SPLC – The Gospel According to Mark (Potok)

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s public relations chief, Mark Potok, is a paid spokesman whose primary function is to perpetuate the SPLC’s decades-long fear campaign in the Media. The SPLC gave Mr. Potok a $10,000 dollar raise in 2012, bringing his compensation package to $162,000 a year because of his great skill at convincing their mostly elderly donor base that “hate groups” were everywhere.

Potok is the Media’s “go-to” guy on “hate,” despite the fact that he has no legal or law enforcement experience, and so Mr. Potok spends a lot of his time giving his repetitious “hate” spiel, but every so often the “Senior Fellow” forgets to follow the “hate groups are everywhere!” script and it’s always informative to hear what he really thinks.

Most recently, as of this writing, Mr. Potok made an astounding admission to CNN  that nearly mirrors what Watching the Watchdogs has been telling readers for years about the SPLC’s lucrative “hate group” marketing tool:

“Mark Potok,  a center spokesman, says there’s no shared definition of what constitutes hate speech.

“There is no legal meaning. It’s just a phrase,” Potok says. “Hate speech is in the ear of the beholder.”
(May 5, 2013, CNN.com, “When Christians become a ‘hated minority‘”)

Mr. Potok, there’s no shared definition of a “hate group” either. No legal meaning. It’s just a phrase. A “hate group” is entirely in the eye of the beholder (or marketer).

And because the SPLC is the sole arbiter of the “hate group” label, a “hate group” is whatever they say it is and they can designate as many as they want for fundraising purposes. The SPLC receives no external review or oversight and the Media makes no attempt whatsoever to vet Mr. Potok’s claims.

And what exactly are Mr. Potok’s exacting standards when it comes to applying the lucrative “hate group” stamp of disapproval? According to Mark Potok:

“…a “hate group” has nothing to do with criminality… [or] potential for violence…” Rather, as Potok put it, “It’s all about ideology.”

Futhermore:

“Listing here does not imply a group advocates or engages in violence or other criminal activity.” (SPLC “Hate Map” legend, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map)

No crime, no violence, just “wrong thinking.”  Potok further claims that:

“All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” (SPLC “Hate Map” legend, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map)

Since Mr. Potok has already ruled out crime and violence, which would immediately be considered hate crimes and rightly turned over to the police, all of these malignant “attacks” must then be considered “hate speech,” which Mr. Potok so elegantly defined above.

Get the picture?

Potok also admits that even the FBI cannot monitor “hate group” based solely on their ideology (but somehow his private fundraising company can?):

“The FBI does not monitor groups just because they have “hateful” ideology. There must be some evidence of criminal wrongdoing.“ (www.usatoday.com, May 17, 2002)

Despite Potok’s feckless disclaimer that being listed on his “Hate Map” tool in no way implies violence or criminality, that is precisely what the map is intended to do . That’s why Mr. Potok created it in the first place. The “Hate Map” is a branding tool, in both the marketing and social senses of the term.

Much like Hawthorne’s scarlet A, Mr. Potok’s scarlet H is designed solely to demonize, dehumanize and stigmatize its targets, effectively stifling all discussion or debate. Who would want to talk to a hate group, after all?

So, if these people aren’t out there breaking laws left and right, what exactly are they doing to earn the “hate group” label?:

“Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.” (SPLC “Hate Map” legend, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map)

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere! Marches, speeches, meetings, publishing… there are laws regarding such things!:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (First of ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, a.k.a. The Bill of Rights)

Is it really right for an alleged “civil rights group” to deliberately conflate six of the most fundamental, Constitutionally protected civil rights with “criminal acts” and “hate group activities”?

If these groups are exercising their legal rights to Free Speech, regardless of how distasteful some may find that speech, what would you call someone who arbitrarily interprets the Laws of the Land by his own subjective standards?

