitted that the hate accusations leveled by the SPLC are a “con,” a deceptive scheme to raise money.
“In looking over their fundraising stuff, I could see that they were sensationalizing racial conflict issues, and when their reports on ‘extremist’ groups began appearing it was obviously a bogus fundraising scheme that was into demonizing and blacklisting. It reminded me so much of similar operations that were aimed at leftists during the fifties and sixties, that I concluded it was basically modeled after them.” (Laird Wilcox)
Sadly, many of the news outlets, companies, and donors who look at the SPLC “hate group” list are unlikely to do the research to realize how hilariously sad many of these organizations are, when they even exist. For that reason, [Nathan J.] Robinson wrote, “This whole SPLC set-up strikes me as fraudulent in the extreme.” “They have to know that they’re inflating the danger. They know that when they report ‘over 1,000’ hate groups in America, they’ve deliberately excluded membership numbers in our to sound as scary as possible. They’re perpetuating a deception, because they don’t want you to know that groups like the ‘Asatru Folk Assembly’ are no political threat. The SPLC has continuously sent out terrifying lies to make old people part with their money.”
“The SPLC’s ‘hate group’ accusation is a financial and reputational death sentence, effectively equating organizations to the KKK. No right-thinking person wants to be associated with the KKK, so the SPLC’s ‘hate group’ accusation is incredibly effective at shaming organizations and causing them to be shunned by donors, fundraising platforms, service providers, the media, and others.” (lawyer Megan L. Meier)
Indeed, in 2007, SPLC spokesman Mark Potok explained that the SPLC’s purpose is to destroy its enemies. “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them,” Potok declared.
The SPLC treats Christian organizations the same as abhorrent groups like the KKK and the America[n] Nazi Party just because we promote millennia-old beliefs about marriage and human sexuality that are shared by millions of people of many faiths and of no faith at all. That lack of moral clarity should concern us all. (Jeremy Tedesco)
“They can’t rebut the factual information we’ve developed; they are seeking to deny us platforms, visibility, and now funding,” [Frank Gaffney] said. “Because we are a problem.” He warned that “Sharia supremacists” would wipe out modern concepts of human rights, especially for women, homosexuals, Jew, and Muslims who disagree with the reigning form of Islam. Yet the SPLC frequently cites, defends, and has often coordinated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator with the Holy Land Foundation, which was charged with providing “financial support to the families of Hamas terrorists, detainees, and activists.”
Thinking in terms of the radical identity politics of intersectionality, the SPLC seems to consider Muslims an oppressed minority who therefore cannot be culpable in horrific acts like funding terrorism, having ties to terrorist groups, or harboring anti-Semitism. Many Muslims do desire peace and freedom, but many of those reformers partner with organizations the SPLC considers “anti-Muslim hate groups.” In an attempt to defend Muslims, the SPLC marginalizes anti-terror reformers. “The SPLC ends up becoming a tool of the theocrats—like the Saudis and others who you think they’d disagree with—but they don’t care about what they’re facilitating globally, which is global jihad of the Islamic Republic of Iran or Saudi Arabia.” … The SPLC “just wants to use us Muslims within our identity who reject their identity politic. That’s why they want to label us Islamophobes and bigots. … [The SPLC] are basically doing the work to silence and marginalize the authenticity of the voices of Muslim reform.” [Zuhdi Jasser] In doing so, they echo the work of Islamist regimes across the world.
The SPLC is not an advocate to end racial and ethnic tensions. They’re not working to decrease those, they benefit when we’re at war with one another. [Carol Swain]
Imagine losing the ability to buy groceries, order a taxi or Uber, or make and order online because you are on the record disagreeing with the political views of the establishment. Thanks to the SPLC and their ilk, America has already taken a few terrifying steps in that direction.
