The confidence man in the mailbox

Charlatans who pile private bounty by exploiting others' decent passions merit merciless condemnation.

Since its 1971 founding, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center has spotlighted repugnant hate groups. The organization won multi-million dollar judgments, driving bigoted foes into deserved despair.

It is good news that hate groups have today largely vanished. 

The SPLC should be pleased by its increasing obsolescence. Wasn't the disappearance of hate groups from the landscape a hope, all along?

Rather than celebrate and close its doors, though, the SPLC contrived new pulse-quickening causes.

Radical Islamic adherents beheaded and burned alive 'heretics,' and imprisoned, oppressed, and tortured women and gays. But the SPLC did not consistently decry Dark Ages foot soldiers, instead lobbing mouth grenades at Trump and his base for supposed anti-Muslim sentiment.  

Radical Islamic vows to overturn Constitutional protections, establish Sharia Law, and despoil our culture of enlightenment and equality certainly gave reason for rock-ribbed SPLC denouncements. 

Or, at least, so logic would dictate.

More SPLC opportunity came with the spread of radical Islam-sympathetic Antifa / Resistance terrorism. The fascistic effort scorned Americans' rights to speak and assemble, as well as to express themselves democratically..

But the SPLC refused to condemn either it or calls for statues' pull-downs, that buildings and boulevards be renamed, or other Cultural Revolution-type agitations for historical revisionism. 

Just as the ACLU had in 2017 rejected matter-of-principle free speech defense, the SPLC chose to stand at the side of Leftist intolerance.

It further recreated itself as a feminist foghorn. No cross-burnings outside Gloria Steinem Manor had been reported, but that was irrelevant. SPLC crusaders ignored the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, they galloped across cable news sets as lance-hefting White Knights for Third Wave feminism.

Indictments of the Southern Poverty Law Center have for years turned up, even in non-conservative outlets like the Progressive 

magazine, Harpers, The Huffington Post, the Nation, and 

Counterpunch.

The article "Poverty Palace: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Got Rich Fighting the Klan," was in 1988 produced by John Egerton for the Progressive. 

By his telling, the organization rode the anti-hate crime cause as a vehicle for enrichment and aggrandizement. Co-founder Morris Dees had realized a lucrative fundraising operation, one that churned contribution appeals that waved as scary banderole the specter of on-the-march hate.

The SPLC claimed creditable accomplishments in and out of courtrooms. But many dated from the groups' early years. Direct mail solicitations exploiting those only cheapened them.

In 2017, the Washington Free Beacon's Joe Schoffstall reported that:

"The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal, Alabama-based 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organization that has gained prominence on the left for its 'hate group' designations, pushes millions of dollars to offshore entities as part of its business dealings, records show.

"Additionally, the nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to its top directors and key employees while spending little on legal services despite its stated intent of 'fighting hate and bigotry' using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy.

"The SPLC has turned into a fundraising powerhouse, recording more than $50 million in contributions and $328 million in net assets on its 2015 form 990...SPLC's form 990-T, its business income tax return from the same year, shows that they have 'financial interests' in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda."

Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of California-based nonprofit consulting firm Pacific Human Capital, was quoted by Schoffstall: 

"I've never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts. My impression based on prior interactions is that they have a small, modestly paid staff, and were regarded by most in the industry as frugal and reliable. I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with.

"It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas," Casil added. "I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts." (Schoffstall / Washington Free Beacon "Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions In Cash To Offshore Entities" Aug. 31, 2017)

For Dees, avarice was hardly new. When in college, the future SPLC founder joined with fellow student Millard Fuller to form the Fuller and Dees Marketing Group. The two hawked cookbooks by direct mail. Other postal-routed products included birthday cakes, rat poison, and tractor seat cushions. 