Vigilante: noun : a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); broadly : a self-appointed doer of justice. (www.merriam-webster.com)

That pretty much sums up the SPLC’s M.O. in a nutshell. Too bad the IRS didn’t take a hint from the Feds…

Maybe Senior Fellow Potok knows things the rest of us do not? After all, the SPLC has paid the man more than $2,000,000 dollars since 2000 for his expertise, right?:

“Mark Potok, who has directed the SPLC’s Intelligence Project for 12 years, said the report relies on media, citizen and law enforcement reports, and does not include original reporting by SPLC staff.” (www.postcrescent.com, July 6, 2009)

Well, okay, Mr. Potok’s Intelligence Report is based on second- and third-hand information, informants and hearsay, but at least he must have a solid handle on how many people are involved in these nefarious “hate groups,” no?:

“The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., estimates more than 100,000 followers among the various hate groups, though a spokesman [Mark Potok] concedes that the tally – from periodicals, news reports and police – is approximate. (Arlene Levinson, “Hate Groups, Crimes Said Rare in US,” Associated Press, July 8, 1999)

“Approximate,” eh? Hmmm. Mr. Potok claims there were 602 “hate groups” in the US in 2000, so that averages out to about 166 haters per group. That sounds a bit high to us. Would you care to qualify your estimate, Mr. P.?:

“The numbers are absolutely soft,” said Mark Potok, a Southern Poverty Law Center spokesman. “We are talking about a tiny number of Americans who are members of hate groups – I mean, infinitesimal.” (Arlene Levinson, “Hate Groups, Crimes Said Rare in US,” Associated Press, July 8, 1999)

“Infinitesimal”?? How much is that in more monosyllabic terms?:

in·fin·i·tes·i·mal

adjective

1.indefinitely or exceedingly small; minute: 

2.immeasurably small; less than an assignable quantity: to an infinitesimal degree.

(www.dictionary.com)

Well, in all fairness, Mr. Potok made his “infinitesimal” estimate back in 1999 when he was still new on the job. Surely his powers of prognostication have improved with time:

“Potok acknowledged that some of the groups may be small and said it is impossible for outsiders to gauge the membership of most of the groups.” (David Crary, Associated Press Online, March 10, 2008)

The groups may be small? With over a hundred members each? How many members comprise a group, Mr. Potok? Especially a “hate group”?:

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

When Watching the Watchdogs had the opportunity in 2011 to ask Mr. Potok directly about the accuracy of his “hate group” numbers, on camera, the Senior Fellow was amazingly candid in admitting that his figures were “anecdotal,” “an imperfect process” and “a very rough estimate.”

Too bad the tens of thousands of suckers who sent the SPLC $40 million donor-dollars last year, based on Potok’s “hate group” numbers, didn’t realize the fellow was merely guessing. Well, no harm done, we suppose.

The important thing to remember is that even though Mr. Potok assigned his “hate group” label to people who were breaking no laws, and, even though he’s not especially concerned over just exactly how many people (or P.O. boxes) make up a “group,” we can all rest assured that “hate groups” are the biggest threat to domestic tranquility today:

“And I would say as a general matter, it is extremely unusual these days for an organization to plan and carry out a criminal act where mainly for the reason that they are so likely to get caught.

So what we really see out there in terms of violence from the radical right is by and large what we would call lone wolves, people operating on their own or with just one or two partners. As opposed to, you know, being some kind of organizational plan.” (October 30, 2008, NPR.org,  Assessing White Supremacist Groups in the US)

“Still, [Potok] said the public should remain vigilant about the activities of hate groups, even though individuals are responsible for the majority of hate crimes in America.” (www.courier-journal.com, July 21, 2009)

Well Mr. Potok, if “lone wolves” and individuals are the ones committing all these alleged hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism, why do you focus solely on law abiding “hate groups”?? Why not just publish the names and addresses of these “lone wolves” in your next Intelligence Report and be done with it? It’s not like you don’t have enough third-hand gossip and self-appointed vigilante informants on the ground to get the information, right?

At the end of the day, Mr. Potok and his SPLC have no more power to identify the next mentally ill individuals to go on a murder spree than you do. That’s not the point of the exercise, however. Mr. Potok’s job is to perpetuate his endless fear campaign and convince his mostly-elderly, mostly-Progressive donor base to send him more money. They sent him more than $4,500 dollars every single hour last year and it did nothing to prevent Sandy Hook or Aurora, but it did contribute directly to a crazed “lone wolf” who used Mr. Potok’s “Hate Map” fundraising tool to select the target for his botched shooting spree at the Family Research Council.