There’s a chilling “cancel culture” campaign being waged against patriotic journalists & activists … and apparently, not even Mar-a-Lago is a safe space. … Here’s the real problem: The [SPLC] & [CAIR] seek to silence & eliminate political opponents by redefining criticism of their agenda & tactics as “hate.” These character assassinations exploit sympathetic & lazy journalists, like those at the [Miami Herald] who targeted [ACT for America], [Brigitte Gabriel] & me after receiving an SPLC alert over the weekend about our event. (Michelle Malkin)
In March 2019, Teaching Tolerance encouraged educators to push the idea of “microaggressions”—in first grade! … Apprently, the SPLC thinks six-year-old kids are mature enough to examine schoolyard insults in the light of structural racism. The organization also seems unconcerned about the psychological damage ideas like this can cause. Kids will insult each other and make each other feel bad, “but not all unkindness is the same,” first-grade teacher Bret Turner warns in the article. “It can be particularly detrimental when the hurtful language relates to race, gender, religion or other aspects of a child’s identity. These are microaggressions: small, subtle, sometimes-unintended acts of discrimination.” The SPLC-aligned teacher does not address the fact that focusing on unintentional insults creates a culture of “vindictive protectiveness,” which actually harms students psychologically. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explain in their Atlantic essay … teaching kids to read malice and oppression into unintentional insults involves training them to magnify unimportant episodes and label language and people dangerous. They warned against vindictive protectiveness in college, and children are even more vulnerable in their younger years. “The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.”
In April 2019, sixty-seven nonprofit groups released another open letter to the media, emphasizing the racism and sexism scandal at the SPLC in March. “Today’s SPLC is aggressively anti-Christian and morally bankrupt—both inside and out. It attacks anyone who disagrees with its far-left agenda, smearing them with lies and grossly mischaracterizing their work. All the while SPLC has also been imploding from within, with allegations of sex and race discrimination—which have hounded them for years—finally boiling over with the firing of Dees and the resignation of Cohen,” the letter read. “SPLC has lost all credibility. We call on all media, corporations, social media companies, and financial institutions to immediately stop relying on their discredited and partisan ‘hate’ and ‘extremist’ lists,” the groups concluded.
Laid Wilcox, an extremism expert, has described the SPLC’s tactics as “a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation, however—a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserved to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.” “Anyone attacked by the SPLC is basically up against a contest of resources, from the ability to engage legal counsel, to the access to fairness in media treatment, to the ability to survive the financial destruction of a reputation or a career,” he continued. “What they do is a kind of bullying and stalking. They pick people who are vulnerable in terms of public opinion and simply destroy them. Their victims are usually ordinary people expressing their values, opinions, and beliefs—and they’re up against a very talented and articulate defamation machine.”
America’s polarization seems to be hitting a new fever pitch, with conservatives and liberals mistrusting one another at levels unseen since the Civil War. The SPLC’s work demonizes dissent from its far-left perspective, attempting to cut one half of the political spectrum off from polite society. America needs more dialogue, civility, and humility—not more division, smears, and comparisons to the KKK. If the SPLC is truly serious about helping America, it should drop its demonization tactics and stop trying to hoodwink its donors, the public, and the government. Until then, Americans should take concrete steps to minimize the destructive impact of this corrupt organization.
In summary: The SPLC has a troubling history. It was founded more to make money than to help poor and minorities with legal aid. Even at the beginning, it focused on big sensational cases that would bring in lots of fundraising cash and dismissed real people in need for being unprofitable. It raised big money in the 80s targeting the KKK, even though it was pretty defunct and powerless by then.
It kept this gravy train going by creating a list of hate groups, taken as gospel by the government and media. Many of these groups don’t exist, consist of a single person with a blog, or are the same group listed multiple times. It’s used to push the narrative that there are more hate groups than ever before (and thus more donations are needed), but that’s just an illusion.
Many of the listed “hate groups” are political enemies of SPLC’s far-left ideology. Any Christian organization is guaranteed to make the SPLC’s enemies list, as are Muslim groups that are opposed to terrorism. These charities become victims of harassment, violence, and cancel culture.
About a third of donations go to actual charitable causes; most is in off-shores accounts and makes the executives extremely wealthy. The SPLC is embroiled in accusations of racism and sexism within its organization. Organizations are starting to fight back with libel and defamation lawsuits.
