Profits in the absence of principle
by
DC Larson
Since its 1971 founding, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center has spotlighted repugnant hate groups like the Klan, nazi skinheads, and the militia movement. And the organization has won multi-million dollar judgements, driving bigoted foes into ruin.
All of us who would see a society enriched by diverse cultural influences, one in which every citizen enjoys equality and constitutional protections, hail the important work of hate's indefatigable opponents.
It is indeed good news that in 2015, hate groups have largely vanished. In fact, they have for decades been shrinking in both number and threat.
The SPLC, it would logically follow, would be pleased by its increasing obsolescence. Wasn't the disappearance of hate groups from the landscape a hope, all along?
But rather than celebrate and close its doors, the SPLC has instead sought out new reasons for existence. And the organization seems to have chosen a new mission, that of national thought monitor and pressuring champion of political correctness.
One example of that currently in the news is the organization's concerted drive to label as bigots beyond contempt all who speak against radical Islam and related terrorism.
Beheadings? Rapes? Stonings? Throwing gays from building-tops? Nothing to see here, pooh-poohs the Southern Poverty Law Center, directing its attention instead to anyone who objects.
Too, it has of late recreated itself as something of a feminist foghorn. I know of no cross-burnings outside feminists' homes, but that's of no matter. SPLC crusaders today ignore the remnants of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, preferring to gallop across cable news sets themselves as White Knights for radical feminism.
And even when it does take up its traditional mission, the SPLC is careful to hew closely to liberal Democrat sensibilities.
For instance, though it did in 2000 list the New Black Panthers as a hate group, it fell silent on them following the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the DOJ's refusal to prosecute New Black Party members for open racial intimidation at a polling site, and the ascendence to Democrat vogue of Identity Group tribalism.
Never mind that the New Black Panthers and radical, Sharia Law Islam conflict howlingly with the generally-accepted notions of equality, unity, and fairness that the Southern Poverty Law Center would otherwise enunciate.
For decades, I studied America's hate groups. I read of armed rallies, angry mailings, murders, local market public access television and shortwave radio propaganda broadcasts, fire-bombings, the Turner Diaries, fertilizer bombs, and hysterical efforts to establish 'whites only' Idaho homelands.
Too, I learned of bizarre supposed theological justifications for racial separatism and supremacy, including Christian Identity and the Cress Theory.
More than a little of my research included materials provided by the SPLC. These included nationwide overviews, regional breakdowns, interviews with
hate group opponents at the grassroots level, historical explications, philoso-
phical explorations, and ways in which hate is manifested in educational and electoral political spheres.
But as years passed, I came to view things with a wider lens, one encompassing various interests. And I found that what might seem logical and appropriate when inside a bubble, and considering related parochial issues from only its perspective, can appear problematic and even counterproductive when one leaves that bubble, and considers the general situation.
I was troubled by news media's uncritical embrace of the private and unaccountable SPLC. Talking heads regurgitated its pronouncements as if they were sacrosanct.
And that bias endures. So timepiece-certain is reporters' resort to the wholly autonomous SPLC that whenever hate crimes or allegations of systemic racism are in the news, one can be certain that SPLC spokesman Mark Potack will within moments appear on camera, providing automatic commentary.
How often has a journalist effectively discounted a speaker or organization by observing they had been "listed by the SPLC as a hate group?" Who decided that independent group could issue the final word, its credibility beyond question, and its judgements assumed to be of the same objective and undoubtedly believable quality as, say, the law of gravity?
The Southern Poverty Law Center was not elected by citizens, and its opinions are subjective ones that favor ideological persuasion and may well be based on what might best serve the SPLC's own institutional welfare.
It is entirely possible for an observer to agree with the organization's anti-bigotry message, while understanding that it is flatly wrong for news media to trumpet the SPLC's damning classifications as if they were objective truths, and to fashion all subsequent commentary with them as a yardstick.
And it is more than a bit odd that rank-and-file onlookers who would otherwise insist that the powerful and influential be tightly reined by transparency and democratic checks would, in the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, cast aside such legitimate concerns.
Some might well protest: "But, look at whom the SPLC opposes! Nazis! The KKK! Militias! Racist skinheads! To criticize the SPLC - in any way, and to any degree - serves those haters' cause, and risks locating oneself in their camp!"
