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XPost: atl.general
The Southern Poverty Law Center was long ago exposed as money-
making scam.
It has amassed almost half-a-billion dollars fighting an
imaginary tide of “hate” that is ever “rising,” which provides
the twin benefits of bringing in that money and advancing the
totalitarian goals of the radical Left. Topping that agenda is
demonizing any opposition to the Left as “hate,” be it racism,
homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia.
But last week, the discredited group fired its co-founder,
Morris Dees, a shocker in the “civil rights community” that
opened the door to discussing exactly who Dees is and what goes
on at SPLC, also called the Poverty Palace.
Former SPLC staff member Bob Moser took to the New Yorker
yesterday to elaborate on what we’ve known for some time: The
SPLC is, again, a money-making scam. But he revealed that truth
from the inside.
Until Justice Rolls Down Like Dollars
A detailed report in the Los Angeles Times explained that SPLC
fired Dees likely because of the long-term abuse of women and
blacks at the organization.
Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the
Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, told the Times that
SPLC’s fundraising is “fraudulent,” and called Dees 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.”
The flim-flam man’s career is officially over, and Moser offers
a few insights that open with an amusing but telling vignette:
I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I
used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the
center’s Maya Lin-designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs,
we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King,
Jr., etched into the black marble — “Until justice rolls down
like waters”— and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice
rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning
idealists into cynics.
Working in a building that “made social justice ‘look
despotic,’” the earnest young leftist quickly learned that
fighting hate involved a lot of hypocrisy and a lot more money.
Of the hypocrisy, Moser wrote, blacks at SPLC were almost
uniformly “administrative and support staff — ‘the help,’ one of
my black colleagues said pointedly.” But the “‘professional
staff’ — the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations
officers, and fund-raisers — were almost exclusively white. Just
two staffers, including me, were openly gay.”
Of the money-making, Moser quotes another of Dees’s critics, who
says Dees viewed “civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool
for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”
So beyond Dees’s having a “reputation for hitting on young
women,” SPLC is just a storefront for selling the “fight against
hate” to make a pile of money. “The work could be meaningful and
gratifying,” Moser wrote. “But it was hard, for many of us, not
to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a
highly profitable scam.”
SPLC, a former staff member said to Moser, was a “virtual buffet
of injustices.”
Moser eventually admits that he and other staffers didn’t care
enough about their own integrity to blow the whistle:
Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in
Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security
regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that,
though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism,
“hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than
ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—
making hate pay,” we’d say.
It wasn’t funny then. At this moment, it seems even grimmer.
But Moser and this coworkers participated in the “making hate
pay.”
No Objections at All to What SPLC Did
Not once in this half-apology for joining this massive fraud did
Moser express sorrow for helping smear innocent conservatives.
Aside from defaming mainstream conservatives, SPLC’s application
of the “hate group” label inspired an attempted mass murder at
the Family Research Council.
But Moser’s concern was this: “As critics have long pointed out,
however, the hate-group designations also drive attention to the
extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family
Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise
considerable money by decrying the S.P.L.C.’s ‘attacks.’”
Moser never admits that the SPLC’s “extremist” and “hate”
designations are either bogus or highly suspect, or that the
designated targets don’t really exist. Nor does he mention that
SPLC faces multiple lawsuits alleging defamation, mail fraud and
violations of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt
Organizaitions Act.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/31809-former- staffer-admits-splc-is-a-money-making-scam
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