No. I have never trusted the SPLC, and have been quite vocal about the
evils of the SPLC and in particular Morris Dees.   You used to agree; and
it was but one of many points that we saw eye to eye upon.

Those days seem long gone......

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:09 PM, plainolamerican <[email protected]>
wrote:

> The SPLC is declaring good honest Americans as "Hate Groups" based on
> their political motivations and financial motivations.  The SPLC is more
> dangerous today than they were twenty years ago, and they are no longer
> trusted, even my elitist mainstream media.
> ---
> I've never trusted them ... and now you don't. Welcome to the 21st century.
>
> On Monday, February 29, 2016 at 1:06:35 PM UTC-6, KeithInTampa wrote:
>
>> The SPLC is declaring good honest Americans as "Hate Groups" based on
>> their political motivations and financial motivations.  The SPLC is more
>> dangerous today than they were twenty years ago, and they are no longer
>> trusted, even my elitist mainstream media.
>>
>> Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label
>> By Rosslyn Smith <http://www.americanthinker.com/rosslyn_smith>
>> Last week's shooting
>> <http://www.examiner.com/article/frc-shooting-and-hate-crimes> at the
>> headquarters of the Family Research Council (FRC) has placed the Southern
>> Poverty Law Center (SPLC) back into the news.  The SPLC recently had placed
>> the FRC on its list of hate groups because the SPLC claims that in its
>> opposition to gay marriage, the FRC defames gays and lesbians.
>>
>> It should be noted that the not-for-profit SPLC ostensibly began its
>> mission to help those who had been victimized by civil rights violations by
>> filing suits on their behalf.  In recent years, the SPLC greatly expanded
>> its definition of civil rights and hate groups to the point where any
>> organization that opposes the left's favored causes risks being labeled a
>> hate group by the SPLC.  It has also moved away from suing on behalf of the
>> aggrieved to raising awareness of the presence of "hate groups."  Most of
>> all, for the last 35 years, it has become a real fundraising dynamo.
>>
>> The labeling of opposing political views as hate by the SPLC has become
>> so egregious that at the end of a report on a solidarity march in the
>> Swedish city of Malmö by people protesting attacks on Jews by Islamists,
>> William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection
>> <http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/08/kippah-walk-in-malmo-in-solidarity-with-jews-persecuted-in-malmo/>
>> wonders:
>>
>>
>> *Bonus question*: Will pointing out the truth about Malmö land me on
>> SPLC's "hate map <http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map#s=NY>"
>> along with Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs
>> <http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/>?
>>
>> Update:  I just noticed that Danel Greenfields' Sultan Knish
>> <http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/> also is on SPLC's NY hate map.
>>
>> A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a
>> hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor.  I agree that it is, but I take
>> issue with others about what is to be done.  When I look at the entire
>> history of the SPLC, I don't think the recent trend of inflate the hate
>> <http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2012/08/stop-calling-conservative-groups-hate-groups/>
>>  is
>> as much about political correctness run completely amok in the age of Obama
>> as it is about the greed and self-aggrandizement of the founder of the SPLC
>> and the gullibility of the donor base.
>>
>> Yes, mock those who increasingly conflate disapproval of policy ideas
>> with hate.  It is a silly idea.  But mock even more those who continue to
>> donate to SPLC as dupes of pious-sounding con men.  Make them doubt their
>> self-image as serious-thinking people by showing that they are being
>> manipulated by a shameless huckster whose principal agenda has always been
>> to become very wealthy.  For if you understand that motivation, it is easy
>> to see why the definition of hate had to be expanded to include groups that
>> were considered very mainstream just a short time ago.
>>
>> SPLC founder Morris Dees is a lawyer, but he began his career as a direct
>> marketer, hawking everything from cookbooks to tractor seat cushions.
>> Indeed, the SPLC was a latecomer to the civil rights movement, as many of
>> the biggest legal and legislative battles had been won before the
>> organization was formed in 1971.
>>
>> Dees' first law partner, Millard Fuller
>> <http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Egerton-Poverty-Palace-July-1988.pdf>,
>> had this to say of him and their legal and direct marketing business
>> ventures in the 1960s:
>>
>> Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the
>> overriding purpose of making a pile of money. ... We were not particular
>> about how we did  it. We just wanted to be independently rich.  During the
>> eight years we worked together we never wavered in that resolve.
