SPLC — 2013 — “The New Hate Map is Here!”

Watching the Watchdogs readers of a certain age may remember actor Steve Martin’s 1979 debut film, The Jerk. In one memorable scene, Martin’s character, the naive country boy, Navin Johnson, is ecstatic to find his name listed in the local telephone directory.

“The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!!” shouts Navin, as he wildly leaps and prances about. Navin’s boss, played by deadpan comic Jackie Mason, observes, “I wish I could get that excited about nothin’.”

Navin counters breathlessly, “I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this thing every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity… your name in print… that makes people!!”

The parallels between this classic comedy scene and the latest iteration of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual “Hate Map” are manifold: Spontaneous publicity. Your name in print. Millions of naive people looking at this thing and getting excited about nothin’.

For the benefit of new Watching the Watchdogs readers, let’s take a moment to recap the key facts about the Hate Map that need to be understood before delving into what is, to borrow a phrase from another classic comedy, ” … a show about nothing.”

1. The Hate Map is compiled each year by the SPLC’s master Public Relations chief, Mark Potok, and purports to identify the number of “hate groups” across America on a state-by-state basis. Mr. Potok’s maps always refer to the previous calendar year.

2. There is no legal definition for “hate group,” which is why even the FBI does not, cannot, designate “hate groups,” yet somehow a private fundraising outfit can?

Mr. Potok has no legal or law enforcement background and admits that all of his data are second hand, at best, and that his infamous Hate Map “does not include original reporting by SPLC staff.” The SPLC is a private fundraising group run by white millionaires. It has no mandate, receives no outside oversight and has no authority, legal or moral, to designate anything.

In short, the SPLC has no more authority to designate “hate groups” than does the SPCA.

3. Mr. Potok provides absolutely NO evidence to prove that the groups he is designating actually exist. In many cases, Mr. Potok cannot even provide the name of a city or town where the alleged group is supposed to reside. Investigative journalist Laird Wilcox pointed out this lack of hard evidence as far back as 1998, in his seminal exposé of the SPLC and other so-called “civil rights” groups, The Watchdogs.

What [the SPLC] apparently did was list any group they could find mention of, including groups only rumored to exist. These included the large number of “post office box chapters” maintained by Klan and skinhead organizations. Some Christian Identity “ministries” consist only one person and a mailing list and many “patriot groups” consist of but three or four friends.

They also listed many groups whose actual affiliation is neither KKK nor neo-Nazi and who would argue with the designation of “white supremacy.” In short, they misleadingly padded their list. When the SPLC releases their list, either in print or on the Internet, it fails to contain actual addresses that might be checked by journalists or researchers. Several listings refer to “unknown group” and the name of a city or town. — The Watchdogs, p. 79

Mark Potok admitted as much a decade later:

“Potok says inclusion on the list might come from a minor presence, such as a post office box.” (www.sanluisobispo.com, March 25, 2009)

4. As noted, in many cases, Mr. Potok does not even bother to provide a physical location for his alleged groups. Last year, 247 of his 1,017 alleged “hate groups” were homeless, or about one in four. This year, 195 of his 1,007 alleged groups are phantoms, or about one in five.

In 2011, Watching the Watchdogs actually got to ask Mr. Potok in person about these missing groups. As the video clip below shows, Mr. Potok was startled by the question at first, as no one apparently has ever bothered to vet his numbers before, and he then proceeds to stammer out that his “hate map,” the keystone of all SPLC claims and fundraising rhetoric, is “anecdotal,” “a very rough measure” and “an imperfect process.”

Sadly, the tens of thousands of well-meaning people who sent Mr. Potok and the SPLC more than $40 MILLION tax-free dollars in 2012, (that’s more than $4,600 dollars every single hour of every day) didn’t realize that his Hate Map numbers were just a wild guess. Those trusting folks took Mr. Potok at his word that his data were sound.

So now that we’ve established Mr. Potok’s credentials and the accuracy of his data, let’s take a closer look at his actual numbers, which again, is something no professional news outlet seems willing to do.

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In Point 4 above, we skimmed quickly over a monumental and wholly unprecedented event: For the first time in SPLC history… the number of “hate groups” designated by Mark Potok… actually DECLINED!

Yes. You heard it here first, folks. Something we never thought we’d see has come to pass and gives a very strong indication that the days of Mr. Potok’s primary fundraising tool, his much-lauded and oft-quoted Hate Map, are numbered.

This turn of events comes as a complete surprise, as Mr. Potok is the sole arbiter of the “hate group” label, and since no one ever checks on his numbers, why didn’t he just pad the numbers a little more as he has always done in the past?

