One of the favorite conservative whipping posts is the SPLC. Whenever an unfavorable SPLC report comes out, they just deride said report as having come from the SPLC, so why bother with it. So I think it is time for The Subway Canaries to see just who is right.
"The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, the Center is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups. Located in Montgomery, Alabama – the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement – the Center was founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, two local lawyers who shared a commitment to racial equality. Its first president was civil rights activist Julian Bond."
The SPLC was founded by Joseph J. Levin, Jr.
"..In the early 1960s, Joseph J. Levin, Jr. saw one of his University of Alabama fraternity brothers persecuted for expressing unpopular views. Melvin Meyer, editor of the school newspaper, the Crimson White, was taunted by fellow students and the community because he courageously argued in favor of integration at a time when Alabama Governor George Wallace "stood in the schoolhouse door" to prevent black students from enrolling at the state's largest college. The harassment directed at Meyer peaked when the Ku Klux Klan burned a 12-foot cross in front of Levin's Jewish fraternity house early one morning..."
One of the few things that can be found about Levin by googling is this charming article on "Jew Watch". It is another lovely bastion of freedom of expression that is "Not a Hate Site" It is run by Frank Weltner, who, according to Wikipedia is "... a member of the National Alliance, a white nationalist/white supremacist organization." Funny, but after 5 google pages, this is the only negative thing I can find is the Neo-Nazi thing.
Richard Cohen is the current executive Director.
"...Richard Cohen was 31 when he came to the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1986. Less than two months after his arrival, founder Morris Dees announced big news: The U.S. Supreme Court had decided to hear a major desegregation case brought by the Center against the Alabama Highway Patrol. Dees asked Cohen if he could handle the Supreme Court argument, because the lawyer who had been litigating the case was leaving the Center. Cohen, who had previously worked for a law firm in Washington, D.C., had tried cases in court but had never handled appellate work. He didn't hesitate, telling Dees, "Of course I'm up for it." ..."
You will want to check the Charity Navigator for the SPLC expenses. Contrary to some of the criticisms they have a 52%, 3 star rating. Ironically, it has the identical rating as the Heritage Foundation. And, The Center for Popular Culture (Front Page Mag) that authors most of the non-nazi critics of the SPLC has only a two star or 49% rating!
| Anti-Defamation League | 39.20 |  |
| The American Jewish Committee | 62.54 |  |
| Mothers Against Drunk Driving | 47.60 |  |
| American Civil Liberties Union Foundation | 65.39 | |
| Southern Poverty Law Center |
Now, for an organization that is allegedly determineed to rook innocent people out of their hard earned money and do it far more successfully than all the TV preachers combined, and ferrets out nazis, and the KKK, looks like their primary critics, aside from Horowitz are Nazis and the KKK. Right there, their mission statement seems to be proven. Even more interesting is a Newsmax article complaining that large foundations are not donating to 'conservative' charities. They use the Concerned Women For America as a prime example. Now if you go by the Charity Navigator, which is endorsed by major conservative organizations, as a benchmark, you know why no one in their right mind would donate to this organization. The Concerned Women for America have a one star rating!
Even more fascinating is the Newsmax article cites National Committee for Responsible Philophantropy as a source for complaining about liberal organizations and funding. Problem is, Charity Navigator does not have a listing for the NCRP, who is looking for donations for conservative sources. One of the organizations the Newsmax article pans is the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which has a 4 star rating from Charity Navigator..
Now, start exploring SPLC and 'bias'. You come out with this lovely number that completely trashes the SPLC because they ignore 'white crime'...Then read what this un-named woman writes. Then you need to check out her links page. I think I've made my point.
"...The truth is that SPLC's primary goal is to elicit guilt money from gullible Whites, because they know Whites are hyper-sensitive, over-tolerant, naively altruistic and most importantly, an easy mark. This translates into millions for the hate peddlers at SPLC. All under the guise of tolerance and multiculturalism. The truth is that they are race haters. The true believers amongst them are biased is against race, period. They want 'genocide by penis' against OUR race, 8-10% of earth and losing ground QUICKLY. They think the human tendency to fight will end with the physical extermination of our race, yet fail to acknowledge most racism is against people of European descent. Blacks in Africa cut each others' organs out and burn political opponents alive over minor tribal differences. Given the fact that exterminating human diversity will NOT end war, it would behoove Morris Dees and Mark Potok to promote intolerance, because without race, they'll have no cash cow, no idiotic Whites to give them guilt money...."