>>
>> By the mid-60s, Morris was rich.  He also became deeply interested in the
>> money side of leftist politics.  The initial donor list of the SPLC
>> consisted of those who had contributed to McGovern's political campaign,
>> because Dees ran that campaign's direct mail operation and had requested
>> the mailing list as his fee.  The Southern-born Dees knew that many of the
>> northern liberals on McGovern's donor list would get a vicarious thrill
>> from sending a check to the Alabama-based SPLC to fight the Ku Klux Klan
>> and other white supremacists.
>>
>> If appealing to some of these rather naive donors meant tarring other
>> Southerners as racist, bigoted hicks, so be it.  Dees also raised money for
>> Jimmy Carter in 1976 and wanted to be attorney general, but he and Carter's
>> people had a falling out.  After Carter left office, spokesman Jody Powell
>> made no bones about his disgust with Dees and the use of appeals in SPLC
>> mailings that were intentionally designed to play up to the stereotypes
>> "ignorant Yankee contributors" had about Southerners.
>>
>> It should also be noted that Millard Fuller took a different course from
>> his erstwhile partner's.  After he sold out to Dees, Fuller donated the
>> money to charity and went on to found Habitat for Humanity.  As
>> contributions to the SPLC kept increasing, so did Dees' salary.  Within two
>> decades, he was among the most highly compensated of the heads of advocacy
>> groups, earning much more than the heads of more widely known organizations
>> such as the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, and the NAACP Legal Defense
>> and Educational Fund.  That something was seriously rotten at SPLC was
>> noted along with the increases in Dees' salary.  While the SPLC promoted
>> its pursuit of lawsuits related to civil rights, especially those
>> challenging the imposition of the death penalty on black offenders,
>> fundraising was pursued even more fervently.  By 1989, an ecumenical guide
>> to charitable giving described the mission of the SPLC as
>> <http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Other-Side-Givers-Guide-1989.pdf>
>>  "the
>> aggressive distribution of junk mail, soliciting funds for more junk mail."
>>
>> A decade later in *Harper's* magazine
>> <http://www.americanpatrol.com/SPLC/ChurchofMorrisDees001100.html>, a
>> feature titled "The Church of Morris Dees" noted:
>>
>> Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless
>> fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with
>> all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim
>> and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti-
>> death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate,
>> "though I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye."
>>
>> The results of one of the SPLC's most famous cases as detailed in that
>> article certainly might lead even the most credulous donor to think the aim
>> of the SPLC may have shifted a bit from helping victims of hate to greed
>> and self-aggrandizement.
>>
>> In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of
>> America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two
>> Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted
>> Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper
>> stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million
>> from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one
>> containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse.
>>
>> In what Dees must have seen as icing on the cake, his battles against the
>> fast fading and largely judgment-proof Klan even became the subject of a
>> 1991 made-for-TV movie that depicted him as a huge hero in the civil rights
>> movement.  Again, the movie was used to feed the all-important fundraising
>> beast.
>>
>> The year 1998 saw Dees being inducted into the Direct Marketing
>> Association Hall of Fame
>> <http://www.the-dma.org/awards/hof/hofinductees.shtml#1998>, a move that
>> also should have alerted the SPLC donor base that just maybe the SPLC was
>> not quite as cash-strapped as it always represented itself in its frequent
>> solicitations.
>>
>> Dees' reputation has long been beyond tarnished inside much of the civil
>> rights bar.  In 2007, Atlanta civil rights lawyer Stephen Bright was
>> invited by the University of Alabama Law School to present its Morris Dees
>> Justice Award.  Here is what Bright wrote Dean
>> <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001573>Kenneth C. Randall
>> <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001573>:
>> <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001573>
>>
>> I also received the law school's invitation to the presentation of the
>> "Morris Dees Justice Award," which you also mentioned in your letter as one
>> of the "great things" happening at the law school. I decline that
>> invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and
>> others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has
>> been documented by John Egerton, Harper's, the Montgomery Advertiser in its
>> "Charity of Riches" series, and others.