Every March, Mr. Potok releases his new “hate group” numbers in the Spring edition of his flagship “Intelligence Report” publication. Mr. Potok ignored the fact that his numbers actually went down for the first time in history, “…the number of hate groups remained essentially unchanged last year…,” choosing to focus on his newest marketing ploy, evil “militia” groups. We’ll have a look at those numbers in a minute.

Potok provides a bar graph to illustrate his claim that the number of “hate groups” has increased by 67% since 2000:

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It’s worth noting at this point that the SPLC’s bloated “Endowment Fund” has increased by 147% in just the past decade, from $99,000,000 to over $245,000,000.

Comparing the two charts, a case could be made linking the increase of cash in the Endowment Fund to the increase in “hate groups.”

Or maybe it’s the other way around…

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Purely a happy coincidence, no doubt, but it must be getting tougher to sell “poverty” to the donors when you’ve got nearly a quarter-BILLION dollars in cash reserves. Last year, the Endowment Fund generated more than $18 MILLION dollars in tax-free interest.

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In November, 2008, immediately after the election of President Obama, Mr. Potok predicted “explosive growth in hate groups” due to “… the tanking economy and a Black man in the White House. Mr. Potok is still singing this same tune in 2013, but now he says it’s the evil militias that are upset:

“Capping four years of explosive growth sparked by the election of America’s first black president and anger over the economy, the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012…”

According to Mr. Potok’s own bar graph above though, we see that for 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration and the worst year of the current recession, the number of “hate groups” only rose by 6, or 0.6%. Until this year, that half a percent “explosion” was the smallest increase in SPLC history.

Mr. Potok added 70 new “hate groups” in 2010, as if to make up for his anemic performance the previous year, but at the same time, the number of homeless “hate groups,” those Mr. Potok can’t seem to locate on any map, including his own, jumped by 99, which really represents a net loss.

Mr. Potok was losing his “hate groups” faster than he could designate them.

In 2011, Mr. Potok’s list grew by only 12 new groups, for an increase of just over 1%. That year he added 20 chapters of something he called “The Georgia Militia” to that state’s Hate Map, but he couldn’t seem to locate 18 of them, so he simply added 18 empty slots marked “Georgia Militia” to pad out his numbers. No one in the Media ever called him on it.

In 2012, the number of “hate groups” actually dropped by 1%

Mr. Potok’s “explosive growth” has turned out to be a damp squib…

As for the Georgia Militia, Mr. Potok has revised his figures down to 14 chapters, one of which allegedly resides somewhere in Camden County, one is simply labeled “statewide” and the other 12 are nowhere to be found. Must be all that camouflage gear those good ol’ boys like to wear:

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In all, 17 of the 53 “hate groups” Mr. Potok has assigned to Georgia are invisible. That’s one in three. No doubt the rest of Mr. Potok’s “militia” numbers are at least as accurate.

While we’ve already packed a lot of information into this one post, let’s crunch Mr. Potok’s numbers just a little more to see what his figures actually say.

Once again, when you strip out all of Mr. Potok’s homeless “hate groups” you arrive at the surprising conclusion that, according to Potok’s carefully researched data, the largest segment of “hate groups” are Black, outnumbering the KKK, Neo-Nazis, Racist Skinhead and White Nationalist groups respectively.

Who knew? Mark Potok knows.

The Southern Poverty Law Center made its fortune by going after “hate groups” in the South, and Mr. Potok is always nattering about evil white Christians, who tend to live in the South, but according to his latest numbers there was a distinct drop in the number of these alleged groups last year:

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Mr. Potok also issues regular alarums about how the Northwest is a magnet for “radical white nationalists” but, once again, his numbers have dropped:

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Ironically, (we use that term a lot when dealing with Mr. Potok’s fundraising rhetoric), the traditionally more liberal Northeast actually showed a 6.25% increase in “hate groups” last year.

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And finally, Mr. Potok has always claimed that the Republican Party is the root of all evil and represents the black heart of all hate-groupdom, but when you look at which states voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election there are actually 12% more “hate groups” located in the Blue States even though the number of states in either camp was roughly even:

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So what are we to make of these capricious numbers at the end of the day? The short answer is: Not much. Mark Potok’s “hate group” numbers are a marketing ploy and an extremely lucrative brand name. Even Mr. Potok concedes on the legend of his hate map fundraising tool that these groups are doing nothing illegal:

“Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity.”

No crime. No violence. Just “wrong thoughts.”

Admittedly, some of these groups do engage in what most people would consider inflammatory rhetoric, but as long as they’re not breaking any laws… they’re not breaking any laws and neither Mr. Potok nor any other “civil rights” vigilante groups have a right to silence anyone.