These facts, these numbers, Mr. Potok’s own public contradictions will do little to dissuade the SPLC’s donors, because the Master Public Relations man knows how to play the con to the hilt. In a 2007 speech to an “anti-hate” group in Michigan, Mark Potok laid out his personal thoughts on these “wrong thinkers” and his views on their fundamental humanity and civil rights:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that these are human beings and it’s a mistake to regard them as just a bunch of sociopaths… though most of them are.”

“Let me say… our aim… sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups and so on. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups. Completely destroy them.”

The only thing more chilling than the sneering way in which Mark Potok deliberately dehumanizes people who are exercizing their Constitutional rights is the roar of laughter and thunderous applause it drew from the tolerant, inclusive and progressive “anti-haters.”

All facts to the contrary be damned, they came to hear what they wanted to hear… the Gospel according to Mark.

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.

A Tale of Two SPLCs

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “serendipity” as:

“The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.”

In short, looking for one thing and finding something else that you weren’t expecting. It happens to everyone at some time or other and it can be quite rewarding when it does.

As long-time readers of this blog know, we get the vast majority of our information about the Southern Poverty Law Center from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s web site is a treasure trove of information on the organization’s hiring, fundraising and public relations practices.

As long-time web surfers know, a fairly reliable shortcut to finding many web sites is simply to type in the name of an organization with a “.com” or “.org” appended to the end. If you try this trick with www.splc.org, however, you will be rewarded with a serendipitous trip to an entirely different SPLC web site.

In this case, you will be directed to the site of the Student Press Law Center, located in Northern Virginia. Apparently, these folks registered their domain name before their Alabama counterparts, who had to settle for http://www.splcenter.org instead.

Actually, “counterparts” is misleading as you would be hard pressed to identify two law centers with such diametrically opposite missions.

Since the primary mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center appears to be fundraising, we’ll call it the $PLC, for short, and use SPLC to refer to the Student Press Law Center, which operates on a fraction of the $PLC’s annual budget.

The primary mission of the SPLC, as you might imagine, is to serve as a resource and advocate for student publications from elementary school through to colleges and universities.

The Student Press Law Center is an advocate for student First Amendment rights, for freedom of online speech, and for open government on campus. The SPLC provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to student journalists and the educators who work with them.

Did you catch the reference to First Amendment rights? This is the foundation and basis for all of the Student Press Law Center’s work. For those who are a little rusty on the First Amendment, as the Southern Poverty Law Center seems to be, it goes like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Imagine, a law center dedicated to preserving the most fundamental civil rights in the U.S. Constitution. Compare that with the $PLC’s take on the First Amendment rights of those groups its donors find objectionable:

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

Instead of promoting and protecting the First Amendment rights of people to assemble peaceably and to speak, write and publish their own thoughts and opinions, the $PLC conflates those rights with “hate group” activities and “criminal acts.”

Even the entirely spurious term “hate group” is nothing more than a blatant attempt to silence people engaged in entirely legal and protected activities. Who, after all, would listen to anything a “hate group” has to say?

Those who would petition their own elected government for redress are smeared as “far right-wing, anti-government radicals.” Those concerned with their government’s response to the  millions of people who flaunt US law and enter the country illegally are “nativists” and those hold conservative religious beliefs are tarred as “radical traditionalists.” (As we recently noted, the $PLC contends that “Modern Americans” have abandoned Christianity…)

In short, if there is a Constitutionally protected civil right, the Southern Poverty Law Center has a smear for it.

The $PLC maintains a “Hate Map” fundraising tool a “Stand Strong Against Hate” map that also allows donors to “report hate incidents” directly to the $PLC for inclusion in the dossiers they compile and send to every law enforcement agency in the land. Note the term “hate incidents” as opposed to “hate crimes.” Watching the Watchdogs created a short video that uncovers the fast and loose accounting behind that scam:

The Student Press Law Center maintains an interactive map as well, only this one identifies areas where bigots have attempted to censor the press by stealing newspapers from newsstands. These are actual civil rights violations, (more than half a million papers stolen since 2000), in which the First Amendment rights of both the publishers and the readers were denied by ignorant vigilantes.

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So at the end of the day we have two law centers with the same initials but absolutely nothing else in common. The Student Press Law Center fights to preserve and protect people’s most fundamental First Amendment rights while the Southern Poverty Law Center is hell-bent on censorship and denying those same civil rights to those they designate as having “wrong thoughts” and smear with dehumanizing labels such as “hate group.”