That closed argument rings quite like George W. Bush's 'With us, or against us' Iraq War dictum. It holds that there is no legitimacy to question asking, or disagreement despite fundamental consonance.
In recent years, pointed and substantial criticisms of the Southern Poverty Law Center have turned up in decidedly non-right wing outlets. The Progressive magazine, Harpers, The Huffington Post, the Nation, and Counterpunch have all derided the media-ubiquitous organization.
The first of these I encountered was John Egerton's 1988 Progressive article, "Poverty Palace: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Got Rich Fighting the Klan."
Egerton painted a portrait of an organization that basically used the anti-hate crime cause as a vehicle for enrichment and aggrandizement. Masterminding co-founder Morris Dees had realized a tremendously lucrative fundraising operation, one that churned out innumerable contribution appeals using hate as a premise.
The SPLC certainly could point to creditable accomplishments in and out of courtrooms, but many of these dated from the early years. Direct mail solicitations unashamedly exploiting these only cheapened them.
I would learn that big-money inclination was not new. In college, Dees and fellow student Millard Fuller had formed the Fuller and Dees Marketing Group, hawking cookbooks by direct mail.
Farmer would later recall, "Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. 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 waivered in that resolve."
Other early days Dees mail order-advertised products included birthday cakes, rat poison, and tractor seat-cushions. He was in 1998 induced into the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.
(That make-a-buck obsession would remain a Dees trademark, driving his later SPLC. In his 1991 book, "Shades of Gray," Egerton quoted Dees as revealing, "A lot of groups we work with, hand to mouth. Sometimes they're a little envious of us. I'm sorry they feel that way, but I can't do anything about it. We just run our business like a business. Whether it's cakes or causes, it's all the same thing.")
Farmer would reorder his priorities. Later a renowned anti-death penalty attorney, he sold out to Dees in 1965, donated his profits to charity, and went on to found Habitat For Humanity.
Writing in the Nation in 2001, JoAnne Wypijewski said, "No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of America's [hate] groups than millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging [fundraising] letter, 'Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.'"
DiscoverTheNetworks.org observed, "To put Dees' claim in perspective: the Klan, by that time, consisted of no more than 3000 people nationwide - a far cry from the four million members it had boasted in the 1920s. Nonetheless, Wypijewski notes, 'Dees would have his donors believe' that 'militia nuts' are 'lurking around every corner.'"
Another non-right SPLC critic whose name will doubtless be familiar is acclaimed anti-execution attorney, author, and Southern Center for Human Rights director Stephen Bright. He rejected a 2007 University of Alabama School of Law invitation to a Dees event.
His letter of declination read, in part, "I also received the law school's invitation to the presentation of the 'Morris Dees Justice Award...I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been documented by John Egerton, Harper's, the Montgomery Advertiser in its 'Charity of Riches' series, and others.
"The positive contributions Dees has made to justice - most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund-raising potential - are overshadowed by what Harper's described as his 'flagrantly misleading' solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two 'Poverty Palace' buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people - some of moderate or low incomes - who believe his pitches and give to his $175 million operation.He has spent most of what they've sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because he spends so much on fundraising, his operation spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other operations accomplish on shoestring budgets."
In a 2009 Harpers essay titled, "The Church of Morris Dees," Ken Silverstein wrote that after the 1965 dissolution of the Fuller-Dees college-era partnership, Dees "bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a swimming pool, and stables." Silverstein later observed, "Today, the SPLC spends most of its time - and money - on a relentless fundraising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate."
Also in that year, Nation columnist and Counterpunch co-founder Alexander Cockburn termed Dees the "arch-salesman of hate-mongering." According to Cockburn, Dees profited handsomely by, "selling the notion that there's a right resurgence out there in the hinterland, with massed 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."
Cockburn added that, "Since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with [SPLC] fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depiction of a hate-sodden America."
By the time of Cockburn's acidic appraisal, though, I'd already reached a condemnatory conclusion founded on personal experience.
Following the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, I found in my mailbox a three-alarm fundraising appeal from the SPLC. It warned ominously that malicious far-right elements had helped populate those actions, and fueled the general anti-corporate movement.
