In 2010, SPLC labeled the Christian group Family Research Council as a hate group. The justification? The group “hates” the LGBT community because they object to policies supported by that community, such as hate crime laws, gay marriage, and gay scout leaders. SPLC claims Family Research Council has embraced “junk science” to raise concerns about LGBT parenting. Instead of taking issue with that “junk science” in the marketplace of ideas, SPLC simply labels these organizations with a debate-killing epithet.
Soon after Family Research Council appeared on the hate list, the organization was the target of a politically motivated shooting in 2012. Telling a security guard at the organization’s Virginia headquarters that he disagreed with the group’s politics, a twenty-eight-year-old gay rights volunteer carrying a 9 mm handgun and fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches opened fire. The shooter later told investigators he planned to shoot as many people as possible and then smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces as a political statement.
Conservative backlash to SPLC following the attack received muted media coverage of the “conservatives pounce” variety, suggesting there was no way to know for sure whether SPLC’s hate designation motivated the shooter. The shooter himself laid those concerns to rest in subsequent interviews with federal investigators. In video obtained from the FBI by Family Research Council, the shooter can be heard saying, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
Even as SPLC points the finger at the tiniest organizations on the right, major violent movements like Antifa on the left get a pass. The group has lobbed bricks and glass bottles at police, thrown Molotov cocktails and smashed windows on the University of California, Berkeley campus, slashed tires of right-wing activists, and doxxed 1,595 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers by publishing their names and photographs. Despite Antifa’s pattern of violence, SPLC president Richard Cohen told Congress, “Antifa is not a group that vilifies people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and the like.” He told the Washington Free Beacon in 2017, “There might be forms of hate out there that you may consider hateful, but it’s not the type of hate we follow.” We all know what type of “hate” they follow.
What’s not hateful to the SPLC? Apparently when the governor of Virginia, a Democrat, appears in a yearbook photo allegedly either wearing blackface or dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, that incident merits no response from the fighters of hate at SPLC. When it comes to hate on the left, SPLC’s approach is to see no evil, hear no evil.
In the fight against hate and intolerance on the right, SPLC deploys both. The results are nothing if not profitable. The organization sits on a $471 million endowment. In 2017, thanks in part to the anger resulting from the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, SPLC raised $132 million.
Public reporting indicates SPLC has moved $121 million to offshore accounts. The reports don’t indicate how the offshore dollars are invested, but in its 2015 business tax filings, Southern Poverty Law Center reported having bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands. The Cayman Islands is a well-known tax haven. An investigation by the Washington Free Beacon uncovered tax forms showing transfers to Cayman Islands bank accounts and foreign partnerships totaling millions of dollars.
With its vaunted history of winning lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, the organization attracts idealists. But the firing of cofounder Morris Dees in early 2019 amid allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism exposed the internal contradictions of an organization infected with the very intolerance it is paid to fight.
SPLC bills itself as “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.” In reality, former SPLC employee and writer Bob Moser said, it was hard for employees not to “feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”
The posh Alabama headquarters (snarkily referred to by employees as “the Poverty Palace”) is focused on fund-raising programs, not civil rights lawsuits. Karl Zinmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable reports that SPLC has never spent more than 31 percent of its donations on fighting hate and intolerance. In some years, he reports, that number has dropped to as little as 18 percent, far less than the fund-raising budget.
Its two largest expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual lists of “haters” and “extremists,” and running a big effort that pushes “tolerance education” through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. And the single biggest effort undertaken by the SPLC? Fundraising. On the organization’s 2015 IRS 990 form it declared $10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.
The bad publicity following the firing of Morris Dees resulted in the resignation of SPLC president Richard Cohen as the group faces perhaps the worst public relations disaster in its history. To help navigate the problem, the Daily Wire reports they’ve hired the former chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, Tina Tchen. She will lead an internal investigation into alleged racial and gender bias.
You may have heard of Tchen. She played a role in getting hate crime charges against actor Jussie Smollett dropped. A grand jury had indicted the actor from the television series Empire with sixteen counts of disorderly conduct after police found evidence he had falsely reported a hate crime. The actor had alleged an attack in January 2019 in which he claimed he was assaulted by two men who put a noose around his neck, doused him in chemicals, and said, “This is MAGA country.” The allegations described precisely the type of crime that fills SPLC coffers with donations from angry progressives.
In a text message to Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx, Tchen wrote, “I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation.” Foxx emailed back saying, “Spoke to the Superintendent [Eddie] Johnson” and “convinced him to reach out to FBI to ask that they take over the investigation.” Presumably Tchen’s intervention helped Foxx connect with a member of Smollett’s family. In subsequent texts between that family member and Foxx, Foxx reassured the family member, writing, “Spoke to the superintendent earlier, he made the ask. Trying to figure out logistics. I’ll keep you posted.” To which Smollett’s undisclosed relative replied, “Omg this would be a huge victory.” Foxx responded that she would “make no guarantees, but I’m trying.”
Just one month after his arrest, the charges against Smollett for faking a hate crime were mysteriously dropped. There would be no prosecution. The case was closed. The record was sealed. Smollett did not even have to take responsibility for a hate crime hoax that targeted Trump supporters and undermined the credibility of other hate crimes going forward.
You know which nonprofit should be really upset about this? That’s right. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead, they decided Tina Tchen was the person they should rely on to get to the bottom of their own racism and bigotry. Obviously, they are very serious about that. The extent to which these nonprofit charities are tied together with progressive politics and politicians is laid bare.