SPLC - Southern Poverty Law Center hate group

Rather than engage in a debate, La Raza and its allies have waged a campaign to have the other side shunned by the press, civil society, and elected officials. It is an effort to destroy the reputations of its targets. It also seeks to intimidate and coerce others into silence. It undermines basic principles of civil society and democratic discussion...

SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok doesn’t mince words about illegal-immigration opponents:

“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on … I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.…” [Watch video]...

Though trained as a lawyer, [SPLC Founder Morris] Dees is best known for his fundraising ability...

With over $238 million in net assets, the SPLC is one of the wealthiest nonprofit organizations in the United States. Despite this massive endowment, the Center devotes almost 20 percent of its $34.5 million operating expenses – $6.5 million in 2011 – to fundraising. This includes $1 million for fundraising services and $5.5 million in fundraising staff salaries and administrative expenses.

Meanwhile, the group spent only $11 million on its supposed primary mission: “providing legal services to victims of civil rights injustices and hate crimes.”...

Dees and [partner Millard Fuller] were in hot pursuit of their first million dollars, and each of them reached that goal in 1964. "Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," Fuller wrote in a book some years later. "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."

What has infuriated the SPLC’s liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has used the SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his direct-mail talents that generates a nice living for himself (the SPLC’s 2010 tax filing lists a compensation package of $345,000 for him as the organization’s chief trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high ranking SPLC officials plus luxurious offices and perks, but that does relatively little in the way of providing the legal services to poor people that its name implies.

CharityWatch (formerly the American Institute of Philanthropy), an independent organization that monitors and rates leading nonprofits for their fundraising efficiency, has consistently given the SPLC its lowest grade of “F” (i.e., “poor”) for its stockpiling of assets far beyond what CharityWatch deems a reasonable reserve (three years’ worth of operating expenses) to tide it over during donation-lean years. But even if the SPLC weren’t sitting on an unspent $256 million, according to CharityWatch, it would still be a mediocre (“C+”) performer among nonprofits.

There have never been any left-wing groups on the SPLC’s lengthy list of "hate groups." It’s "Hate Watch" Web site clearly states that it is supposedly "Keeping and Eye on the Radical Right." There is no mention of the Radical Left, such as the organizations the SPLC’s board members all have founded or belong to and associate with. When pressed, the professional political haters at the SPLC will admit, as Mark Potok, author of the laughingly-named "Intelligence Report" did, that his "hate group" list is "all about ideology," as Menzies writes.

The sun is dipping low in the evening sky over the Republican Party as the Other Leading Brand... It's also horrible news for people who raise money and make money selling the notion there's a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of "Mein Kampf" tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.

What is the arch-salesman of hate mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now?...

Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: It's their staple.

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."

... human nature being what it is, there always seems to be a lump of coal lurking among the sugarplums. We were reminded of this unpleasant fact again by a Journal reader in Arlington who considered making a contribution to the Southern Poverty Law Center, listed as No. 0454 in the Combined Federal Campaign...

In fact, unknown to most CFC donors, the tax-exempt SPLC flunked an audit by the Arlington-based Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, which requires that "a reasonable percentage, at least 50 percent of total income from all sources, should be applied to programs and activities directly related to the purposes for which the organization exists."

...SPLC...spent 89 percent of its total income on fund-raising and administrative costs...

Granted, administrative costs tend to run high when executive salaries are in the six-figure range. For example,... Morris Dees, SPLC's chief trial lawyer, pulls down a cool $280,699...

... give your hard-earned dollars to a real charity, not a bunch of slick, parasitic hucksters who live high on the hog by raising money on behalf of needy people who never see a dime of it.

...Morris Dees [founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center] won a judgment for a black woman whose son was killed by Klansmen. She received $51,875 as settlement. Mr. Dees, according to an investigation by the Montgomery Advertiser, pulled in $9 million from fund-raising solicitation letters that featured a particularly gruesome photograph of the grieving mother's son. Mr. Dees, who pays himself an annual salary of $275,000, offered the grieving mother none of the $9 million her son's death made for him.

Mr. Dees, in fact, earns - or is paid, which is not necessarily the same thing - more than nearly any officer of other advocacy groups surveyed by the National Journal, more than the chairmen of the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children's Defense Fund.

"You are a fraud and a con man," Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which actually takes on dozens of death-penalty appeals for poor blacks every year, once told him. "You spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly."...

White guilt can be manipulated with black pain, but it has to be done carefully. It's a sordid scam. Some people would call what Morris Dees does a hate crime, but it's a living, and a very good one.

To make a long story short, out of the blue, the Southern Poverty Law Center put Ranch Rescue Colorado on their notorious Hate Map. Apparently, for the SPLC, the mere act of defending a White person before the INS was all the evidence they needed to brand our organization as "anti-immigrant" and racist. All of a sudden, our support for the Afrikaaner woman became toxic to her case and the INS dismissed her claim of political, racial and religious persecution and had her deported back to South Africa, where she was murdered shortly after her return.

Can you believe it? The Denver Pravda Post called the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform a hate group! Here's the article: Colorado had 16 hate groups in 2015, says Southern Poverty Law Center.

What a hoot!

Can you imagine? The discredited SPLC moneymaking machine has christened the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform a hate group!

CAIRCO.org has been active in Colorado since the mid 1990s. Our primary focus is - and always has been - issues of sustainability, and the environmental and societal consequences of unending immigration-driven population growth.

Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."

Unfortunately, the SPLC is in a (bottom-dwelling) class of their own. They aren't capable of debating serious issues on their own merits, so they presumptuously resort to name calling in faltering attempts at intimidation.

You know, that's a formal debating tactic. It's called an ad hominem attack - something to be used in last resort when all serious logical arguments fail. As such, we really can't consider the SPLC an enemy of substance. But they tried.

I am embarrassed for Noelle Phillips and the Denver Post for regurgitating this tripe without surmounting the modicum of energy required to initiate even so much as a perfunctory email to CAIRCO to confirm this imputation. Can you smell media laziness? Media bias?

In any case, it's an honor - albeit an indiscernible one - to be included on the hateful SPLC's hate list.

Fred Elbel
Director, Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform
CAIRCO.org