>>
>> The positive contributions Dees has made to justice -- most undertaken
>> based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund raising potential --
>> are far overshadowed by what Harper's described as his "flagrantly
>> misleading" solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions
>> of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the
>> money because he has $175 million and two "poverty palace" buildings in
>> Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people -- some of
>> moderate or low incomes -- who believe his pitches and give to his
>> $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to
>> raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because
>> he spends so much on fund raising, his operation spends $30 million a year
>> to accomplish less than what many other organizations accomplish on
>> shoestring budgets*.*
>>
>> The award does not recognize the work of others by associating them with
>> Dees; it promotes Dees by associating him with the honorees. Both the law
>> school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another Dees scam.
>>
>> None of this has ever seemed to dent the SPLC's ability to raise money by
>> inflating the influence of what it calls hate groups.  But by the late
>> 1980s, a different problem was starting to develop: the Klan was all but
>> dead, and few of the organizations labeled as white supremacists had more
>> than a handful of members.
>>
>> But this didn't stop SPLC from using such groups for their direct mailing
>> haul of shame.  Still, the original donor base was aging.  So during the
>> Clinton administration, the SPLC found Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh
>> a handy substitute for the Klan in its fundraising, despite failures to
>> link his actions to any of the small militia groups the SPLC had earlier
>> identified as hate groups.  Eventually that appeal also ran its course, so
>> the SPLC needed to "inflate the hate" by identifying another group as the
>> boogieman for a new generation of naive souls eager to depart with their
>> money for a righteous-sounding cause.
>>
>> In 2010, Ken Silverstein, the author of the 2000 *Harper's* article,
>> noted that the SPLC had found a large new target
>> <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/03/hbc-90006753>: those immigration
>> reform groups that supported almost anything more restrictive than amnesty
>> and de facto open borders.
>>
>> For the record, I am totally opposed to CIS's stance on immigration, as I
>> stated at the press conference. I accepted the invitation to speak on the
>> panel because it came from my friend Jerry Kammer <http://cis.org/Kammer>,
>> of whom I am a big admirer.
>>
>> I also agreed to the invitation because, much like CIS, I feel that the
>> Law Center is essentially a fraud and that it has a habit of casually
>> labeling organizations as "hate groups." (Which doesn't mean that some of
>> the groups it criticizes aren't reprehensible.) In doing so, the SPLC shuts
>> down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money,
>> very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.
>>
>> Silverstein's good friend Kammer <http://www.cis.org/immigration-splc> had
>> this to say about Dees' manipulative methods as he demolished the SPLC in
>> "Immigration and the SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invented a
>> Smear, Served La Raza, Manipulated the Press, and Duped Its Donors."
>>
>> While Dees was raised a Southern Baptist, he suggested to some donors
>> that he had a more diverse background. For example, in a 1985 fundraising
>> pitch for funds to protect SPLC staff from threats of Klan violence, Dees
>> made conspicuous use of his middle name - Seligman, which he received in
>> honor of a family friend. A former SPLC attorney told The Progressive
>> magazine that Dees signed letters with his middle name in mailings to zip
>> codes that had many Jewish residents. The article was titled "How Morris
>> Dees Got Rich Fighting the Klan." A former SPLC employee told the
>> Montgomery Advertiser that the donor base was "anchored by wealthy Jewish
>> contributors on the East and West coasts."
>> <http://www.cis.org/immigration-splc#94>
>>
>> Attorney Tom Turnipseed, a former Dees associate, told Cox News Service,
>> "Morris loves to raise money. Some of his gimmicks are just so transparent,
>> but they're good."
>> <http://www.cis.org/immigration-splc#95>
>>
>> Turnipseed described a fundraising letter whose return envelope carried
>> "about six different stamps." The purpose of the ruse was to present the
>> appearance of an organization struggling to keep going. As Turnipseed
>> noted: "It was like they had to cobble them all together to come up with 35
>> cents."