Mr. Potok uses his “hate group” smear because it allows him to incite his donor base, who were cultivated specifically for their political views, without having to accuse those groups of any actual crimes. His disclaimer may read “Listing here does not imply…” but that is precisely what it does and that’s why the donors sent Mr. Potok more than $110,000 tax-free donor-dollars each and every day last year.

And that, friends, is why Mr. Potok, who has no legal or law enforcement background, is compensated by this law firm to the tune of $150,000 a year. As Navin Johnson observed so many years ago, Mr. Potok’s “Hate Map” is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people.

SPLC – Some donors are “better” than others

**** Update, Feb., 23, 2013 **** A week and a half ago we noted the Southern Poverty Law Center’s continuing recruitment for its multi-million dollar fundraising juggernaut. A mere ten days has passed since the SPLC advertised for a “Development Associate” and now they’re looking for a “Planned Giving Officer” to scout out those elderly donors who are nearing death.

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Six months ago they were recruiting for an “On-line Fundraising Coordinator” and before that it was for a “Regional Advancement Director.”

If only the SPLC’s civil rights division grew as reliably as its massive fundraising machine. When’s the last time they advertised for a civil rights attorney or an advocate for the homeless?

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[Original post Feb. 13, 2013] As we’ve mentioned frequently on this blog, the primary business of the Southern Poverty Law Center seems to raising cash, especially as reflected by the rather paltry endeavors documented in the SPLC’s case docket. Lots of low-hanging cases dealing with illegal aliens, underfunded schools in Mississippi and now even a copyright infringement and a consumer fraud case.

For the most part, “fighting hate” it ain’t, but the donors don’t seem to realize it. In 2011 they sent the SPLC more than $4,400 tax-free donor dollars each and every hour.

That kind of money requires a bit of effort to solicit, collect and count and so the SPLC recently placed a help wanted ad for a “Development Associate.”

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The job description states that the successful applicant: “Under general supervision, receives, screens, answers correspondence, and updates donor gift records,” which is pretty standard fare. A couple of the “Primary Job Functions” are worth noting:

“Provides friendly and courteous customer service to SPLC’s best donors”

“Best donors“? Some SPLC donors are better than others? Hmmm. Makes you wonder what the criteria are to make the cut? Is there a lower-level flunky who deals with the second-rate donors?

“Maintains and updates donor demographic and gift records using a sophisticated database system”

Well, many “non-profits” gather donor demographics to try to distill out the “best donors,” so that’s nothing new, though you wonder if the donors realize that they’re being sorted and classified at the SPLC by their potential donor-dollar value?

It is also encouraging to see that the SPLC has finally scraped up enough to get a “sophisticated database.” Such was not always the case. A couple anecdotes regarding  direct-mail millionaire and SPLC founder Morris Dees’ less sophisticated methods are as entertaining as they are instructive:

“Dees’s fundraising tactics are as varied as they are creative. In a 1985 fundraising letter to zip codes where many Jewish residents lived, he made conspicuous use of his Jewish-sounding middle name, Seligman, in his signature at the end of the document.”

“Attorney Tom Turnipseed, a former Dees associate, recounts how, on another occasion, Dees distributed a fundraising letter with “about six different stamps” affixed to the return envelope, so as to make it appear that “they had to cobble them all together to come up with 35 cents.”

At the time, the SPLC had more than $65 million in cash reserves on hand.

Speaking of cash reserves, most donors are equally ignorant of just how much money the SPLC already has over and above the $106,000 a day they take in by taking in the donors (of all quality levels). The SPLC’s annual report notes that:

The SPLC builds for the future by setting aside a certain amount of its income for an endowment, a practice begun in 1974 to plan for the day when nonprofits like the SPLC can no longer afford to solicit support through the mail because of rising postage and printing costs.

In 1999, Mr. Dees predicted that when the SPLC’s “Endowment Fund,” (Recently renamed the “Morris Dees Legacy Fund”), reached the $100,000 million dollar mark he would cease all of that expensive fund raising (about 19% of his annual budget, on average) and “live off the interest.”

The fund reached $100 million in 2002, but the fund raising machine kept chugging away. The fund reached $200 million in 2007 but Mr. Dees is only expanding his fund raising department, as this most recent job opening indicates.

Meanwhile, the costs of soliciting money have decreased substantially due to the advent of the Internet and e-mail, though studies show that at least one donor demographic, the elderly, still prefer stamp-and-letter snail mail. No doubt these folks make up a substantial, though actuarially dwindling, segment of Mr. Dees’ “best donors.”

At last count, Mr. Dees’ legacy stood at just under $224 million. The SPLC will release its financial records for 2012 in a few weeks. It’s always interesting to see how much poverty there is at the law center.

