The Southern Poverty Law Center, Part One

A National Policy Institute Staff Report
January 2007: Issue Number 701
All NPI publications can be found at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/publications

Overview

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) ranks among the foremost vigilant of left-wing organizations working to thwart the impact and activities of right wing “extremist” groups in the U.S. The SPLC has positioned itself, arguably second to only the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in terms of fundraising, influence and effectiveness, as the leading Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that serves as a domestic surveillance operation in monitoring and disrupting their adversaries. For more than 30 years, the SPLC has cultivated a carefully crafted image in the mass media as an objective and reliable source of information on America’s far-right fringe groups, and as an intrepid campaigner for civil rights and racial egalitarianism. However, critics from across the ideological spectrum have detected in the SPLC’s modus operandi an ideologically driven agenda that relies upon manufactured or distorted information in a smear campaign against its enemies by alleging “links” between them and extremist individuals and groups. Through adroit manipulation of such, often ethereal, “links” in its propaganda, the SPLC has often been able to smear its opponents far more effectively in the public arena than Sen. Joe McCarthy and his allies. Unlike McCarthy’s critics, who helped create a political backlash over “guilt by association” tactics, the SPLC has waged an effective smear campaign with flawed “guilt by linkage” affiliations.

The SPLC has won a series of lawsuits against far-right fringe groups in the past, winning large but uncollectible judgments, then using the cases for its highly successful fundraising efforts. The SPLC has its charity base among wealthy leftists and has amassed a war chest in excess of $150 million. It continues to come under scrutiny for its fund-raising practices as a non-profit organization,and year afteryear receives unreliableratings from charity watchdog groups for stockpiling charitable funds. The following two-part report documents the SPLC’s own ideological campaigns to discredit individuals on the political right, and shows the extent of the group’s influence and selective manipulation of facts to exaggerate the threat that “hate groups” pose to the security of the nation. Moreover, it illustrates the SPLC’s own extremist agenda by citing information on its own website, and its subsidiary’s website, Tolerance.org, which reveals the SPLC’s ideological and political agenda as a far-left organization with an actual agenda far from that of its public image.

Part II will continue with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s methods, fundraising tactics, and efforts to influence law enforcement.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction—Overview & summary

II. Morris Dees—Bio & background on co-founder

III. Political Orientation—SPLC’s ideological agenda

IV. Methods—political tactics to smear the right and minimize the influence of the radical left

The perception in some circles in the black community is that of this great freedom fighter out there attempting to serve the best interests of the poor, oppressed and black. I think the reality is totally different. I think the reality—and this is not a knock against Morris [Dees] personally—is that the center is guilty of some of the same things that they are out there protesting against and filing lawsuits over.

—Donald Jackson, a black former intern who now is a private attorney.

I. Introduction

Founded in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) bills itself as the foremost monitor of white supremacist, far-right extremist organizations in the United States. The SPLC is the brainchild of Morris Dees who, along with law partner and SPLC co-founder Joe Levin, originally “borrowed $2,500 from a bank to open the law center.”¹ Dees, Levin, and other organizers of the SPLC are former activists in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. As a chief fundraiser for the McGovern campaign in 1972, and fund-raiser for other Democratic presidential candidates, Dees has established the benchmark in direct mail fundraising for an important left-wing constituency: wealthy, civil rights activists and egalitarian radicals.

Today, with a budget in excess of $150 million and a large, fortress-fortified staff headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, the SPLC has positioned itself as the arch adversary of the far right, primarily white nationalists, but also grassroots social conservatives. What began as an organization that primarily monitored various Klan and neo-Nazi factions has evolved into a mission with a wider scope, which now encompasses anyone who is perceived to be “intolerant” of left-wing causes: Anti-abortion activists, religious social conservatives—the so-called “religious right”—cultural conservatives, the “patriot” movement, militias, professors who study racial differences and behavior genetics, immigration reform activists, conservationists, traditional family advocates, “neo-confederates,” anti-tax protestors, and “other” assorted extremists.

The SPLC aggressively promotes a radical left-wing agenda that seeks the transformation of American society—a society that reflects a more diverse population and one that is less homogeneous—but works to achieve this larger agenda by actively supplanting the work of their adversaries under the banner of “tolerance” and racial equality. The SPLC publishes a quarterly Intelligence Report on “hate groups”—what it characterizes as the “racialist, patriotic, and anti-Semitic” fringe of the far-right—and tracks various “hate crimes” around the country. It briefs law enforcement agencies on the “terrorist threat” of domestic “hate groups” while minimizing the threat of illegal ethnic gangs, militant leftists or Islamic extremists. The SPLC’s sister organization, Tolerance.org, has established a foothold in the education establishment by providing supplemental materials and workshops to educators for classroom instruction. The editorial advisory board of its bi-annual publication, Teaching Tolerance, includes Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles, black historian John Hope Franklin, and “artist/architect” Maya Lin. Civil rights activist Julian Bond sits on the SPLC board. In the image of the nation’s elite institutions (philanthropic organizations, the mass media, corporations, and academe), the SPLC’s agenda and activities are viewed as noble pursuits: Bringing to justice perpetrators of “hate crimes,” exposing the activities of “white supremacists” and other far-right “domestic terrorism” conspirators, and waging an ideological campaign against “intolerance” that seeks to define America’s national identity as a boundlessly diverse, multiethnic, multicultural, immigrant-enriched melting pot.

As a nonprofit organization, the SPLC serves multiple roles: A watchdog organization that bolsters its image as a quasi-intelligence apparatus, disseminating information to state, local and federal authorities as well as the mass media on “far right” groups, perpetrators of “hate crimes,” and the prospective threat of domestic terrorism from “white supremacists;” a litigious crusader in the name of “hate crime” victims that has waged a relentless campaign to bankrupt the “racialist fringe” with costly litigation offensives in several high-profile cases; an ideological partisan enterprise aggressively targeting conservatives with smear-orchestrated offensives in order to ruin careers and, more importantly, on the subject of open and uninhibited commentary on racial differences, restrict the range of publicly acceptable commentary to an egalitarian perspective (labeling anyone who freely invokes the idea of racial differences as a “white supremacist”); a fund-raising organization that solicits direct-mail contributions from its radical-left base (wealthy ex-Marxists) in order to capitalize on sensationalistic activities of their adversaries—from the far-right fringe to religious social conservatives, such as Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. The SPLC’s targets constitute a host of divergent individuals and groups on the political right—from university professors to political and religious grassroots activists to white nationalist leaders—in a quest to sanitize the nation’s political and social traditions, eliminate any vestiges of racial consciousness on the part of America’s majority population, and minimize the political effectiveness of right-wing organizations with charges of “ties” to far-right “extremists.” What initially was an effort to monitor extreme political organizations on the far right fringe—such as the various Klan and neo-Nazi groups—has expanded to encompass Southern heritage organizations, the national Taxpayers’ Party (now the Constitution Party), elements of the “religious right,” patriotic civic organizations, anti-abortion groups, and at least one neoconservative think tank: the American Enterprise Institute.

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