Fuller recalled: "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 wavered in that resolve." (Rosslyn Smith / American Thinker "Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label" Aug. 20, 2012)

A DiscoverTheNetworks.org profile of Dees revealed that in 1961, he and Fuller "served as defense attorneys for a white racist who had viciously beaten a journalist covering Freedom Riders in the South." The pair "had their legal fees paid by the Ku Klux Klan."

Fuller would reorder his priorities. Later a renowned anti-death penalty attorney, he sold out to Dees in 1965. Fuller donated his profits to charity, and went on to found Habitat For Humanity.

In his 1991 book, Shades of Gray (Louisiana State University Press), Egerton quoted the SPLC founder: "A lot of  groups we work with in litigation on social issues are poor, themselves, living 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."

Dees was in 1998 inducted into the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame. Discover The Networks recorded his boast: "I learned everything I knew about hustling from the Baptist Church. 

Spending Sundays on those hard benches listening to the preacher pitch salvation -- why, it was like getting a PHD in selling."

In the Feb. 8, 2001 Nation edition, JoAnn Wypijewski wrote: "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.'"

But, as Discover The Networks pointed out: "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."

Stephen Bright is another SPLC critic. An acclaimed anti-execution attorney, author, and director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, he rejected by letter a 2007 University of Alabama School of Law invitation to a Dees event:

"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 2000 Harpers essay, Ken Silverstein noted that after the 1965 dissolution of the college-era Fuller-Dees partnership, Dees "bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a swimming pool, and stables." 

Silverstein later wrote: "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." (Silverstein / Harpers "The Church of Morris Dees" November 2000)

Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in 2009 termed Dees the "arch-salesman of hate mongering." 

According to their essay, Dees enriched himself by "[S]elling 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."

They added "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." (Cockburn, St. Clair / Counterpunch "King of the Hate Business" May 15, 2009)

In 2010, Silverstein dismissed the SPLC as a "bogus 'civil rights organization' whose chief (and wildly successful) mission has been to separate wealthy liberals from their money." (Silverstein / Harpers "Morris Dees: A Life Fighting Poverty" April 12, 2010.)

For years, I studied American hate groups. I read of rallies, mailings, murders, public access television and shortwave radio broadcasts, fire-bombings, the Turner Diaries, fertilizer bombs, and efforts to establish segregated homelands.

I also learned of bizarre supposed justifications for racial

separatism and supremacy, including Christian Identity and the Cress Theory.

Eventually, I viewed the world with a wider lens. I found perceptions that seemed sound when interpreted from within a solitary interest-group bubble stand evident as legitimately complex, once one has left that distortive circumstance.

Following the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, I found in my mailbox a three-alarm SPLC fundraising appeal. It warned that

malicious far-right elements infiltrated those actions.

I was then 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 knowledge of the movement's ideological sensibility. And I knew that it wasn't anywhere near the hate neighborhood.

Cynically, but not unwarrantedly, I suspected perhaps the SPLC was test villifying the anti-WTO movement in hopes of expanding its contribution base. Searching out a new bogeyman.

I was reminded of a passage from Egerton's 1988 Progressive 

article:

"The Klan thing is winding down," SPLC founder Dees had said. He added that his group's fundraisers 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 from the SPLC followed that initial WTO alarm, though. Threat levels apparently correlated to contribution potential.

I became troubled by mainstream news media's uncritical embrace of the private and unaccountable group. Talking heads regurgitated that organization's pronouncements as if they were sacrosanct.

So timepiece-certain was reporters' resort to the SPLC that whenever alleged hate crimes were in the news, one could be certain that organization spokesman Mark Potak would within moments appear on camera to dispense scarlet boilerplate.

Journalists discounted speakers and organizations by observing they had been 'listed by the SPLC as a hate group.' I wondered who had decided that judgments issued by that private, for-profit organization were of the same beyond-skepticism quality as, say, Newton's law of gravity.

Some who toil within the SPLC'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 perverse dollar lust.

But the possible former in no way excuses the contemptible latter. 

-----