SPLC

Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees

The Southern Poverty Law Center fired Morris Dees, the nonprofit civil rights organization's co-founder and former chief litigator.

SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement Dees' dismissal over his misconduct was effective on Wednesday, March 13....

"As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world," Cohen said in the emailed statement. "When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action."

Dees, 82, co-founded the Montgomery-based organization in 1971. 

"It was not my decision, what they did," Dees said when reached by phone. "I wish the center the absolute best. Whatever reasons they had of theirs, I don't know."...

Dees' termination is one of several steps taken by the organization this week, Cohen said. 

"Today we announced a number of immediate, concrete next steps we’re taking, including bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve — one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected," Cohen said. 

What the SPLC wants the "next steps" to address or correct remains unclear. An SPLC spokesperson said the organization was "in the process of hiring" the firm for the workplace climate assessment, and no other leadership changes had been announced. 

A message seeking further comment was left on Cohen’s cell phone Thursday afternoon.

"I’ve read the statement they issued," Dees said when asked if he knew why he was fired. "I feel like some of the things in the statement were unfortunate. But I refuse to say anything negative about the center or its employees. I’ll let my life’s work and reputation speak for itself."

When asked if he was offered the chance to resign or retire, the 82-year-old said, "I've told you all I can tell you."

Dees' biography appeared scrubbed from the SPLC's website as news broke of his termination on Thursday afternoon. 

Morris Dees, SPLC funding and civil rights cases

A Montgomery native, Dees attended Sidney Lanier High School. He burnished his marketing chops by managing a direct sale book publishing company while attending the University of Alabama, where he also earned a law degree. 

After returning home to establish a law practice in 1960, Dees won a series of civil rights cases before establishing the SPLC with lawyer Joseph J. Levin Jr. and civil rights activist Julian Bond a decade later.

Southern Poverty Law Center President Emeritus Julian Bond, left, and founder Morris Dees at the SPLC's 40th Anniversary Celebration on Saturday April 30, 2011 at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Ala.(Montgomery Advertiser, Mickey Welsh) (Photo: Montgomery Advertiser)

The legal partnership netted significant civil rights triumphs. Dees challenged systemic discrimination and segregation in Alabama state trooper ranks in a case won in the U.S. Supreme Court. SPLC litigation challenging Alabama's legislative districts forced the state to redraw its districts in the early 1970s, leading to the election of more than a dozen black legislators in 1974.

Morris Dees is a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery.

Early SPLC lawsuits also fought for better conditions for cotton mill workers in Kentucky, women in the workplace and poor defendants on death row. The organization bankrupted a Ku Klux Klan Organization, the United Klans of America, in a 1987 civil case. 

Dees has been a fixture in politics since the group's ascension, though his organization has faced scrutiny in the past.

A 1994 Montgomery Advertiser series provided a deep look into the organization controlled by the multimillionaire Dees, illustrating his near-singular control over the organization and its mammoth budget.

The series, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, revealed a figure seen as heroic by some and single-minded by others. Dees' critics said he was more concerned with fundraising than litigating. 

The series also alleged discriminatory treatment of black employees within the advocacy group, despite its outward efforts to improve the treatment of minorities in the country. Staffers at the time “accused Morris Dees, the center’s driving force, of being a racist and black employees have ‘felt threatened and banded together.’” The organization denied the accusations raised in the series.

"I would hope the IRS and the Justice Department would take this as [an] opportunity to come in and take a close look at The Center, it's finances and it's day-to-day operations," said Jim Tharpe, managing editor of the Advertiser in the mid-1990s, who oversaw the Advertiser series. "It's long overdue."

Dees' central role in the organization has also led to numerous threats against him, and the Advertiser previously reported that he has 24-hour protection at his home.

SPLC a war chest of funds that dwarfs over NAACP and Equal Justice Initiative

Over the years, the SPLC has continued to amass massive funds from donors amid differing levels of scrutiny. The nonprofit has hundreds of employees and offices in four states. The organization had nearly $450 million in net assets, according to publicly available tax documents filed for 2017.

That figure easily dwarfs other civil rights groups — such as the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP — during the same time frame. The Montgomery-based EJI had about $57 million in net assets at that time and the NAACP had about $3.8 million.

SPLC still fell behind other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, which pulled in more than $526 million between its main nonprofit and foundation in 2017 filings, with several local groups collecting additional millions of dollars not included in that figure.

In recent years, the organization has become nationally known and scrutinized for its Hatewatch work tracking the rise of hate groups, particularly white supremacists.