While the mission of the Student Press Law Center is to protect all forms of expression, even those that some may find offensive, here’s what the $PLC’s $150,000-dollar-a-year Public Relations Chief Mark Potok had to say about the rights of all citizens to free speech and freedom of association back in 2007:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that these are human beings and it’s a mistake to regard them as just a bunch of sociopaths… though most of them are.”

“Let me say… our aim… sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups and so on. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups. Completely destroy them.”

These are American citizens engaging in entirely legal free speech activities and the “nation’s leading civil rights organization” wants to “completely destroy them.” You don’t have to agree with anything these groups have to say, most people don’t, but you cannot arbitrarily deny them their rights to free speech or it’s only a matter of time before the $PLC or some other self-appointed vigilante group decides that you have “wrong thoughts” and need to be “completely destroyed.”

Mark Potok, this veritable paragon of civil rights makes both of these telling comments within the first two minutes of the video below. What’s even more ironic is that Mr. Potok began his career as journalist back in the 1990s. Apparently, the $PLC pays better than USA Today. It’s amazing what people are willing to sell for a few pieces of silver.

 

 

The $PLC has nearly a quarter-billion dollars in cash on hand while the SPLC does actual good in the world on just over 1% of that bloated trove.

The Student Press Law Center also offers an online First Amendment quiz. that everyone should take, especially the would-be civil libertarians at the $PLC.

Mr. Potok, what was your score?

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 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.

Click image to enlarge

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.

Click image to enlarge

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.

Click image to enlarge

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

Mark Potok — The SPLC’s ‘Hate Map’ is an “Imperfect Process”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s $147,000-a-year public relations guru, Mark Potok,  recently appeared at a local Virginia university to talk about, what else, “The State of Hate in America: The Radical Right Since 9/11″

Billed as a “Visiting Scholar, Mr. Potok delivered a rather predictable, hour-long diatribe on the evilness of evil white/conservative/Christian men in America, all leading to and from the Oklahoma City bombing.

A long-time Watching the Watchdogs reader actually captured most of Potok’s sales pitch on video and, better still, Mr. Potok was finally asked the very question we’ve been asking for years: Where are the missing “hate groups”?

Up to that point, Mr. Potok had been preaching to the choir. The professor who introduced the Maestro gushingly referred to him as her “personal hero,” and the crowd of wide-eyed twenty-somethings had been nodding and “Amen”-ing their way throughout the lecture.

By questioning Potok’s numbers in his own element, our correspondent was literally “bearding the lyin’,” so to speak.

Below is a transcript of the exchange, and a video clip of the the three-minute exchange can be found here.

The question seemed to throw Mr. Potok off his game, as nobody, certainly nobody in the media, academia or the DHS had ever challenged his numbers before. He seems to hem and haw and grasp for words. At one point, Mr. Potok seemed to have a flash of sudden inspiration, the missing “hate groups,” said he, “are state chapters!”

If you listen closely, you can almost hear Jon Lovitz exclaiming from the bleachers, “Yeah! That’s the ticket!!”

To his credit, Mr. Potok acknowledged that the question was an honest one: “I understand the criticism and it’s not an illegitimate criticism,” he said.

More amazing still, Mark Potok admitted that his “Hate Map,” the Crown Jewel of all SPLC fund-raising fear campaigns is “a very rough measure” and the result of “an imperfect process.”

Potok further concedes that his information is “anecdotal” and that up to 20% of his groups can’t be found. The actual number is 26%, assuming all of the other “groups” actually exist. In fact, last year Mr. Potok bumped the number of alleged “hate groups” up by 70 and yet the number of homeless “hate groups” jumped by 99 for the same time period!

In other words, Mr. Potok’s numbers are meaningless. Who knew?

Let’s allow the Director of Intelligence to speak for himself:

Q: Mr. Potok, every year your organization produces a “Hate Map” that purports to identify the number of “hate groups” in individual states across the country. This past spring, according to your accounting, the number was up to 1,002, but if you actually go in… if you Google the map and look at it…, 262 of those groups aren’t affiliated with any town or city or anything. They’re just kind of floating out there in limbo.