Stay tuned for those numbers as they become available.

SPLC — “There’s No Trial Like a Show Trial!”

**** UPDATE – 1/4/13 **** Once again, the best source of information on the SPLC’s ham-fisted fundraising tactics is the SPLC’s own website. Under the “Docket” tab on the SPLC’s home page you can find the actual complaint against JONAH, again, something that no Media outlet could bother to do.

According to the 28-page document, the actual lawyers handling the suit are Lite DePalma Greenberg of Newark, NJ, who bill themselves “…as the pre-eminent New Jersey firm for litigation of complex class actions in the areas of securities fraud, antitrust, and consumer fraud.” Sounds like they know what they’re doing.

The SPLC is listed on the complaint as having requested pro hac vice status, which “refers to the application of an out-of-state lawyer to appear in court for a particular trial, even though he/she is not licensed to practice in the state where the trial is being held.”

Now, why exactly would New Jersey’s pre-eminent fraud attorneys require the assistance of an Alabama civil rights law firm, who are not licensed to practice law in the Garden State, especially when you consider that the term “civil rights” does not even appear in the 28-page complaint??

(The same question can be asked of Faegre Baker Daniels, the law firm handling the copyright infringement case filed in Denver on behalf of the New Jersey gay couple. FBD is one of the highest ranked Intellectual Property law firms in the country, and again, the term “civil rights” appears nowhere in the actual legal complaint.)

The short answer, the blindingly obvious answer, is that neither law firm requires the services of the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama.  The SPLC brings nothing to these cases except publicity, and since that publicity is a) highly favorable to their clients’ lawsuits, and b) absolutely free, (The SPLC would never accept a dime in legal fees…), any sharp lawyer would take full advantage of the opportunity.

What’s in it for the SPLC? According to the American Bar Association, the application fees for pro hac vice status run to a maximum of $186 dollars a year in New Jersey, and $250 in Colorado. All of the attorneys assigned to the two cases are already on the SPLC payroll, and even if the pro hac vice fees apply to all four of them you’re looking at a cost of just $808 dollars.

Now Google the term SPLC gay lawsuit (the search works even better if you enclose it in parentheses) and see how many hits you get. We came up with 299,000 hits, but since Google tailors its results to specific users your results may vary. Check out who’s carrying the stories: “mainstream” media outlets like ABC, CNN, Twitter, as well as hundreds of local newspapers and television station web sites. Not surprisingly, the stories have been picked up by countless LGBT web sites and even a number of prominent Jewish sites, due to JONAH’s Jewish origins.

You try buying that much publicity for $800 bucks…

If you notice a certain “sameness” in the “reporting,” that’s just because almost every site is simply regurgitating the highly polished press releases issued by the SPLC’s Public Relations chief, Mark Potok. And all of them claim that the SPLC is somehow “fighting hate” by associating itself in these simple civil suits. The LGBT community includes a lot of financially well-off, Progressive-leaning members who are no more or less prone to investigating the SPLC’s claims than anyone else.

In short, they are the perfect demographic for Mr. Potok and his fundraising minions. The SPLC won’t take a dime in legal fees because they’d probably have to pay taxes on that income, but donations are exquisitely tax-free.

Vaya con dinero!

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[Original post] More “mission creep” from “the nation’s leading civil rights organization.” In October, we at WTW noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center was taking on the case of a New Jersey gay couple whose engagement photo had been appropriated by a conservative political group who used the image in campaign ads in Colorado.

The facts in that case are pretty straight-forward: The political group used the photo without the permission of the couple or the photographer, who holds the copyright to the photo.

It’s a copyright infringement case. Nothing more. The plaintiffs are not indigent and there is no shortage of qualified attorneys in New Jersey.

Fast forward to December and the SPLC are back in New Jersey, this time, going after a non-profit group that claims it can “cure” gay Jewish men of being gay. According to SPLC attorney Sam Wolfe, the group Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), deliberately duped a number of gay Jewish men into believing that their homosexuality was a mental aberration that could be “cured” through therapy. Wolfe made his case by stating:

“We found our plaintiffs’ experiences with JONAH to be compelling and even shocking in terms of the types of techniques and misrepresentations the defendants were luring these men into their programs with.”

Wolfe continues:

“People are paying for these services under false pretenses. They are believing and trusting that these counselors know what they are doing, but in fact, they don’t.”

What exactly does “the nation’s leading civil rights organization” propose to do for the plaintiffs in the case? Under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, Wolfe is “…seeking triple monetary damages to cover the cost of “legitimate therapy” and attorneys’ fees.” A case worth thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands.