I was at that time an Iowa Green Party organizer, and knew many who opposed the secrecy-shadowed and undemocratic WTO. Obviously, I didn't know every participant, but I did have a grasp of the movement's ideological sensibility. And I knew that it wasn't anywhere near the right-wing neighborhood.
Cynically - but not unwarrantedly - I reasoned that perhaps the SPLC was latching onto and villifying the anti-WTO movement in hopes of extending its contribution base. Looking for a new bogeyman. Testing the waters, so to speak.
I was put in mind of a Dees quote contained in Egerton's 1988 Progressive article.
"The Klan thing is winding down," the SPLC founder had said. He and that fundraising operation were "looking at some new areas, including in education. Who knows what the SPLC will be doing a year from now?" (In fact, the organization's classroom-angled "Teaching Tolerance" program would later be launched.)
Nothing substantial followed that WTO protest, though, and I saw no new SPLC letters decrying it. Threat levels apparently correlate to contribution potential.
But the SPLC had endeavored to smear the anti-corporate globalism cause of which I'd so proudly been a part, claiming it to be connected to extreme right hate merchants. That single letter had an effect on me that its senders surely did not anticipate. It pushed into my face that the Southern Poverty Law Center considered everyone outside the mainstream of capitalist orthodoxy, regardless of their political point of origin, to be equally, interchangeably suspicious and treacherous.
Just as the Southern Poverty Law Center was from its earliest moments compromised by founder Dees' dollar-lust, it is very much of a political mainstream that abhors difference.
And it has increasingly acted as ideological advocate, while searching out new enemies to star in the constantly churning, fundraising letter machine.
Lamentably, millions of well-intentioned donors who desire to counter criminal ills are fleeced by profiteering pretenders to respectable principle.
It is possible that some who toil within the Southern Poverty Law Center's pricey walls, souls within whom the spark of integrity flashes yet, may do so with pure ambitions. They should not be held blameworthy for organization leaders' political prejudices and poisonous avarice.
But the possible former provides no reason to excuse the miserable latter. Those who would store up riches accrued from others' evils are themselves complicit.
DC Larson
Since its 1971 founding, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center has spotlighted repugnant hate groups like the Klan, nazi skinheads, and the militia movement. And the organization has won multi-million dollar judgements, driving bigoted foes into ruin.
All of us who would see a society enriched by diverse cultural influences, one in which every citizen enjoys equality and constitutional protections, hail the important work of hate's indefatigable opponents.
It is indeed good news that in 2015, hate groups have largely vanished. In fact, they have for decades been shrinking in both number and threat.
The SPLC, it would logically follow, would be pleased by its increasing obsolescence. Wasn't the disappearance of hate groups from the landscape a hope, all along?
But rather than celebrate and close its doors, the SPLC has instead sought out new reasons for existence. And the organization seems to have chosen a new mission, that of national thought monitor and pressuring champion of political correctness.
One example of that currently in the news is the organization's concerted drive to label as bigots beyond contempt all who speak against radical Islam and related terrorism.
Beheadings? Rapes? Stonings? Throwing gays from building-tops? Nothing to see here, pooh-poohs the Southern Poverty Law Center, directing its attention instead to anyone who objects.
Too, it has of late recreated itself as something of a feminist foghorn. I know of no cross-burnings outside feminists' homes, but that's of no matter. SPLC crusaders today ignore the remnants of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, preferring to gallop across cable news sets themselves as White Knights for radical feminism.
And even when it does take up its traditional mission, the SPLC is careful to hew closely to liberal Democrat sensibilities.
For instance, though it did in 2000 list the New Black Panthers as a hate group, it fell silent on them following the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the DOJ's refusal to prosecute New Black Party members for open racial intimidation at a polling site, and the ascendence to Democrat vogue of Identity Group tribalism.
Never mind that the New Black Panthers and radical, Sharia Law Islam conflict howlingly with the generally-accepted notions of equality, unity, and fairness that the Southern Poverty Law Center would otherwise enunciate.
For decades, I studied America's hate groups. I read of armed rallies, angry mailings, murders, local market public access television and shortwave radio propaganda broadcasts, fire-bombings, the Turner Diaries, fertilizer bombs, and hysterical efforts to establish 'whites only' Idaho homelands.