It produces research and advocacy work on a variety of topics, including payday lending, civil asset forfeiture and immigration rights. The SPLC also continues day-to-day civil rights litigation, including an ongoing lawsuit to address prison conditions in Alabama.

“The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses — truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment," Cohen said.

Brian Lyman contributed to this report.

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Melissa Brown at 334-240-0132 or mabrown@gannett.com.

  Read more about Southern Poverty Law Center fires co-founder Morris Dees

U.S. Far-Left Group SPLC To Pay Counter-Extremist Maajid Nawaz $3.3M Settlement Over Anti-Muslim 'Hate List'

OFIR note: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is in big trouble for maligning anti-extremist British Muslim Maajid Nawaz. It appears the the SPLC has overstepped not only the bounds of sensibility, but bounds of legality.

It should be noted that the SPLC has listed Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR) on their arbitrary "hate map". As a result, the University of Oregon used this accusation as grounds to try to intimidate OFIR on use of OFIR's logo.

This is a prime example of how the radical left uses bullying tactics against legitimate mainstream organizations.

 

From the article:

The U.S. far-left “anti-hate” Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has agreed to pay anti-extremist British Muslim Maajid Nawaz a 3.3m dollar settlement after the group included him in a list of anti-Muslim extremists.

The settlement amount was announced by Mr Nawaz on Twitter Monday following a lawsuit brought against the group last year for including him on their “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”

Nawaz included a press release from the anti-extremist Quilliam group which he co-founded that said not only was the SPLC  paying Nawaz and Quilliam $3.375 million U.S. dollars but also formally apologized to Nawaz for including him on their “hate list.”...

 


 

Related

Pressured, the Southern Poverty Law Center Admits It Was Wrong, by Douglas Murray, National Review, June 19, 2018:

Any free society must expect that a certain number of chancers, hucksters, and shake-down artists will prosper among them. But rarely have they come in so grossly endowed and shameless a guise as the “Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The SPLC was founded in the 1970s, and back then it did some respectable campaigning work to target and shut down — through legal means — actually racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. All well and good, and the SPLC can still be applauded for this work. And yet students of non-profits and charities worldwide will be familiar with a certain tendency in this field, which is that such organizations rarely shut themselves down. Or, to put it another way, a charity set up to cure a disease may find a cure for that disease and yet strangely also find some reasons to continue. For of course salaries and pensions are at stake. ...

So it is — though in far worse form — with the KKK and the SPLC. Of course as the KKK dwindled to an all but negligible fringe, the SPLC could not afford to bask in its victories. There was still cash to collect. Indeed more cash than ever. And who but a fool, or an honest man, would leave tens of millions of dollars on the table? So it is that in recent years the SPLC reoriented itself. It became an organization that looked into all those things that were not racist but that might be deemed right of center. It decided to look into not terrorism and racism but “extremism.” It decided, in particular, that it should become the self-appointed arbiter of what is acceptable in American life and what is unacceptable....

Yet the SPLC has repeatedly shown itself to be woefully unfit to perform its self-assigned task. For instance in 2015 it “designated” (as though this should have had any standing anywhere other than in the minds of the SPLC’s employees) Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson as an “extremist.” So within the space of only a few decades the SPLC moved from targeting the KKK to targeting a black conservative. ...

Which brings us to today. For as of today it seems possible that the SPLC’s position may finally be taken back down to the position it should have been reduced to years ago. Perhaps after today those donors who still give money to the SPLC will realize that they are backing a disgraced and disgraceful organization, if any were unaware of and unbothered about this before....

 

Also see: The SPLC File - An Exclusive Report on the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Social Contract, Spring 2018. Read more about U.S. Far-Left Group SPLC To Pay Counter-Extremist Maajid Nawaz $3.3M Settlement Over Anti-Muslim 'Hate List'

University Of Oregon Attacks OFIR

Alert date: 
May 17, 2018
Alert body: 

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON'S TRADEMARK-INFRINGEMENT LAWSUIT THREAT FRIVOLOUS, POSSIBLY POLITICALLY MOTIVATED,  ALLEGES OREGONIANS FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM

Oregonians for Immigration Reform, the state's largest group advocating for immigration reductions, today condemned the University of Oregon for threatening to sue the group for trademark infringement.

"Last week, the University of Oregon notified OFIR that it would sue if our group did not immediately stop using the letter 'O,' with a depiction of a fir tree inside it, as part of our logo," said Cynthia Kendoll, OFIR's president.  "Our 'O,' the university claims, too closely resembles the 'O' it uses as its own logo."  Images of both logos appear at the end of this release.