Language: Clean
Sexual Content: None
Violence: Some mentions of violence in news
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
============================================
The SPLC singles out “hate” on the far-right but not the far-left. It faced a very public sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal. It has a history of raising far more money than it spends n programs and keeping millions in Cayman Island accounts. It has a malleable definition of hate that it applies to its political enemies. It has paid millions to settle a defamation lawsuit after acknowledging it falsely accused someone of being an extremist. Former staffers have admitted that the hate accusations leveled by the SPLC are a “con,” a deceptive scheme to raise money.
“In looking over their fundraising stuff, I could see that they were sensationalizing racial conflict issues, and when their reports on ‘extremist’ groups began appearing it was obviously a bogus fundraising scheme that was into demonizing and blacklisting. It reminded me so much of similar operations that were aimed at leftists during the fifties and sixties, that I concluded it was basically modeled after them.” (Laird Wilcox)
Sadly, many of the news outlets, companies, and donors who look at the SPLC “hate group” list are unlikely to do the research to realize how hilariously sad many of these organizations are, when they even exist. For that reason, [Nathan J.] Robinson wrote, “This whole SPLC set-up strikes me as fraudulent in the extreme.” “They have to know that they’re inflating the danger. They know that when they report ‘over 1,000’ hate groups in America, they’ve deliberately excluded membership numbers in our to sound as scary as possible. They’re perpetuating a deception, because they don’t want you to know that groups like the ‘Asatru Folk Assembly’ are no political threat. The SPLC has continuously sent out terrifying lies to make old people part with their money.”
“The SPLC’s ‘hate group’ accusation is a financial and reputational death sentence, effectively equating organizations to the KKK. No right-thinking person wants to be associated with the KKK, so the SPLC’s ‘hate group’ accusation is incredibly effective at shaming organizations and causing them to be shunned by donors, fundraising platforms, service providers, the media, and others.” (lawyer Megan L. Meier)
Indeed, in 2007, SPLC spokesman Mark Potok explained that the SPLC’s purpose is to destroy its enemies. “Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them,” Potok declared.
The SPLC treats Christian organizations the same as abhorrent groups like the KKK and the America[n] Nazi Party just because we promote millennia-old beliefs about marriage and human sexuality that are shared by millions of people of many faiths and of no faith at all. That lack of moral clarity should concern us all. (Jeremy Tedesco)
“They can’t rebut the factual information we’ve developed; they are seeking to deny us platforms, visibility, and now funding,” [Frank Gaffney] said. “Because we are a problem.” He warned that “Sharia supremacists” would wipe out modern concepts of human rights, especially for women, homosexuals, Jew, and Muslims who disagree with the reigning form of Islam. Yet the SPLC frequently cites, defends, and has often coordinated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator with the Holy Land Foundation, which was charged with providing “financial support to the families of Hamas terrorists, detainees, and activists.”
Thinking in terms of the radical identity politics of intersectionality, the SPLC seems to consider Muslims an oppressed minority who therefore cannot be culpable in horrific acts like funding terrorism, having ties to terrorist groups, or harboring anti-Semitism. Many Muslims do desire peace and freedom, but many of those reformers partner with organizations the SPLC considers “anti-Muslim hate groups.” In an attempt to defend Muslims, the SPLC marginalizes anti-terror reformers. “The SPLC ends up becoming a tool of the theocrats—like the Saudis and others who you think they’d disagree with—but they don’t care about what they’re facilitating globally, which is global jihad of the Islamic Republic of Iran or Saudi Arabia.” … The SPLC “just wants to use us Muslims within our identity who reject their identity politic. That’s why they want to label us Islamophobes and bigots. … [The SPLC] are basically doing the work to silence and marginalize the authenticity of the voices of Muslim reform.” [Zuhdi Jasser] In doing so, they echo the work of Islamist regimes across the world.
The SPLC is not an advocate to end racial and ethnic tensions. They’re not working to decrease those, they benefit when we’re at war with one another. [Carol Swain]
Imagine losing the ability to buy groceries, order a taxi or Uber, or make and order online because you are on the record disagreeing with the political views of the establishment. Thanks to the SPLC and their ilk, America has already taken a few terrifying steps in that direction.
