How much do you really know about the SPLC and their agenda?
The Spring 2010 issue of an online journal, The Social Contract, published seventeen articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center by various scholars and journalists. In an article entitled “SPLC: America’s Left-Wing Hate Machine,” journalist Jerry Woodruff wrote of how the SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, proudly received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU in 1990. Baldwin was a self-proclaimed communist who is quoted by Woodruff as having written such things as “I am for socialism” and “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class . . . . Communism is the goal.”
Baldwin was a companion of “Red Emma” Goldman, who publicly advocated murder and violence to further a communist revolution in America. She was eventually deported, and Baldwin wrote to her, “you always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life,” Woodruff documented in his article.
Morris Dees’s cheerful acceptance of an award that is associated with such despicable characters is not an isolated example of the extremist background of the SPLC’s staff and directors. SPLC Director James Rucker is also the executive director of an organization called “Color of Change” that was founded by one Van Jones, who was forced to resign from the Obama administration after online videos appeared showing him publicly describing himself as an advocate of”urban Marxism” and “Third World Communism.”
Perhaps the most absurd thing the SPLC does is to sponsor a Web site called “Tolerance.org” and to purportedly teach “tolerance” in primary and secondary schools. The man in charge of Tolerance.org is none other than William Ayers, the “Weather Underground” terrorist of the 1960s who admitted to setting off bombs at the U.S. Capitol building in his youth.”I don’t regret setting the bombs,” Ayers told the New York Times on October 4, 2008. “I feel we didn’t do enough” bombing, he said.
It was the SPLC that spread the false stories during the Clinton administration that there was an “epidemic” of fires at predominantly black churches in the South. Investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere quickly proved the story to be false.
In a Social Contract article entitled “Bashing for Dollars: The SPLC’s Predatory Game,” Brenda Walker writes that by 2005 the organization had an endowment of $174 million. “Very little of the hoard is spent on actual civil rights work,” writes Walker. “The major products are smear campaigns,”which are essentially fundraising campaigns.
In an article entitled “The Church of Morris Dees” in the November 2000 issue of Harper’s magazine Ken Silverstein noted that the SPLC spends such a high percentage of its revenue on salaries, perks, and fundraising that “The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst rankings of any[nonprofit] group it monitors.”
Left leaning journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote in the New York Press in 2007, “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million…”
In Liberty
Michael Gaddy