National Review Online
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
In 1994, the Montgomery
Advertiser reported that the Southern Poverty Law Center was a toxic
atmosphere for its black employees, who said they “felt threatened and banded
together.” At the time, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees pooh-poohed the report,
claiming that the “most discriminated people in America today are white men
when it comes to jobs.” This month, SPLC employees notified management that
“allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and
racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity
along with it.” Dees, 82, was fired.
By any fair or rigorous standard, it’s difficult to
impugn Dees’s character based on either the old charge of racial discrimination
or the current, still-vague allegations. But Dees’s leadership of the SPLC has
done enough to impugn his character, and by the SPLC’s own standard, both
incidents could be enough to designate the organization a “hate group.” Far
from being a nonpartisan watchdog genuinely dedicated to exposing racism and
extremism, the SPLC has spent recent decades stoking fear and hostility for fun
and funds. That is Dees’s legacy as he departs.
The SPLC’s estrangement from its former moral authority
is an open secret. Yale law professor Stephen Bright, former director of the
Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, told the Los Angeles Times that “Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed
to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about
the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will
sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of
dollars.” SPLC assets reached $477 million in 2017.
Hate groups, in Dees’s junk-mail pitches, are forever on
the march, always growing, always metastasizing in sinister new ways. These
fears were built on smears: Dees would make ever more absurd claims about
right-leaning individuals and groups, labeling scholars and intellectuals such
as Charles Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Christina Hoff Sommers soldiers of
hatred to attract publicity, which in turn would stoke the fundraising furnace.
The Center for Immigration Studies and the Alliance Defending Freedom were
absurdly designated hate groups, as was the Family Research Council for its
traditional views on gay marriage. In 2012 a shooter who picked his target off
the SPLC’s “hate map” marched into FRC’s offices and shot an unarmed security
guard.
The SPLC hustle has become so brazen, the group was
lately starting to receive skeptical coverage even from left-leaning media
outlets. Last year, liberal Muslim Maajid Nawaz sued the SPLC for calling him
an “anti-Muslim extremist.” It settled the lawsuit for $3.4 million and an
apology, but its grift continued apace.
Lumping together neo-Nazis and distinguished authors is a
vile, shameless tactic in which much of the mainstream media has been complicit
for many years by treating the SPLC as a neutral umpire instead of a wildly and
unabashedly partisan activist group. (“We’re not really set up to cover the
extreme Left,” a spokesperson told NR in 2012.) Dees’s SPLC took a nominal
stance against hatred, but its true mission was to profit from hate-mongering.
While we doubt new leadership will solve the SPLC’s problem, we’re nonetheless
happy to see him go.
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