There’s a chilling “cancel culture” campaign being waged against patriotic journalists & activists … and apparently, not even Mar-a-Lago is a safe space. … Here’s the real problem: The [SPLC] & [CAIR] seek to silence & eliminate political opponents by redefining criticism of their agenda & tactics as “hate.” These character assassinations exploit sympathetic & lazy journalists, like those at the [Miami Herald] who targeted [ACT for America], [Brigitte Gabriel] & me after receiving an SPLC alert over the weekend about our event. (Michelle Malkin)
In March 2019, Teaching Tolerance encouraged educators to push the idea of “microaggressions”—in first grade! … Apprently, the SPLC thinks six-year-old kids are mature enough to examine schoolyard insults in the light of structural racism. The organization also seems unconcerned about the psychological damage ideas like this can cause. Kids will insult each other and make each other feel bad, “but not all unkindness is the same,” first-grade teacher Bret Turner warns in the article. “It can be particularly detrimental when the hurtful language relates to race, gender, religion or other aspects of a child’s identity. These are microaggressions: small, subtle, sometimes-unintended acts of discrimination.” The SPLC-aligned teacher does not address the fact that focusing on unintentional insults creates a culture of “vindictive protectiveness,” which actually harms students psychologically. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explain in their Atlantic essay … teaching kids to read malice and oppression into unintentional insults involves training them to magnify unimportant episodes and label language and people dangerous. They warned against vindictive protectiveness in college, and children are even more vulnerable in their younger years. “The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.”
In April 2019, sixty-seven nonprofit groups released another open letter to the media, emphasizing the racism and sexism scandal at the SPLC in March. “Today’s SPLC is aggressively anti-Christian and morally bankrupt—both inside and out. It attacks anyone who disagrees with its far-left agenda, smearing them with lies and grossly mischaracterizing their work. All the while SPLC has also been imploding from within, with allegations of sex and race discrimination—which have hounded them for years—finally boiling over with the firing of Dees and the resignation of Cohen,” the letter read. “SPLC has lost all credibility. We call on all media, corporations, social media companies, and financial institutions to immediately stop relying on their discredited and partisan ‘hate’ and ‘extremist’ lists,” the groups concluded.
Laid Wilcox, an extremism expert, has described the SPLC’s tactics as “a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation, however—a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserved to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.” “Anyone attacked by the SPLC is basically up against a contest of resources, from the ability to engage legal counsel, to the access to fairness in media treatment, to the ability to survive the financial destruction of a reputation or a career,” he continued. “What they do is a kind of bullying and stalking. They pick people who are vulnerable in terms of public opinion and simply destroy them. Their victims are usually ordinary people expressing their values, opinions, and beliefs—and they’re up against a very talented and articulate defamation machine.”
America’s polarization seems to be hitting a new fever pitch, with conservatives and liberals mistrusting one another at levels unseen since the Civil War. The SPLC’s work demonizes dissent from its far-left perspective, attempting to cut one half of the political spectrum off from polite society. America needs more dialogue, civility, and humility—not more division, smears, and comparisons to the KKK. If the SPLC is truly serious about helping America, it should drop its demonization tactics and stop trying to hoodwink its donors, the public, and the government. Until then, Americans should take concrete steps to minimize the destructive impact of this corrupt organization.
September 24, 2024
A nice quick read that thoroughly exposes the fraudulent, hyper-partisan nature of the SPLC. O'Neil touches upon all of their many scandals and demonstrates how their definition of "hate" evolved from more or less genuine extremism to anything the liberal elite disagrees with. Most of the people and organizations blacklisted by the radical leftist SPLC are dissidents, not "haters."