The primary googles of SPLC and bias - one or two ultra conservative hits and then I came up with this one from the Anarchists. Seems the SPLC has a bias against them, also! The American Patriot Friends don't like them. And of course the American Renasissance has a problem with the SPLC. News Busters doesn't like them. News Busters does not like this SPLC report on 'home grown terror' but it's documented. What's the problem? Then I found this piece under SPLC and bias. You DEFINATELY need to read it. Vdare doesn't like them.
SPLC director Morris Dees, who is the director of the SPLC seems to receive the most complaints from 'conservatives'. He is a civil rights advocate, writer, publisher, and a very successful business man, and - Lord Have Mercy - an unrepentatent Liberal. I find the "Dirt" on him quite humorous. It comes from a conservative site, The Patriotist". I thought conservatives praised highly successful individuals. Instead, probably the biggest complaint they have about Dees, besides being liberal and working with Teddy, and JC (Carter, not the other JC) is the fact that he has taken the SPLC from a very poor store-front endeavour and created a nearly $100 million dollar endowment. If this were the Heritage Foundation, these same critics would be crowing. Much of their criticism looks more like an attack of the old green eyed monster than anything else. (P. S. Evidently Dees has the same proclivities as Teddy and Slick and is a consumate womanizer.) (Note the following link to the site that allegedly contains his divorce deposition from the late 1978 reads like absolute filth. You can google it if you want, but I will not put a link here. The thing that concerns me is the fact that it is 'Zianet' free pages. Zianet is an ISP here in New Mexico. It should also be noted that the information is uncited and probably comes from a 'militia' site. I have my suspicions, but that's all.)
Dees critics include the following: Nationalist Movement where the site tries to 'explain' away all the 'nazis' Dees has uncovered. Then there is this critique. Then there is deeswatch.com, a now defunct site. One of the 'Dees Watch' pages links here. I think if you read the 'Zionist' words, etc. you will get a feel for who has written the critique. NOTE: it sure ain't the ADL! Or try this critique.
A more reliable critique of Dees comes from David Horowitz's Discover the Networks. But, in order to get dirt on Dees, Horowitz must use the Patriotist piece tha basically slams Dees for being an alleged womanizer and for making lots and lots of money - probably more money than most of the conservative organizations combined! The following piece, Hate Debate - Hate Groups Defined by Robert Stacy McCain, seems to be a fairly balanced piece. McCain also seems to be a writer who likes to 'hit' conservatives, so he's going at Dees from a 'liberal' perspective.
"The SPLC, founded in 1971, has amassed an endowment of $113 million through the efforts of cofounder Morris Dees, who served as finance director for Democratic Sen. George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. The SPLC consistently has exaggerated the size and numbers of extremist groups, claims Wilcox, who for more than 20 years has edited the Guide to the American Right (now in its 24th edition) and the Guide to the American Left (in its 21st edition), each of which lists hundreds of organizations. In 1992, for instance, SPLC's Klan-watch division claimed some 346 white-supremacy groups operated in the United States. In terms of "viable groups," says Wilcox, "the actual figure is about 50." Although the SPLC recently announced that the number of hate groups had declined, it claimed the figures "may be deceiving" in part because of a trend of consolidation in which "smaller groups disbanded or joined larger organizations." According to SPLC spokesman Mark Potok, however, Wilcox has had "an ax to grind for a great many years. He spends his time attacking other people who do antiracist work, calling them everything from Communists to opportunistic slime." Wilcox's criticism has been "used by right-wing extremists very frequently as a vehicle to attack us," Potok adds. But Wilcox is not the only critic of the SPLC. Left-wing writer Alexander Cockburn said Dees has raised millions "by frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street." According to the Atlanta Constitution, Dees used "the campaign's donor list of 700,000 liberals for the law center. Wilcox, however, has chronicled scandals involving numerous antiracist groups: * In 1993, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, which monitors anti-Semitism, came under scrutiny when the FBI accused one of its paid investigators, Roy Bullock, of using confidential information from San Francisco police inspector Tom Gerard to compile computer files on political groups..."