So, were anyone’s civil rights violated here? Not so much. All of the plaintiffs enrolled in the JONAH program of their own free will. In at least two cases, the adult plaintiff’s fees were paid by their mothers, so these were not the isolated victims of some secretive cult. Again, none of the plaintiffs are indigent.

No civil rights violations. Can you call “antisemitism” when all the parties involved are Jewish? What you have is a cut-and-dried fraud suit, or possibly a malpractice case, but at the end of the day, there is no “hate” going on here, and damn little poverty.

So what does the Southern Poverty Law Center bring to this case and the copyright infringement suit? Publicity. Nothing more. As noted above, there is no shortage of qualified fraud attorneys in New Jersey. The SPLC brings in the publicity and their ace Public Relations guru, Mark Potok, will spin that publicity into gold. Donor gold.

Does the SPLC run any risks by suing a Jewish organization, considering how many of its top donors are Jewish? Again, not so much. JONAH is operated by conservative Orthodox Jews, who are far less likely to donate money to the SPLC than their progressive coreligionists. The rest of the donor base, especially wealthy gay donors, will see this as a gay issue first and a Jewish issue second, if at all.

SPLC founder Morris Dees made his first fortune in direct-mail marketing in the early 1960s. The Maestro, who was inducted into the Direct Marketing Association’s “Hall of Fame” for his fundraising prowess, knows an opportunity for cheap publicity when he sees it. Truly, there is no trial like a show trial for gulling the gullible donors.

Another SPLC Show Trial?

The Blogosphere is all a-buzz with the latest news that the Southern Poverty Law Center is filing a federal law suit on behalf of a New Jersey gay couple whose engagement photograph was used in an anti-gay political flier, without their knowledge or consent.

By now, most people have seen the photo of Brian Edwards and Thomas Privitere holding hands and kissing in a park overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, so we won’t reprint it here. Apparently, the photo was picked up by a group called Public Advocate of the United States, who replaced the Manhattan skyline and iconic bridge in the background with evergreens and snow, to be used in a political flier in Colorado.

Public Advocate did not obtain permission to use or alter the photo from Edwards and Privitere or the photographer, Kristina Hill, who holds the copyright to the photo. The flier was distributed in Colorado as part of a campaign against State Senator Jean White because of her support for upcoming gay marriage legislation in that state.

This much we know. What we don’t know is what this has to do with the Southern Poverty Law Center? What are the actual legal issues in this case?

Was the photographer’s copyright violated by the unauthorized use of the photo? Absolutely and without a doubt.

Was Messrs Edwards’ and Privitere’s privacy violated by the unauthorized use of the photo? Most likely, though no doubt a good scuzzy lawyer could water down that argument in court.

Did Sen. White lose her primary race because of the fliers? She says she did, but the gay union bill wasn’t a major issue in the campaign.

Does any of the above add up to a ‘hate crime” worthy of the attentions of “the nation’s leading civil rights group”? Not so much.

When you get right down to it, the actual crime here is a simple copyright infringement case. The SPLC could go through the motions of making claims of libel, since the couple’s image was used in a derogatory fashion that clearly goes against their core beliefs, but libel cases are notoriously difficult to win in this country.

Undoubtedly a sleazy ploy by Public Advocate, even by political campaign standards, but “hate” it ain’t.

Will the SPLC play up this simple copyright infringement case in their never-ending fundraising propaganda as “proof” that they are “fighting hate” by “bringing these anti-gay bigots to their knees”? You betcha!

Will this dubious claim prompt the SPLC’s self-described Liberal donor base to send in millions of donor dollars over the course of the case? It’s always worked in previous SPLC show trials. Why wouldn’t it work again?

Will the New Jersey couple see one red cent of that money? Not a dime. They may receive some damages from a finding against Public Advocate, as will photographer Hill, but it will pale in comparison to the huge, tax-free windfall the SPLC is likely to gull from their gullible donors.

Time will tell.

SPLC Media Guides

Longtime readers of Watching the Watchdogs, if their comments are accurate, have an appreciation of the information and analysis of Southern Poverty Law Center fundraising propaganda we provide here.

Oftentimes there is a lot of data to digest, at least in a written form, but as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. To that end, we have endeavored to create a series of short (to accommodate the attention-span-challenged) video clips to show just how really simple it is to find the SPLC’s raw data, almost all of it found on the SPLC’s own web site, so that the viewer can evaluate it for themselves.

We ask no one to take our word for it, but we do ask the viewer to go directly to the source, as we have, see the data for themselves and come to their own conclusions. If you think we’re way off base then please tell us so. All intelligent comments and criticisms are welcome.

These are nothing more than the simple fact checks any real journalist should make before blindly quoting Mark Potok’s press releases. This isn’t “hate,” this isn’t “domestic terrorism,” it’s Journalism 101. These are the basic fact checks the Media should make, but won’t. Check back for additional installments.