May 20, 2024
A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE SPLC’S ‘HATE GROUP’ TARGETING, AND MORE
Conservative author and commentator Tyler O'Neil wrote in the Introduction to this 2020 book, “The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated the Westboro Baptist Church a ‘hate group,’ and I am inclined to agree with them. However, the SPLC made its name by suing the Ku Klux Klan, and its list of ‘hate groups’ grew out of its efforts against the Klan. I emphatically agree that the Westboro Baptist Church is a vile organization that gives Christians a bad name, but I don’t think I would associate it with the KKK. Yet the SPLC includes many more organizations on the ‘hate group’ list, and some organizations are nothing like the Westboro Baptist Church…
“[W]hat kind of organization can be trusted to be the arbiter of such claims?... Certainly, America’s hate arbiter should be unbiased, willing to call out hate on both sides of the political spectrum… The SPLC fails on all of these criteria, and then some. The SPLC singles out ‘hate’ on the far-right but not the far-left. It faced a very public sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal… It has a malleable definition of hate that it applies to its political enemies… Of course, this group has free speech. The SPLC has every legal right to attack what it sees as extremism on only one side of the political spectrum. The problem is, so many Americans act as though this group is a neutral and trustworthy organization when it is not.” (Pg. 6-7)
He continues, “While the SPLC should be disqualified from the role of America’s hate arbiter, corporations, Big Tech companies, media outlets, and even some government entities have seemingly hired this corrupt organization for that position… effectively blacklisting people, and peaceful organizations, for their political views… I refuse to hire this extremely corrupt organization for the position of America’s hate arbiter, and so should you… it has abused the trust of gullible donors, media outlets, companies, and states to enrich itself and attack its enemies.” (Pg. 7-8)
Former SPLC employee Bob Moser “described a key shift in the 1980s, when the group began to focus its efforts on fighting the Ku Klux Klan. While a terrifying force in the 1920s and a strong one in the 1960s, the KKK was a spent force by the 1980s, and the SPLC enjoyed easy legal success against America’s most notorious hate group… idealistic lawyers saw that work as a distraction from the issues they really care about, like getting innocent people off of death row. In fact, the entire legal team besides Dee himself quit in protest, claiming the SPLC had lost its way. The group had exchanged scrappy legal cases helping blacks and poor people for a high-profile campaign against ‘hate’---and that campaign kept expanding.” (Pg. 19)
He points out, “The SPLC’s notoriously handsome founder [Morris Dees] has married at least five women. In one scandalous divorce trial he admitted to sleeping with many women, some of whom were coworkers at the SPLC… Dees seems to have seduced women he met at work, and it wrecked his marriages… The man founded a civil rights organization that did incredible good. But he also had long-standing weaknesses that help put the recent scandal in perspective.” (Pg. 24)
He observes, “When a nonprofit organization is comfortable, it may be natural to expand. But this moment arguably helps explain how the scrappy [SPLC] launched itself on a trajectory to a half-a-billion-dollar endowment, $92 million in overseas equity funds, and millions in Cayman Islands accounts.” (Pg. 44)
He explains, “By the end of the 1980s, Dees knew the KKK jig was up. The SPLC … needed a new host of current villains… The eventual ‘hate group’ list essentially manufactured hate, listing defunct organizations that extremist experts say didn’t exist. According to ‘The Outline,’ the Klanwatch project morphed into the ‘hate group’ list… The shift from Klan-specific monitoring to the vaguer ‘hate’ mission seems to have centered on reporting hate crimes.” (Pg. 75)