Horowitz also quotes a Harper's profile of Dees. I go back to my original observation that the primary criticism of Dees and the SPLC seems to be the propensity for making a lot of money. And, once again I go back to my observation that we may be dealing with a little bit of the green eyed monster. Dees and the SPLC are obviously a money making machine.
"...Contributors to Teaching Tolerance might be surprised to learn how little of the SPLC's reported educational spending actually goes to education. In response to lobbying by charities, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1987 began allowing nonprofits to count part of their fundraising costs as "educational" so long as their solicitations contained an informational component. On average, the SPLC classifies an estimated 47 percent of the fund-raising letters that it sends out every year as educational, including many that do little more than instruct potential donors on the many evils of "militant right-wing extremists" and the many splendid virtues of Morris Dees. According to tax documents, of the $10. 8 million in educational spending the SPLC reported in 1999, $4 million went to solicitations. Another $2.4 million paid for stamps.
In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. "Morris and I...shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money," recalls Dees's business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). "We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich." They were so unparticular, in fact, that in 1961 they defended a man, guilty of beating up a journalist covering the Freedom Riders, whose legal fees were paid by the Klan. ("I felt the anger of a black person for the first time," Dees later wrote of the case. "I vowed then and there that nobody would ever again doubt where I stood.") In 1965, Fuller sold out to Dees, donated the money to charity, and later started Habitat for Humanity. Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables, and, in 1971, founded the SPLC, where his compensation has risen in proportion to fund-raising revenues, from nothing in the early seventies to $273,000 last year. A National Journal survey of salaries paid to the top officers of advocacy groups shows that Dees earned more in 1998 than nearly all of the seventy-eight listed, tens of thousands more than the heads of such groups as the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Children's Defense Fund. The more money the SPLC receives, the less that goes to other civil rights organizations, many of which, including the NAACP, have struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a 1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to the most desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly." Soon the SPLC win move into a new six-story headquarters in downtown Montgomery, just across the street from its current headquarters, a building known locally as the Poverty Palace..."
You will also want to check out a Front Page article by Debbie Stossel. It is primarily about Dees and how the SPLC helped to defend the two 'illegals' who were assaulted by Nethercott and Operation Ranch Rescue. Naturally, the Front Page article is weighted against Dees. And here is another piece by Horowitz.
What I find fascinating is where the criticism of Dees comes from. But, you need to remember Horowitz is not exactly his own man at times, and does come at something from acertain spin. Horowitz is supported by the Locke Foundation. The Locke Foundation is bought and paid for by NC extreme conservative John William Pope. He also gives huge amounts of money to the Pope Center at Chapel Hill - UNC. The Pope Center sponsors think pieces. Link to a Subway Canaries expose. And this charming little expose comes from our good friends at the CofCC
The Google Search of Morris Dees brings the following: You need to note this is a google of the first 10 pages "Morris Dees". Just deal with his detractors. I'm sorry, but aside from the article by Robert McCain, quoting Wilcox, which is rather fair and balanced, I can find nothing else but a lot of 'hate speak' from the opposite side. And, aside from a messy divorce, the primary criticism of the SPLC appears to be the fact that they are worth so much money. Once again I go back to my primise that the criticism falls a bit short to me, since it is coming from either conservatives or libertarians, both of whom absolutely worship at the altar of the up from the boot-straps and making a fortune. The man knows how to make money. William Greene could take a few lessons from him. After dealing with Greene, the rest are just pathetic wanna-bes.
The Patriotist - The Dirt on Morris Dees
| In an article titled Poverty Palace, Morris Dees told journalist John Edgerton that "I had a ... "Morris Dees and I, from the first day of our partnership, ... www.patriotist.com/dees.htm - 19k - |
Morris Dees -- Child Molester, Pervert, and Liar?
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Major Media has portrayed Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center as an.
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