MP: Sure. Well, these aren’t.. I mean, look, let me tell you a little bit about how we do the “hate group” map. I understand the criticism and it’s not an illegitimate criticism.

Let me first of all say, that we do the “hate group” map and the counts, and so on, as a very rough measure… I’m not talking about the individual towns and such… as an attempt to get a feel for what the Radical Right looks like. Is it growing? Is it shrinking? And so on.

And, you know, I will admit right up front, I mean, is… are two groups with two people in them worse than one group with four people in them? Well, maybe not… it’s the same thing. But, what we’ve seen historically is that counts do seem to… very clearly… go up and down… we now see it going up again and we can see it reflected anecdotally.

What you are asking about, and it’s true, we have a lot of groups that we can’t identify in a town, and you know, I’ll say we can’t always… it’s an imperfect process… because we’re forced to… many times we know quite a lot about a group. Other times we don’t know much more, uh, other than a particular Klan group… What those basically are, those are state-wide units… that’s what those groups are… So, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan might have a chapter in Harrison, Arkansas, they may have a chapter in another town, and so they might also have an Arkansas chapter, and in those cases, we don’t know where the chapter is.

Q: But the media doesn’t see it that way. They quote you verbatim, saying that there are 1,002 groups out there.

MP: Well, that’s, that’s what there are out there…

Q: But you can’t locate them. You claim there are 221 Klan groups in the U.S., but you can’t locate 109 of them.

MP: Sorry?

Q: You claim there are 221 Klan groups in the U.S., but you can’t locate 109 of them. That’s fifty percent. That’s quite a discrepancy.

MP: You said it yourself, it’s more like 20% of the overall numbers [unintelligible]. And I’m telling you… the reasons I’m not telling you it’s not possible that some claims of some statewide group that doesn’t exist.

We’re often looking at these groups… I mean, one of the criteria we use when looking at these groups… we’re trying to separate out the real groups that really do things from one man and a computer [unintelligible]… In other words, separating out the real interest blogs… or, you know, a site on the Internet, from groups that actually do something. So one of the things we try to establish [unintelligible]… is that group active? Has it had a rally? Is it publishing? Propaganda of one kind or another? Can you join that group? Those kinds of things.

And there it is, from Director of Intelligence himself. The ludicrous nature of the final paragraph is worthy of its own blog entry, so replete is it with half-truths and outright contradictions. Stay tuned.

SPLC — Housing Crisis for “Hate Groups”?

While doing a little housekeeping recently here at Watching the Watchdogs, we came across a fantastic statistic buried within the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indisputable “hate group” accounting system.

In 2009, WTW noted that of the 926 “hate groups” designated by the SPLC for the previous year, (according to their own spurious definition), fully 127 of them were not affiliated with any known city or town on the map. That’s 14% of the total listed on their “Hate Map” fund-raising tool for 2008, (the “Hate Map” numbers always reflect the previous fiscal year.)

We can all rest assured that those 127 mystery groups are really, really out there, because the good folks at the SPLC tell us they are out there, right? Not that they give any information about the other alleged “groups” beyond a town name. One would think “outing” a hate group by giving its address, phone number and membership list would be a great way to shame the “haters” back underground.

2008 was also the year that Barack Obama was elected president, causing the SPLC’s public relations guru Mark Potok to sputter that this only proved that Americans were more racist than ever, and Mr. Potok predicted that the election of a black president combined with a tanking economy would lead to unprecedented growth in the number of “hate groups.”

As it turns out, for 2009, the first year of the Obama administration and the worst year of the current recession (so far…), the number of “hate groups,” as counted by Swami Potok himself, rocketed from 926 to 932, a terrifying increase of six groups, or six-tenths of a percent. Shocking, but true.

In the big money world of the Hate-For-Profit industry, the number of “hate groups” is NEVER allowed to decline, no matter how much money you throw at them, and since the SPLC is the sole arbiter of the highly lucrative and highly meaningless “hate group” label, we at WTW were mystified as to why Mr. Potok only came up with a 0.65% increase? After all, if you’re the one pulling numbers out of thin air why not make up a number that would at least back up your predictions?

Six-tenths of a percent is the lowest increase in the SPLC’s entire history.

