What is going on with the Southern Poverty Law Center?

mzungu

This is an interesting article (The Hate Group That Incited the Middlebury Melee) by Carl M. Cannon on the recent Charles Murray speaking engagement at Middlebury that resulted in protests and the assault of a senior professor at the college.

In short, Cannon believes Morris Dees (founder of SPLC) is spreading falsehoods and fear mongering for profit, and this was one of the reasons the Middlebury riot happened. Protestors accused Murray of being a "white supremacist", "racist" and favouring "eugenics". The protestors (and also some academic staff, who admitted they never read a word Murray wrote) cited the SPLC as their source for the claims about Murray. It should be noted, that Murray has mixed race children and has argued in favour of same sex marriage, not exactly the actions of a "white supremacist" or a "racist". Neither has he advocated for eugenics at any point. Yet, the crowd were whipped into a frenzy over this assumed "white supremacist" after getting their information from the SPLC.

This is not the first time violence has occurred off the back of SPLC labelling (From Cannon's article):

In recent years, you can find yourself on the SPLC’s “hate map” if you haven’t gotten fully aboard on gay marriage — or the Democratic Party’s immigration views. In other words, the Dees’ group classifies individuals and organizations as purveyors of “hate” for holding the same view on marriage espoused by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton until mid-2012.

Such labeling has consequences, which became clear in August 2012 when a gay rights activist named Floyd Lee Corkins entered the lobby of the Family Research Council armed with a 9mm handgun and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. The gun was for killing as many Christians as he could, although he only managed to wound a guard. The sandwiches? He was going to rub them in the faces of his murder victims. Corkins had heard that a Chick-fil-A executive express opposition to gay marriage. Why the Family Research Council? He told police that the Southern Poverty Law Center had labeled it “a hate group.”

This episode prompted the FBI to drop the SPLC as a resource for hate crime cases.

In addition to this, the SPLC were recently involved in a Twitter exchange where they were less than forthcoming in calling out anti-semitism, only to backtrack on this a few hours later (after deleting the offending tweet) and eventually admitted that it was anti-semitism.

At present, the SPLC is one of the richest poverty organisation in the world. Morris Dees is a supreme salesman, making money off the back of lucrative business model:

Thanks to the generosity of four decades’ worth of donors, many of whom—as SPLC president Richard Cohen himself noted in a telephone interview with me—are aging Northern-state “1960s liberals” who continue to associate “Southern” and “poverty” with lynchings, white-hooded Klansmen, and sitting at the back of the bus, and thanks also to what can only be described as the sheer genius at direct-mail marketing of Dees, the SPLC’s 76-year-old lawyer-founder, who was already a multimillionaire by the late 1960s from the direct-mail sales of everything from doormats to cookbooks, the SPLC is probably the richest poverty organization in the history of the world. From its very beginning the SPLC, thanks to Dees’s talent for crafting multi-page alarmist fundraising letters, has not only continuously operated in the black, but has steadily accumulated a mountain of surpluses augmented by a shrewdly managed investment portfolio. Today the SPLC’s net assets total more than $256 million (that figure appears on the SPLC’s 2011 tax return, the latest posted on the organization’s website). That represented a more-than-doubling of the $120 million in net assets that the SPLC reported in 2000, which was itself more than a doubling of the $52 million in net assets that the SPLC reported during the mid-1990s.

So impressed was the Direct Marketing Association in 1998 with Dees’s superb fundraising talents that it inducted him into its Hall of Fame, where he shares honors with Benjamin Franklin, first postmaster general, and catalogue retailer L. L. Bean. The SPLC’s sprawling two-story concrete-and-glass headquarters in downtown Montgomery bore the nickname “Poverty Palace” among locals—until the mid-2000s, when the center, whose staff had grown to more than 200 (including 34 lawyers), moved into a fortress-like six-story office building that it had commissioned. The new SPLC building, a postmodernist parallelepiped faced in steel and black glass, has been variously described by its critics as a “small-scale Death Star” and a “highrise trailer.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/king-of-fearmongers/article/714573

In the same article, Dees is accused of making his money by whipping up hysteria over hate groups:

This leads to yet another SPLC irony: Its severest critics aren’t on the conservative right (although the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another “hate group” on the SPLC’s list, has done its fair share of complaining), but on the progressive left. It may come as a surprise to learn that one of the most vituperative of all the critics was the recently deceased Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and the leftist webzine CounterPunch. In a 2009 article for CounterPunch titled “King of the Hate Business,” Cockburn castigated Dees and the SPLC for using the 2008 election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president as yet another wringer for squeezing out direct-mail donations from “trembling liberals” by painting an apocalyptic picture of “millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed 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 continued: “Ever since 1971 U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.”

Cockburn was following on the heels of Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote an article for the reliably liberal Harper’s magazine titled “The Church of Morris Dees.” Silverstein accused the SPLC of manufacturing connections between the “hate groups” that it highlighted in its numerous mailings—back then the groups on the SPLC list tended to be mostly fringe militia organizations—and the Columbine-style school shootings and a wave of black-church arsons during the 1990s that were a staple of the SPLC’s direct-mail panic pleas. “Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence,” Silverstein wrote. “More than 95 percent of all ‘hate crimes,’ including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by ‘lone wolves.’ Even Timothy McVeigh [perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people], subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI’s history—and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC’s—was never credibly linked to any militia organization.”

In an effort to stay relevant and profitable, are the SPLC now trying to conjure up bogeymen out of thin air? Were the attacks on Charles Murray's reputation and the Middlebury riot a byproduct of this incessant fear mongering and outright falsehoods?

Manach

I’d have two books by Mr. Murray.
I initially read his book “Bell Curve” as my then favourite science author (Stephen J. Gould) had written a response against its central premise, human intelligence. I’m still on the fence on that question. The other is a handbook of advice, based on the older academic’s life’s experience on how to tackle what the world throws at you. That book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide , I’d highly recommend. If arguments are to be made against his views, then a reasoned debate should ensue as occurred with the late Mr. Gould and not the riot which bodes ill for non-standard viewpoints in higher education.

mzungu

Manach wrote: »

I’d have two books by Mr. Murray.
I initially read his book “Bell Curve” as my then favourite science author (Stephen J. Gould) had written a response against its central premise, human intelligence.

I believe it was the section about differences in IQ between races and arguing for less immigration were the given justifications for the "white supremacist" label. I believe the the "eugenics" label has to do with the recommendations for a cessation of welfare policies that encouraged the poor to procreate.

Manach wrote: »

I’m still on the fence on that question.

I guess that entire area (especially now) is completely off limits for further study.

Manach wrote: »

The other is a handbook of advice, based on the older academic’s life’s experience on how to tackle what the world throws at you. That book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide , I’d highly recommend. If arguments are to be made against his views, then a reasoned debate should ensue as occurred with the late Mr. Gould and not the riot which bodes ill for non-standard viewpoints in higher education.

Agreed. There has been numerous articles and books roundly refuting its findings over the past 20 years. But what happened in Middlebury was hooliganism, and maybe a sign of the polarised times in the US.