He recounts, “The SPLC published a ‘history of the anti-gay movement since 1977’ with the description, ‘Read a timeline of the radical right’s thirty-year crusade against homosexuality.’ … The SPLC’s anti-gay timeline went on to mention Promise Keepers [PK]… The SPLC … quoted [PK] founder Bill McCartney’s declaration that ‘homosexuality is an abomination of Almighty God.’ This declaration, while strongly worded, is hardly unique in the Christian tradition that has long held that position as clearly biblical… This ‘history of the anti-gay movement’ illustrates a deceptive strategy of connecting conservative groups with violence, a strategy that would make the SPLC as notorious on the right as it is on the left.” (Pg. 86)
He continues, “The very idea that Christians could be demonized and could face animus and hatred like Muslims, black people, LGBT people, and other minority groups may strike many Americans as suspect, but … animus against conservative Christians… holds surprising sway in America and the West generally…” (Pg. 95) He adds, “The SPLC faulted many ‘anti-gay’ groups for claiming that there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilia… and that homosexuality is unhealthy---that homosexuals live shorter lives. These ideas may be wrong, but they are not enough to prove that an organization is a ‘hate group’ … The SPLC moved incrementally into more outright demonization of Christian doctrine and conservative activism.” (Pg. 100-101) Later, he suggests, “If this claim is enough to make an organization a ‘hate group,’ then the SPLC should call the Catholic Church a ‘hate group.’ Otherwise, it is being intellectually dishonest.” (Pg. 108)
He contends, “the SPLC seems to consider Muslims an oppressed minority who therefore cannot be culpable in horrific acts like funding terrorism, or harboring anti-Semitism. Many Muslims do desire peace and freedom, but many of those reformers partner with organizations the SPLC considers ‘anti-Muslim hate groups.’ In an attempt to defend Muslims, the SPLC marginalizes anti-terror Muslim reformers.” (Pg. 113)
About Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag, he says, “The SPLC is right on the history of the Confederacy and on the fact that many of these monuments were erected during Jim Crow. But its insistence on removing them is not popular… But the SPLC is committed to the anti-monument crusade. In June 2018, it found out that 110 of the Confederate symbols had been removed, but 1,728 still stood. Yet by that time, the outrage over these monuments seemed to have dissipated, no thanks to the SPLC.” (Pg. 148-149)
He notes, “The white nationalist riots in Charlottesville seem to have supercharged the SPLC’s blacklisting power. While the organization once worked with law enforcement and the FBI, it had little cultural power beyond getting northern liberals to open their pocketbooks… but in recent years the SPLC’s blacklisting power has made impressive strides in big business. Big Tech, and the Democratic Party… its blacklisting operation had some notable victories before the riots---and its influence continued long after the immediate outrage subsided.” (Pg. 153) Later, he adds, ‘Conservative Christian nonprofits have been booted of Amazon Smile for being on the list. Some people have lost their credit card accounts for being on the list.” (Pg. 197)
He asserts, “the SPLC author engaged in guilt by association to tar critics as in league with white supremacists… any opposition to the SPLC’s narrative is a sign of intolerance and hidden white supremacy. This goes to show just how far the organization has drifted in its mission creep. This kind of guilt-by-association tactic has not gone unanswered, however. Many of the organizations falsely branded ‘hate groups’ are fighting back with defamation lawsuits and public-pressure campaigns.” (Pg. 192)
He concludes, “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a corrupt organization that arguably does more harm than good… The SPLC still offers legal representation to people who need it… Yet the vast majority of the SPLC’s public presence and its fund-raising apparatus is tied up with a deceptive, inflated, and arguably defamatory ‘hate group’ list that uses guilt by association to target conservative and Christian organizations, lacing them alongside the Ku Klux Klan… I have worked with and enjoyed the company of employees and leaders of many unjustly accused ‘hate groups’… These people and the organizations they lead do not inspire ‘hate’ as their central purpose, and they treat their ideological opponents with respect.” (Pg. 230-231)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone seeking a critique of the SPLC; but the author’s pro-Christian perspective will cause some others to view the book as unduly slanted.