Too, I learned of bizarre supposed theological justifications for racial separatism and supremacy, including Christian Identity and the Cress Theory.
More than a little of my research included materials provided by the SPLC. These included nationwide overviews, regional breakdowns, interviews with
hate group opponents at the grassroots level, historical explications, philoso-
phical explorations, and ways in which hate is manifested in educational and electoral political spheres.
But as years passed, I came to view things with a wider lens, one encompassing various interests. And I found that what might seem logical and appropriate when inside a bubble, and considering related parochial issues from only its perspective, can appear problematic and even counterproductive when one leaves that bubble, and considers the general situation.
I was troubled by news media's uncritical embrace of the private and unaccountable SPLC. Talking heads regurgitated its pronouncements as if they were sacrosanct.
And that bias endures. So timepiece-certain is reporters' resort to the wholly autonomous SPLC that whenever hate crimes or allegations of systemic racism are in the news, one can be certain that SPLC spokesman Mark Potack will within moments appear on camera, providing automatic commentary.
How often has a journalist effectively discounted a speaker or organization by observing they had been "listed by the SPLC as a hate group?" Who decided that independent group could issue the final word, its credibility beyond question, and its judgements assumed to be of the same objective and undoubtedly believable quality as, say, the law of gravity?
The Southern Poverty Law Center was not elected by citizens, and its opinions are subjective ones that favor ideological persuasion and may well be based on what might best serve the SPLC's own institutional welfare.
It is entirely possible for an observer to agree with the organization's anti-bigotry message, while understanding that it is flatly wrong for news media to trumpet the SPLC's damning classifications as if they were objective truths, and to fashion all subsequent commentary with them as a yardstick.
And it is more than a bit odd that rank-and-file onlookers who would otherwise insist that the powerful and influential be tightly reined by transparency and democratic checks would, in the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, cast aside such legitimate concerns.
Some might well protest: "But, look at whom the SPLC opposes! Nazis! The KKK! Militias! Racist skinheads! To criticize the SPLC - in any way, and to any degree - serves those haters' cause, and risks locating oneself in their camp!"
That closed argument rings quite like George W. Bush's 'With us, or against us' Iraq War dictum. It holds that there is no legitimacy to question asking, or disagreement despite fundamental consonance.
In recent years, pointed and substantial criticisms of the Southern Poverty Law Center have turned up in decidedly non-right wing outlets. The Progressive magazine, Harpers, The Huffington Post, the Nation, and Counterpunch have all derided the media-ubiquitous organization.
The first of these I encountered was John Egerton's 1988 Progressive article, "Poverty Palace: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Got Rich Fighting the Klan."
Egerton painted a portrait of an organization that basically used the anti-hate crime cause as a vehicle for enrichment and aggrandizement. Masterminding co-founder Morris Dees had realized a tremendously lucrative fundraising operation, one that churned out innumerable contribution appeals using hate as a premise.
The SPLC certainly could point to creditable accomplishments in and out of courtrooms, but many of these dated from the early years. Direct mail solicitations unashamedly exploiting these only cheapened them.
I would learn that big-money inclination was not new. In college, Dees and fellow student Millard Fuller had formed the Fuller and Dees Marketing Group, hawking cookbooks by direct mail.
Farmer would later recall, "Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. 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 waivered in that resolve."
Other early days Dees mail order-advertised products included birthday cakes, rat poison, and tractor seat-cushions. He was in 1998 induced into the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.
(That make-a-buck obsession would remain a Dees trademark, driving his later SPLC. In his 1991 book, "Shades of Gray," Egerton quoted Dees as revealing, "A lot of groups we work with, hand to mouth. Sometimes they're a little envious of us. I'm sorry they feel that way, but I can't do anything about it. We just run our business like a business. Whether it's cakes or causes, it's all the same thing.")
Farmer would reorder his priorities. Later a renowned anti-death penalty attorney, he sold out to Dees in 1965, donated his profits to charity, and went on to found Habitat For Humanity.
Writing in the Nation in 2001, JoAnne Wypijewski said, "No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of America's [hate] groups than millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging [fundraising] letter, 'Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.'"