First off, Media Guide #1 is a brief examination of the fallacy of the “hate group” label, the bedrock foundation of all SPLC fundraising propaganda. There’s no legal definition for the term, so just what exactly is this “law center” tracking?

Media Guide #2 examines the bogus bookkeeping behind SPLC’s public relations chief Mark Potok’s “hate incident’ log.  Most of these “incidents” are so tenuous, from teenagers carving swastikas into park benches to 8-year-olds threatening the President. More than a third of them are nothing more than updates on earlier events. How thug vandals pleading “not guilty” in criminal court is a “hate incident” is beyond us, but the Media and the all-important donors swallow it hook, line and sinker.

Media Guide #3 examines the preposterous proposition that NOT ONE of the top executives at the “nation’s leading civil rights organization” is a minority, and that this has been the case since Morris Dees opened the doors to the SPLC in 1971. The Executive Suite at the SPLC, which overlooks Martin Luther King’s home church in Montgomery, the birthplace of the American Civil Rights Movement, has been home to “whites only” for more than 40 years. Think about that…

Media Guide #4 explores the “ironic” fact that once one strips out all of the “homeless hate groups” discussed in the first video guide, it turns out that the largest single category of “hate group” in America is Black, according to Mark Potok’s bogus figures. The video also includes an excellent example of the Liberal Media’s inability to comprehend that the SPLC’s fundraising numbers are not based in reality.

Another Academic Outs the SPLC

Great blog post by Dr. Jack Feldman, a retired professor of Psychology and long-time SPLC donor.

Dr. Feldman touches on several of the key points regarding SPLC fundraising propaganda that we focus on here at Watching the Watchdogs.

Over the course of many years, Dr. Feldman observed how the SPLC moved away from its founding principles of defending the civil rights of the poor in the Deep South to the more lucrative business of creating “hate groups.”

You can find his post here.

SPLC – Here We Grow Again!

While the rest of the country slogs along at an average of 8% unemployment, business is booming at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nearly every month a new “help wanted” ad hits the ether, usually for a high-end public relations or fundraising position (redundant, I know, I know).

Although it is heartwarming to see that at least somebody is hiring these days, this flurry of growth flies in the face of a promise made by SPLC founder Morris Dees more than 20 years ago.

In 1974, Dees began setting aside SPLC cash resources “to plan for the day when nonprofits like the SPLC can no longer afford to solicit support through the mail because of rising postage and printing costs.”

A noble effort and the noble result became the SPLC’s “Endowment Fund”

In 2000, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Magazine observed in his landmark article, “The Church of Morris Dees,” that Dees had definite goals for the Endowment Fund from the outset, however, like many noble undertakings, this too succumbed to “mission creep.”

“Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ”

That was 1989 and this is now.

The Endowment Fund reached the $100 million mark in 2002, but the fundraising failed to cease.

The Endowment Fund reached the $200 million mark in 2007, but the fundraising failed to cease.

The Endowment Fund was created so that the SPLC could cease fundraising and “live off the interest,” and for much of the past decade the amount of interest generated by the fund each year has surpassed the annual operating costs, minus the 19% in annual fundraising costs, which the fund was designed to eliminate.

These surpluses, or “non-profits,” if you will, have run from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million, even in the depths of the Great Recession. In short, the Endowment Fund could pay all of the bills and still have cash left over, just as it was designed to do.

The Endowment Fund is working as advertised.

Despite Mr. Dees’ promise in 1989 to cease all fundraising when the fund hit $100 million, the SPLC has actually been ramping up its fundraising machinery.

On August 3, 2011, Dees advertised for a “Regional Advancement Director,” (RAD):

“We seek a Regional Advancement Director (RAD) to join our growing major gifts team. Based in Montgomery, the RAD will travel to targeted regions of the US identifying, cultivating, soliciting and closing individual major gifts.”

Identifying, cultivating, soliciting and closing. Join our growing major gifts team. Promises, promises.

This past week the call went out for an On-Line Fundraising Coordinator:

“A successful candidate in this new position will join a team of enthusiastic fundraising and communications professionals to establish and advance SPLC’s online giving efforts.“

This makes perfect sense if the goal of the Endowment Fund was actually designed to plan for the day when postage and printing costs made fundraising unaffordable. The advent of e-mail and online donation platforms have lowered the postage and printing costs of fundraising dramatically. One e-mail can reach tens of millions of donors at the speed of light for a cost measured in pocket change.

The problem is that the Endowment Fund was designed to eliminate fundraising, not support it.