Conservative author and commentator Tyler O'Neil wrote in the Introduction to this 2020 book, “The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has designated the Westboro Baptist Church a ‘hate group,’ and I am inclined to agree with them. However, the SPLC made its name by suing the Ku Klux Klan, and its list of ‘hate groups’ grew out of its efforts against the Klan. I emphatically agree that the Westboro Baptist Church is a vile organization that gives Christians a bad name, but I don’t think I would associate it with the KKK. Yet the SPLC includes many more organizations on the ‘hate group’ list, and some organizations are nothing like the Westboro Baptist Church…
“[W]hat kind of organization can be trusted to be the arbiter of such claims?... Certainly, America’s hate arbiter should be unbiased, willing to call out hate on both sides of the political spectrum… The SPLC fails on all of these criteria, and then some. The SPLC singles out ‘hate’ on the far-right but not the far-left. It faced a very public sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal… It has a malleable definition of hate that it applies to its political enemies… Of course, this group has free speech. The SPLC has every legal right to attack what it sees as extremism on only one side of the political spectrum. The problem is, so many Americans act as though this group is a neutral and trustworthy organization when it is not.” (Pg. 6-7)
He continues, “While the SPLC should be disqualified from the role of America’s hate arbiter, corporations, Big Tech companies, media outlets, and even some government entities have seemingly hired this corrupt organization for that position… effectively blacklisting people, and peaceful organizations, for their political views… I refuse to hire this extremely corrupt organization for the position of America’s hate arbiter, and so should you… it has abused the trust of gullible donors, media outlets, companies, and states to enrich itself and attack its enemies.” (Pg. 7-8)
Former SPLC employee Bob Moser “described a key shift in the 1980s, when the group began to focus its efforts on fighting the Ku Klux Klan. While a terrifying force in the 1920s and a strong one in the 1960s, the KKK was a spent force by the 1980s, and the SPLC enjoyed easy legal success against America’s most notorious hate group… idealistic lawyers saw that work as a distraction from the issues they really care about, like getting innocent people off of death row. In fact, the entire legal team besides Dee himself quit in protest, claiming the SPLC had lost its way. The group had exchanged scrappy legal cases helping blacks and poor people for a high-profile campaign against ‘hate’---and that campaign kept expanding.” (Pg. 19)
He points out, “The SPLC’s notoriously handsome founder [Morris Dees] has married at least five women. In one scandalous divorce trial he admitted to sleeping with many women, some of whom were coworkers at the SPLC… Dees seems to have seduced women he met at work, and it wrecked his marriages… The man founded a civil rights organization that did incredible good. But he also had long-standing weaknesses that help put the recent scandal in perspective.” (Pg. 24)
He observes, “When a nonprofit organization is comfortable, it may be natural to expand. But this moment arguably helps explain how the scrappy [SPLC] launched itself on a trajectory to a half-a-billion-dollar endowment, $92 million in overseas equity funds, and millions in Cayman Islands accounts.” (Pg. 44)
He explains, “By the end of the 1980s, Dees knew the KKK jig was up. The SPLC … needed a new host of current villains… The eventual ‘hate group’ list essentially manufactured hate, listing defunct organizations that extremist experts say didn’t exist. According to ‘The Outline,’ the Klanwatch project morphed into the ‘hate group’ list… The shift from Klan-specific monitoring to the vaguer ‘hate’ mission seems to have centered on reporting hate crimes.” (Pg. 75)
He recounts, “The SPLC published a ‘history of the anti-gay movement since 1977’ with the description, ‘Read a timeline of the radical right’s thirty-year crusade against homosexuality.’ … The SPLC’s anti-gay timeline went on to mention Promise Keepers [PK]… The SPLC … quoted [PK] founder Bill McCartney’s declaration that ‘homosexuality is an abomination of Almighty God.’ This declaration, while strongly worded, is hardly unique in the Christian tradition that has long held that position as clearly biblical… This ‘history of the anti-gay movement’ illustrates a deceptive strategy of connecting conservative groups with violence, a strategy that would make the SPLC as notorious on the right as it is on the left.” (Pg. 86)
He continues, “The very idea that Christians could be demonized and could face animus and hatred like Muslims, black people, LGBT people, and other minority groups may strike many Americans as suspect, but … animus against conservative Christians… holds surprising sway in America and the West generally…” (Pg. 95) He adds, “The SPLC faulted many ‘anti-gay’ groups for claiming that there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilia… and that homosexuality is unhealthy---that homosexuals live shorter lives. These ideas may be wrong, but they are not enough to prove that an organization is a ‘hate group’ … The SPLC moved incrementally into more outright demonization of Christian doctrine and conservative activism.” (Pg. 100-101) Later, he suggests, “If this claim is enough to make an organization a ‘hate group,’ then the SPLC should call the Catholic Church a ‘hate group.’ Otherwise, it is being intellectually dishonest.” (Pg. 108)