DiscoverTheNetworks.org observed, "To put Dees' claim in perspective: the Klan, by that time, consisted of no more than 3000 people nationwide - a far cry from the four million members it had boasted in the 1920s. Nonetheless, Wypijewski notes, 'Dees would have his donors believe' that 'militia nuts' are 'lurking around every corner.'"
Another non-right SPLC critic whose name will doubtless be familiar is acclaimed anti-execution attorney, author, and Southern Center for Human Rights director Stephen Bright. He rejected a 2007 University of Alabama School of Law invitation to a Dees event.
His letter of declination read, in part, "I also received the law school's invitation to the presentation of the 'Morris Dees Justice Award...I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been documented by John Egerton, Harper's, the Montgomery Advertiser in its 'Charity of Riches' series, and others.
"The positive contributions Dees has made to justice - most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund-raising potential - are overshadowed by what Harper's described as his 'flagrantly misleading' solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two 'Poverty Palace' buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people - some of moderate or low incomes - who believe his pitches and give to his $175 million operation.He has spent most of what they've sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because he spends so much on fundraising, his operation spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other operations accomplish on shoestring budgets."
In a 2009 Harpers essay titled, "The Church of Morris Dees," Ken Silverstein wrote that after the 1965 dissolution of the Fuller-Dees college-era partnership, Dees "bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a swimming pool, and stables." Silverstein later observed, "Today, the SPLC spends most of its time - and money - on a relentless fundraising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate."
Also in that year, Nation columnist and Counterpunch co-founder Alexander Cockburn termed Dees the "arch-salesman of hate-mongering." According to Cockburn, Dees profited handsomely by, "selling the notion that there's a right resurgence out there in the hinterland, with massed 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."
Cockburn added that, "Since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with [SPLC] fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depiction of a hate-sodden America."
By the time of Cockburn's acidic appraisal, though, I'd already reached a condemnatory conclusion founded on personal experience.
Following the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, I found in my mailbox a three-alarm fundraising appeal from the SPLC. It warned ominously that malicious far-right elements had helped populate those actions, and fueled the general anti-corporate movement.
I was at that time an Iowa Green Party organizer, and knew many who opposed the secrecy-shadowed and undemocratic WTO. Obviously, I didn't know every participant, but I did have a grasp of the movement's ideological sensibility. And I knew that it wasn't anywhere near the right-wing neighborhood.
Cynically - but not unwarrantedly - I reasoned that perhaps the SPLC was latching onto and villifying the anti-WTO movement in hopes of extending its contribution base. Looking for a new bogeyman. Testing the waters, so to speak.
I was put in mind of a Dees quote contained in Egerton's 1988 Progressive article.
"The Klan thing is winding down," the SPLC founder had said. He and that fundraising operation were "looking at some new areas, including in education. Who knows what the SPLC will be doing a year from now?" (In fact, the organization's classroom-angled "Teaching Tolerance" program would later be launched.)
Nothing substantial followed that WTO protest, though, and I saw no new SPLC letters decrying it. Threat levels apparently correlate to contribution potential.
But the SPLC had endeavored to smear the anti-corporate globalism cause of which I'd so proudly been a part, claiming it to be connected to extreme right hate merchants. That single letter had an effect on me that its senders surely did not anticipate. It pushed into my face that the Southern Poverty Law Center considered everyone outside the mainstream of capitalist orthodoxy, regardless of their political point of origin, to be equally, interchangeably suspicious and treacherous.
Just as the Southern Poverty Law Center was from its earliest moments compromised by founder Dees' dollar-lust, it is very much of a political mainstream that abhors difference.
And it has increasingly acted as ideological advocate, while searching out new enemies to star in the constantly churning, fundraising letter machine.
Lamentably, millions of well-intentioned donors who desire to counter criminal ills are fleeced by profiteering pretenders to respectable principle.
It is possible that some who toil within the Southern Poverty Law Center's pricey walls, souls within whom the spark of integrity flashes yet, may do so with pure ambitions. They should not be held blameworthy for organization leaders' political prejudices and poisonous avarice.
But the possible former provides no reason to excuse the miserable latter. Those who would store up riches accrued from others' evils are themselves complicit.
posted by DC Larson at
June 05, 2015
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