>>
>> After decades of claiming in his mailings that the SPLC was itself on the
>> verge of poverty, Dees raised a few eyebrows in 2010 when a sixty-photo
>> spread of his
>> <http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=DS&Dato=20100325&Kategori=LIFESTYLE04&Lopenr=3250804&Ref=PH>*objets
>> d'art-*filled
>> <http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=DS&Dato=20100325&Kategori=LIFESTYLE04&Lopenr=3250804&Ref=PH>
>> home
>> <http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=DS&Dato=20100325&Kategori=LIFESTYLE04&Lopenr=3250804&Ref=PH>,
>> complete with guest house, pool, and grounds, ran in his hometown
>> newspaper, the *Montgomery Advertiser*.  As blogger Steve Sailer noted
>> <http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/08/house-that-poverty-built.html>:
>> <http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/08/house-that-poverty-built.html>
>>
>> This shiny thing-a-mabob with the #20 on it is described as "A poolside
>> rickshaw at the home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala,"
>> because nothing screams *Equality! *like a fancy rickshaw.
>>
>> A look at the recent numbers
>> <http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4482> 
>> reported
>> by SPLC is highly informative.  With net assets of $238 million as of the
>> close of its last fiscal year, the SPLC is among the wealthiest of civil
>> rights and advocacy organizations.  Despite this endowment, the SPLC often
>> implies that it is on the verge of cutting back operations vital to the
>> quest for equality and civil rights due to lack of funds.  Yet it spends
>> almost 19% of its annual budget on fundraising each year despite the fact
>> its net assets are already an extremely healthy seven times annual
>> expenses.  Note that this 19% figure is under cost allocation rules that
>> allow some solicitations to pass as program expenses because educational
>> material is included with the solicitation.
>>
>> Last year, the SPLC generated a surplus of $4.1 million on revenues of
>> $38.7 million.  CEO J. Richard Cohen makes $299K/year, and editor in chief
>> of the SPLC Intelligence Report and Hatewatch blog Mark Potok makes
>> $150K/year.  Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees, age 74, makes $305K/year.  I
>> wonder how many hours Dees spent on trial preparation compared to
>> fundraising.  The title Dees carries is Chief Trial Counsel, yet his chief
>> bailiwick has always been direct mail marketing.
>>
>> As the SPLC publicizes the names of ever more hate groups to "raise
>> awareness" of intolerance and to tap into ever new sources of funds, its
>> donors should keep in mind a genuine larger truth.  Heightened awareness
>> has never by itself helped the actual victims of anything, anywhere, at any
>> time.  At best, it is entirely self-referential.  At its worst, it serves
>> as a useful ploy to make a donor who hasn't done much in the way of due
>> diligence about an organization's finances feel good about sending money to
>> what appears to be a righteous cause.
>>
>> The SPLC has more than mastered the exercise of raising awareness.  In
>> his 2000 article, Silverstein noted that during its then-29 years of
>> existence, the SPLC had carefully adjusted its operations to fit the needs
>> and self-image of its largely urban, white, and often Jewish donor base.
>> Causes that garnered favorable early media attention but which also risked
>> upsetting some donors, such as filing suits protesting the death penalty,
>> were dropped, even if that meant the mass resignation of staff attorneys.
>> Images of angry blacks and other minorities never appear in solicitations.
>> Nor do concrete issues related to race and poverty get much attention in
>> these appeals.  Donors aren't called on to actually fight to improve
>> housing, improve inner-city schools, or end violence at the borders.
>> Everything is geared to the equal-opportunity and secular sin of being
>> intolerant of those who are different.  According to Silverstein, the
>> payoff is also always the same -- the SPLC is all about making guilty white
>> donors feel good about themselves for being understanding by writing a
>> check to the wealthy and largely white SPLC.  Actual attempts to help the
>> oppressed and downtrodden aren't just optional. They are almost superfluous.
>>
>> This is done with a tried-and-true formula Dees learned listening to
>> evangelical preachers as well as TV hucksters.  Silverstein writes:
>>
>> No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving
>> testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned
>> her lesson is identified only as a child of color. "Which race," we are
>> assured, "does not matter." Nor apparently does the specific nature of "the
>> racist acts directed at him," nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors.