Far from using his bloated Endowment Fund to “live off the interest,” Mr. Dees’ interest seems to be to fatten his quarter-billion-dollar tax-free cash cow for every dime he can get.

One has to wonder what the actual mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center truly is.

If you can’t trust a lawyer to keep his word… who can you trust?

SPLC — “Fighting Hate” on $106,000 a day

How much do you earn a day? Well, if you’re the Southern Poverty Law Center it turns out that you make about $106,062 a day, mostly in the form of tax-free donations.

That’s $106k a day, every day, 365 days a year…

Or, $4,419 an hour…

Or, $73.65 a minute, every minute of every day.

Remember that next time you get an e-mail from SPLC founder Morris Dees explaining how desperate his group is for cash and how only your generosity can save the nation’s leading civil rights group from disaster.

As the SPLC’s most recent IRS Form 990 explains, the Center enjoyed revenues of $38, 712,628 last year, a modest 11.7% raise from the previous year, just like the raise you probably received too.

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In fact, even after paying more than $14 million in salaries (an average of $61,693 per employee) and another $6.5 million in fundraising costs, the SPLC showed a tidy “non-profit” of $4,147,216, when all the “hate fightin’” was over, or just less than a million more than the “non-profit” it showed the year before.

As Line 22 of the Form 990 shows, the SPLC has less than $240 million in tax-free assets on hand, so get out that checkbook and don’t be stingy.

A one hundred dollar donation will match the SPLC’s revenue stream for about one minute and twenty seconds.

For a cool grand you can boast that you kept the lights on for more than 13 minutes.

With your help, we can take the “poverty” out of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Time is money, people.

SPLC data proves that Wal-Mart causes “hate groups”?

Well, friends, if you thought the title of this post was loopy… “you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

The April 2012 issue of the Social Science Quarterly, hardly a supermarket tabloid, sets out to prove conclusively that the presence of a Wal-Mart in a county provides a direct correlation to the presence of “hate groups” in that county, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s scrupulously researched data.

This study, “Social Capital, Religion, Wal-Mart, and Hate Groups in America,” written by Stephan J. Goetz, Anil Rupasingha and Scott Loveridge, bases its premise on numbers taken from the SPLC’s 2007 “Hate Map” fundraising tool.

Longtime readers of Watching the Watchdogs will instantly recognize that this “data” is inherently flawed from the get-go. Newer readers can discover why the SPLC numbers are garbage here and can watch the SPLC’s public relations guru, Mark Potok, admitting on camera that his numbers are “anecdotal,” “a very rough estimate” and “an imperfect process” in this exclusive WTW Youtube clip.

As if this wasn’t a show-stopper from the very beginning, these three geniuses compare the SPLC’s 2007 “hate group” numbers with the number of Wal-Mart stores in the US in 1998!! Really? We don’t claim to be academics here at WTW, but wouldn’t such a comparison be just a little more valid if they compared the SPLC’s spurious 2007 numbers with the number of Wal-Mart stores around in 2007?

According to Wal-Mart annual reports, there were 2,805 stores combined in the US in 1998, by 2007, this number had jumped to 3,910. THIS 40% gain doesn’t skew your calculations does it boys?

The number of “hate groups” designated by the SPLC grew by 351 between 1998 and 2007, but the number of Wal-Mart stores grew by more than 1,000 over the same span of time. Why are Goetz and Company comparing two decidedly different data sets?

Why not simply compare the 2007 “hate group” numbers with a map from 1907 so you can correlate the ratio of “hate groups” to livery stables and blacksmith shops?

Obviously, horses cause “hate groups.”

While the 2007 SPLC numbers are worthless, they claimed they had designated 888 “hate groups” that year, by their own subjective definition. Although Watching the Watchdogs has not yet analyzed those numbers, a look at the 2008 numbers is instructive. Of the 926 groups designated by Mark Potok that year, he wasn’t able to locate 127 of them on his own “Hate Map” fundraising tool.

Again, while we don’t have the individual data for 2007, these 127 homeless “hate groups” from the following year represent a discrepancy of more than 13%. By 2010, Mr. Potok had lost 26% of his “hate groups.” Is 13% statistically insignificant?

How exactly do these rocket scientists correlate decade-old Wal-Mart data with “hate groups” that aren’t even there?

Ordinarily, those who claim Mr. Potok’s ridiculous fundraising propaganda is factual are a relatively harmless lot. The SPLC does it because it scares tens of millions of dollars out of their mostly elderly, self-described “Progressive” donors and last year Richard Florida crunched Potok’s numbers into a map in The Atlantic that claimed that “hate groups” form chiefly in Republican areas, but these hucksters are preaching to the choir. People swallow this tripe as gospel, regardless of the fact that the underlying numbers are entirely fabricated, because they want to believe it.