He contends, “the SPLC seems to consider Muslims an oppressed minority who therefore cannot be culpable in horrific acts like funding terrorism, or harboring anti-Semitism. Many Muslims do desire peace and freedom, but many of those reformers partner with organizations the SPLC considers ‘anti-Muslim hate groups.’ In an attempt to defend Muslims, the SPLC marginalizes anti-terror Muslim reformers.” (Pg. 113)
About Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag, he says, “The SPLC is right on the history of the Confederacy and on the fact that many of these monuments were erected during Jim Crow. But its insistence on removing them is not popular… But the SPLC is committed to the anti-monument crusade. In June 2018, it found out that 110 of the Confederate symbols had been removed, but 1,728 still stood. Yet by that time, the outrage over these monuments seemed to have dissipated, no thanks to the SPLC.” (Pg. 148-149)
He notes, “The white nationalist riots in Charlottesville seem to have supercharged the SPLC’s blacklisting power. While the organization once worked with law enforcement and the FBI, it had little cultural power beyond getting northern liberals to open their pocketbooks… but in recent years the SPLC’s blacklisting power has made impressive strides in big business. Big Tech, and the Democratic Party… its blacklisting operation had some notable victories before the riots---and its influence continued long after the immediate outrage subsided.” (Pg. 153) Later, he adds, ‘Conservative Christian nonprofits have been booted of Amazon Smile for being on the list. Some people have lost their credit card accounts for being on the list.” (Pg. 197)
He asserts, “the SPLC author engaged in guilt by association to tar critics as in league with white supremacists… any opposition to the SPLC’s narrative is a sign of intolerance and hidden white supremacy. This goes to show just how far the organization has drifted in its mission creep. This kind of guilt-by-association tactic has not gone unanswered, however. Many of the organizations falsely branded ‘hate groups’ are fighting back with defamation lawsuits and public-pressure campaigns.” (Pg. 192)
He concludes, “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a corrupt organization that arguably does more harm than good… The SPLC still offers legal representation to people who need it… Yet the vast majority of the SPLC’s public presence and its fund-raising apparatus is tied up with a deceptive, inflated, and arguably defamatory ‘hate group’ list that uses guilt by association to target conservative and Christian organizations, lacing them alongside the Ku Klux Klan… I have worked with and enjoyed the company of employees and leaders of many unjustly accused ‘hate groups’… These people and the organizations they lead do not inspire ‘hate’ as their central purpose, and they treat their ideological opponents with respect.” (Pg. 230-231)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone seeking a critique of the SPLC; but the author’s pro-Christian perspective will cause some others to view the book as unduly slanted.
July 25, 2020
Anyone considering donating to SPLC, or using their list of hate groups, should read this first!
July 10, 2024
This book appears to have been thrown together pretty quickly via heavy reliance on one or two long form magazine or journal articles per chapter of the book.
However the sources I personally reviewed were all published by left leaning authors in left leaning publications.
While obviously a hit piece on the organization, which is a genre I normally avoid, this work makes its points in a relatively objective way, acknowledging that the organization’s principles are valid and that it is their failure to follow them that is the real problem, which I found ultimately quite convincing.
However the sources I personally reviewed were all published by left leaning authors in left leaning publications.
While obviously a hit piece on the organization, which is a genre I normally avoid, this work makes its points in a relatively objective way, acknowledging that the organization’s principles are valid and that it is their failure to follow them that is the real problem, which I found ultimately quite convincing.
June 20, 2025
This could have been a good book. The thesis is that the SPLC is corrupt and weaponizes the label hate to increase donations which they just horde. When the book speaks to that it is good. But as a conservative Christian the author spends a great deal of time trying to defend his cause in opposition to the ideology of the SPLC. I agree with him but that’s another book and not relevant to the thesis. You can argue the SPLC is beholden to leftist ideology (which is it) without then spending pages and pages putting forth a right wing ideology.
August 18, 2020
I thought this would be a lot more interesting than it was. Although I learned some interesting and shocking information, I found the writer’s viewpoint to be very conservative. Not really my cup of tea.
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