>> All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating
>> tears. "I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt," she
>> confides. "His tears washed away the film that had distorted my white
>> perspective of the world." Scales fallen from her eyes, what action does
>> this schoolteacher propose? What Gandhi-like disobedience will she
>> undertake in order to "reach real peace in the world"? She doesn't say but
>> instead speaks vaguely of acting out against "the pain." In the age of
>> Oprah and Clinton, empathy -- or the confession thereof -- is an end in
>> itself.
>>
>> What matters is that the targets feel they will become part of the
>> solution by writing a check to SPLC.  The comparison to Jim and Tammy Faye
>> is really quite apt.  The Bakkers always featured the power of the personal
>> testimonial as panacea.  The SPLC wants the potential donor to identify
>> with the guilty white teacher.  The idea behind Jim Bakker's testimonials
>> was to get potential donors to identify with the one giving the testimony
>> and not dwell on what actual changes must be made in one's life to truly
>> get closer to God.  Solutions were left intentionally quite vague.  And, of
>> course, both the SPLC and the PTL Club offer absolution for sins secular
>> and sacred in nature by means of sinners' dropping a nice fat check in the
>> mail.
>>
>> While the formula is timeless, the pitch itself was badly in need of
>> upgrading in the case of the SPLC.  It's been two generations since the
>> civil rights battles of the 1950s and '60s.  America elected a black man
>> president, and while few of the truly intractable social problems relating
>> to race have been solved, those problems are for serious people willing to
>> do real work -- not film flam artists writing empty prose for the crowd
>> that prides itself on self-described awareness.
>>
>> For some time now, the media culture has been suggesting that the battle
>> for gay marriage has its parallels with the civil rights battles.
>> Promoting gay marriage has certainly become a huge cause among the largely
>> secular, affluent coastal elites who make up much of the donor base of the
>> SPLC.  It seems the perfect newly fashionable cause to adopt to attract a
>> new generation of marks.  Thus, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone who
>> has followed the history of the SPLC that groups which promote traditional
>> values suddenly find themselves on the SPLC hate map.  I guess it is also
>> not surprising that after so many warnings about its money-grubbing ways,
>> the SPLC still has an audience for its exaggerations, misrepresentations,
>> and outright distortions.  As the man said, there is a sucker born every
>> minute.
>>
>> Perhaps if you personally know people who swear by the validity of the
>> new SPLC hate map you may want to nicely inform them they are now charter
>> members of the new secular version of the PTL Club
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PTL_Club> and watch the reaction.  If
>> they get angry, remind them that this is not the assessment of the
>> political right.  The most damning quotes about Dees and the SPLC all come
>> from former associates on the political left.
>>
>> Last week's shooting
>> <http://www.examiner.com/article/frc-shooting-and-hate-crimes> at the
>> headquarters of the Family Research Council (FRC) has placed the Southern
>> Poverty Law Center (SPLC) back into the news.  The SPLC recently had placed
>> the FRC on its list of hate groups because the SPLC claims that in its
>> opposition to gay marriage, the FRC defames gays and lesbians.
>>
>> It should be noted that the not-for-profit SPLC ostensibly began its
>> mission to help those who had been victimized by civil rights violations by
>> filing suits on their behalf.  In recent years, the SPLC greatly expanded
>> its definition of civil rights and hate groups to the point where any
>> organization that opposes the left's favored causes risks being labeled a
>> hate group by the SPLC.  It has also moved away from suing on behalf of the
>> aggrieved to raising awareness of the presence of "hate groups."  Most of
>> all, for the last 35 years, it has become a real fundraising dynamo.
>>
>> The labeling of opposing political views as hate by the SPLC has become
>> so egregious that at the end of a report on a solidarity march in the
>> Swedish city of Malmö by people protesting attacks on Jews by Islamists,
>> William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection
>> <http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/08/kippah-walk-in-malmo-in-solidarity-with-jews-persecuted-in-malmo/>
>> wonders:
>>
>> *Bonus question*: Will pointing out the truth about Malmö land me on
>> SPLC's "hate map <http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map#s=NY>"
>> along with Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs
>> <http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/>?
>>
>> Update:  I just noticed that Danel Greenfields' Sultan Knish
>> <http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/> also is on SPLC's NY hate map.