Regretfully, we at Watching the Watchdogs were so bowled over by these anemic returns that we dropped the ball and did not bother to run through the state by state maps to see how many of those 932 groups were officially homeless. For this, we apologize. We took the numbers for granted even though we have known for years that you cannot trust the SPLC’s mathematics. Mea culpa, mea culpa…

In March of this year, Swami Potok released his impeccably researched number of “hate groups” for 2010, and we were relieved to note that Mr. Potok had noted his previous error and arbitrarily jumped the numbers from 932 to 1002, an increase of 70 groups in one year, or a net gain of 7.5%. Now there’s the kind of good hate work we expect from Mr. Potok. Lord knows you can’t scare the old folks with a measly six-tenths of a percent. What was the man thinking?

As it turns out, after reviewing the maps and doing the math, the number of unaffiliated “hate groups” jumped rather significantly, to 262, or 26% of the total right off the top!

What this means is that while the number of “hate groups” increased by 70, the number of homeless “hate groups” increased by 99!! Apparently, not only were every last one of the new “hate groups” phantoms, but 29 other hotbeds of hate got evicted as well.

It’s no secret that the bursting of the housing bubble caused a lot of good, decent Americans to lose their homes, but thanks to Mr. Potok and the SPLC, we can take great comfort in knowing that evil American “hate groups” are faring no better.

Cue the schadenfreude…

Mr. Potok has been the “Director of Intelligence” at the SPLC for more than a decade now, and while some might be alarmed by these shocking lapses in both accounting and judgment, (Six-tenths of a percent, Mr. P.?? What were you thinking??), fear not, for Mr. Potok’s six-digit salary is far from being in jeopardy. In fact, his grateful overseers actually gave him a $7,300 raise last year (“Recession? What recession?”).

Mr. Potok’s spurious “Hate Map” has been instrumental in bringing in more than $86,000 tax-free donor-dollars a day, every day last year. His numbers are crap, but what does he care? It’s not like anyone in the mainstream media is actually going to look at them.

When you’re the one making up the numbers, you can make up any number you want.

SPLC — “Ding! Dong! The Klan is Dead!!”

Which old Klan? Why, the wicked Klan. Who knew?

As it turns out, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s $147,000 donor-dollar-a-year “Intelligence Director,” (read: Public Relations Guru), Mark Potok knew.

Regular readers of Watching the Watchdogs will be familiar with our coverage of Mr. Potok’s proclamations and prognostications, but Mr. Potok’s most recent public statement caught us completely off guard.

Mark Potok began downgrading the threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan several months ago, as we reported here:

“The Klan of today is small, fractured, impotent and irrelevant,” Potok said. (www.timesfreepress.com, September 12, 2010)

“The Klan is a sorry shadow of its former self. It’s common for the KKK to brag about big numbers, but usually they are largely outnumbered by the counter-protesters, Potok said.

Even on the white supremacist scene, the Klan is seen as less important today, he said.” (www.chronicle.augusta.com, October 21, 2010)

But just last week, Mr. Potok drove a stake into the heart of the SPLC’s prime fund-raising bogey-man:

“But Potok said the Klan has disintegrated. “There is no Klan now,” he said, only a collection of squabbling organizations. (www.sanluisobispo.com, March 23, 2011)

That’s right folks… It’s official!! Intelligence Director Mark Potok announces that “There is NO Klan now!!”

Considering the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars the SPLC has garnered over the decades from exploiting the specter of pointy-headed Klansmen roaming the streets of America, it’s almost incomprehensible that Mr. Potok would cut the throat of this most sacred cash cow.

Fortunately for Mr. Potok and the SPLC, it really doesn’t matter what they say or do. Their mostly elderly donors will continue to cut checks, the so-called media will never vet as much as a single Potokian claim, and the SPLC’s coffers will continue to bulge (they now have more than $216 MILLION tax-free dollars in cash on hand)

On February 23, 2011, Mark Potok released his latest “Hate Map,” claiming that there were 221 Klan “groups,” even though he was unable to locate 109 of them on the map.

On March 23, 2011, Mark Potok announced that “There is no Klan now.”

Since Mr. Potok’s “Hate Map” is a simple HTML web page, which any middle-schooler can edit with ease, we can expect that by April 23, 2011, the “Hate Map” numbers will drop accordingly. Right?

Right???