The problem with this kind of garbage moving into academic circles is that it creates a patina of legitimacy. In fact, the Department of Home land Security has already picked up and regurgitated Mr. Goetz & Co.’s harebrained palaver as “fact” and this ought to scare the bejebus out of everyone.

The real villain here is the Social Science Quarterly, who, just like the national media, accept the SPLC’s spurious data because they want to believe it. If no one expects major news outlets to perform even the most rudimentary fact checks, (a process formally known as “journalism“), why should the editors of an academic journal resort to the scientific method of questioning and evaluating test data?

Watching the Watchdogs has already sent the SSQ its evidence that the Goetz, et al, paper is worthless because its underlying data is worthless, but don’t expect to see our claims published in the July issue, or any similar refutations from accredited scientists. It’s not what the audience wants to hear. What was the final conclusion of this impeccably researched document?

“However, our discovery of an association between Wal-Mart locations and hate groups could lead the corporation’s foundation to play a larger role in supporting the types of local groups that enhance the social capital index used in our analysis.”

There it is in a nutshell, friends… the “show-me-the-money” give-away.

SPLC — 2011 “Hate Map” — Another Year of Lies

The Southern Poverty Law Center has released its annual “Hate Map” fund-raising tool today. The SPLC claims it has designated 1,018 “hate groups” in the US in 2011.

Let’s have a look those numbers, but first, a few background facts are in order:

1. There is NO legal definition of “hate group,” which is why even the FBI does not, cannot, designate “hate groups.”

The SPLC uses the deliberately meaningless term “hate groups” in its fund-raising materials because it allows them to denigrate groups and individuals with which it disagrees without accusing them of any actual crimes, as noted in the last line of the “Hate Map” legend:

“Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity.”

The fact of the matter is that the whole reason for a “Hate Map” is to imply that the “groups” on it are violent criminals. This has been the foundation of the SPLC’s ongoing fear campaign for more than 30 years. To this end, the “Hate Map” legend also states that:

“Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.”

Marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, etc. are all Constitutionally protected under the Bill of Rights. The SPLC deliberately conflates these basic civil rights with criminal acts and “hate group” activities because it frightens their mostly elderly donor base.

2. The SPLC provides no information on the exact location of these groups or their membership numbers. In fact, they don’t even bother to affiliate 247 of these “groups” with any known city or town. That’s 24% right off the top. In many cases, 60%, 80% and even an incredible 100% of the “hate groups” in a given state are homeless.

Watching the Watchdogs questioned the SPLC’s public relations guru, Mark Potok, about these wild discrepancies last fall. Potok, who is responsible for the “Hate Map” numbers, admitted on camera that his “Hate Map” numbers were “anecdotal,” “a very rough estimate,” and “an imperfect process.”

Sadly, the media cannot bother to vet Mr. Potok’s spurious claims and simply regurgitate his bogus numbers as fact. Fortunately, Watching the Watchdogs is very willing and able to examine the numbers, and, as usual, we find them sadly wanting.

See them for yourself. Judge them for yourself.

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Because the “Hate Map” is the keystone to SPLC fund-raising efforts, Mark Potok is forever making claims of “explosive growth” in the number of “hate groups” in his press releases and media interviews.

Last year his “hate group” count “exploded” from 1,002 to 1,017, or 1.5%. In 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration and the worst year of the Great Recession, the count “exploded by 6 groups, or six-tenths of a percent, the lowest increase in SPLC history.

In 2010, Potok bumped the number of “hate groups” up by 70, but the number of homeless “hate groups” actually increased by 99 for the same year.

True to form, Mr. Potok bumped his numbers up by 15 “groups” for 2011, including 20 entries for a new “group,” the Georgia Militia. Oddly enough, Mr. Potok can’t seem to locate 18 of those units.

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This is hard data? NPR, the New York Times and MS-NBC all seem to think so. Look for them to quote Potok’s figures in the coming weeks.

Last year Mr. Potok warned of “explosive growth” in the number of “hate groups” in the Northwest:

“Montana is developing into a hotbed,” said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC Intelligence Project (ABC News, June 22, 2011)

The number of “hate groups’ in Montana actually dropped by 23%, from 13 to 10. Overall, the number of “groups” in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho “exploded” from 59 to 61, and 25% of those ‘groups” are homeless.

Another Potokian “explosion” turns out to be a damp squib.

Even if Mr. Potok’s powers of prognostication are somewhat lacking, the one thing we can always count on is that the number of “hate groups,” like the millions of tax-free dollars in the SPLC’s “Endowment Fund,” will continue to rise.

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The more money the Southern Poverty Law Center makes, the more “hate groups” they seem to find.