>>
>> A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a
>> hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor.  I agree that it is, but I take
>> issue with others about what is to be done.  When I look at the entire
>> history of the SPLC, I don't think the recent trend of inflate the hate
>> <http://caffeinatedthoughts.com/2012/08/stop-calling-conservative-groups-hate-groups/>
>>  is
>> as much about political correctness run completely amok in the age of Obama
>> as it is about the greed and self-aggrandizement of the founder of the SPLC
>> and the gullibility of the donor base.
>>
>> Yes, mock those who increasingly conflate disapproval of policy ideas
>> with hate.  It is a silly idea.  But mock even more those who continue to
>> donate to SPLC as dupes of pious-sounding con men.  Make them doubt their
>> self-image as serious-thinking people by showing that they are being
>> manipulated by a shameless huckster whose principal agenda has always been
>> to become very wealthy.  For if you understand that motivation, it is easy
>> to see why the definition of hate had to be expanded to include groups that
>> were considered very mainstream just a short time ago.
>>
>> SPLC founder Morris Dees is a lawyer, but he began his career as a direct
>> marketer, hawking everything from cookbooks to tractor seat cushions.
>> Indeed, the SPLC was a latecomer to the civil rights movement, as many of
>> the biggest legal and legislative battles had been won before the
>> organization was formed in 1971.
>>
>> Dees' first law partner, Millard Fuller
>> <http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Egerton-Poverty-Palace-July-1988.pdf>,
>> had this to say of him and their legal and direct marketing business
>> ventures in the 1960s:
>>
>> Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the
>> overriding purpose of making a pile of money. ... We were not particular
>> about how we did  it. We just wanted to be independently rich.  During the
>> eight years we worked together we never wavered in that resolve.
>>
>> By the mid-60s, Morris was rich.  He also became deeply interested in the
>> money side of leftist politics.  The initial donor list of the SPLC
>> consisted of those who had contributed to McGovern's political campaign,
>> because Dees ran that campaign's direct mail operation and had requested
>> the mailing list as his fee.  The Southern-born Dees knew that many of the
>> northern liberals on McGovern's donor list would get a vicarious thrill
>> from sending a check to the Alabama-based SPLC to fight the Ku Klux Klan
>> and other white supremacists.
>>
>> If appealing to some of these rather naive donors meant tarring other
>> Southerners as racist, bigoted hicks, so be it.  Dees also raised money for
>> Jimmy Carter in 1976 and wanted to be attorney general, but he and Carter's
>> people had a falling out.  After Carter left office, spokesman Jody Powell
>> made no bones about his disgust with Dees and the use of appeals in SPLC
>> mailings that were intentionally designed to play up to the stereotypes
>> "ignorant Yankee contributors" had about Southerners.
>>
>> It should also be noted that Millard Fuller took a different course from
>> his erstwhile partner's.  After he sold out to Dees, Fuller donated the
>> money to charity and went on to found Habitat for Humanity.  As
>> contributions to the SPLC kept increasing, so did Dees' salary.  Within two
>> decades, he was among the most highly compensated of the heads of advocacy
>> groups, earning much more than the heads of more widely known organizations
>> such as the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, and the NAACP Legal Defense
>> and Educational Fund.  That something was seriously rotten at SPLC was
>> noted along with the increases in Dees' salary.  While the SPLC promoted
>> its pursuit of lawsuits related to civil rights, especially those
>> challenging the imposition of the death penalty on black offenders,
>> fundraising was pursued even more fervently.  By 1989, an ecumenical guide
>> to charitable giving described the mission of the SPLC as
>> <http://www.secondclassjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Other-Side-Givers-Guide-1989.pdf>
>>  "the
>> aggressive distribution of junk mail, soliciting funds for more junk mail."
>>
>> A decade later in *Harper's* magazine
>> <http://www.americanpatrol.com/SPLC/ChurchofMorrisDees001100.html>, a
>> feature titled "The Church of Morris Dees" noted:
>>
>> Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless
>> fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with
>> all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. "He's the Jim
>> and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement," renowned anti-
>> death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, h
>>
>> ...
>
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