"This is ridiculous," continued Kendoll.  "The 'O' in our logo and in the university's are in different fonts.  Our 'O,' unlike the university's, features a graphic inside.

"How, on the mere basis of a capital 'O' in both our logos, could any reasonable person confuse OFIR with the University of Oregon -- or believe the institutions are affiliated?  Does the university really believe it has the right to trademark a letter of the alphabet?

"Most importantly, do Oregonians want the state's flagship institution of higher learning to use their hard-earned tax money to bully an all-volunteer citizens' group over such a trivial matter?"

OFIR communications director Jim Ludwick suggested that politics, not trademark infringement, may be the real reason the university issued its lawsuit threat.

"In its cease-and-desist letter to OFIR, the university mentioned as one reason for its action the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent classification of OFIR as a 'hate' group," said Ludwick.  "But if the university had conducted even a cursory examination of the SPLC's tactics, it would have found the outfit exists mainly to smear patriotic Americans as 'racists' and 'xenophobes.'  Even mainstream liberals agree the SPLC inhabits the left-wing fringe.  If the university's lawsuit threat was truly about trademark infringement, why would its letter to us have mentioned the SPLC?"

In 2014, Ludwick noted, OFIR activists referred a measure to the statewide ballot via which Oregonians rejected illegal-alien driving privileges by a two-to-one margin.  This year, he continued, the group is collecting voters' signatures in an effort to qualify yet another measure -- to repeal the state's illegal-alien sanctuary law -- for this November's ballot.  "Given our record of success fighting illegal immigration in the political realm," asked Ludwick, "might the real reason for the university's action be to distract OFIR's attention from its ballot-measure campaign -- and thereby to chill a volunteer group's effort to influence public policy via direct democracy?"

"If so," concluded Ludwick, "it won't work.  We'll continue our fight against illegal immigration.  We'll get our measure onto the ballot.  And we'll continue to use the logo we use today."

Oregonians for Immigration Reform, founded in 2000, undertakes public-policy action to cut the excessive levels of legal immigration and end illegal immigration.

Open borders Marxists resort to childish name calling

Remember how elementary school kids used name-calling as a bullying tactic? There wasn't much rationale behind it. It was intended to intimidate, ridicule, and diminish the victim. 

Name-calling is pretty serious for kids. It's pretty funny when those who are purportedly adults resort to name-calling as a tactic of attempted intimidation.

There are very good reasons to enforce immigration law, as noted in the article My Secret Plan to Destroy America, by Dick Lamm, former Governor of Colorado. Another is that mass immigration is driving America's population to double within the lifetimes of children born today.

Those who support immigration reduction and immigration law enforcement are accustomed to being called names such as racist, nativist, and white nationalist.* That's it? That's all that the open borders Marxists can come up with? No arguments of substance, no plethora of factual evidence to substantiate their point?

The joke's on them! Anyone with half a brain can see through the shallow, childish attacks. Especially when babbled repetitiously by the Marxist mouthpieces of mass immigration.

The Big Lie

The Big Lie is a formal debating strategy where a falsehood so colossal is told that no one would dare question it. Incessant repetition gels its undeniable existence. The Big Lie was coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf.

One of the most common Big Lies we hear is that "We're a nation of immigrants." Really? I'm not. Are you?

America is a nation of American citizens. A very small fraction of Americans are legal immigrants, and a larger fraction are illegal aliens who evaded capture at our border. In our past, the vast open spaces of America were settled by American settlers, some of whom were immigrants. In perspective, of course, every nation is ultimately a nation of immigrants - there are no documented cases of people sprouting directly out of the soil.

Another Big Lie is that the Statue of Liberty is a tribute to mass immigration. It's not. See the articles listed below to learn more about the third-rate poem that happened to win a fundraising contest.

The ad hominem attack

An ad hominem attack is a formal debating tactic of attacking your opponent's character as opposed to answering their argument. It is a de facto admission of the inability to win the debate on the merits of one's argument alone. 

Accusation of racism is a form of an ad hominem attack. Name-calling - that is, the ad hominem attack - is a popular tool of cultural Marxists, mainly because that's all they've got.

More attacks

More formal debating strategies - also knows as logical fallacies - are summarized in Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate and Master List of Logical Fallacies.

Other methods of attacking ideas and specific opponents prevail. Most notable are those delineated in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. In particular, Rule 13 has been applied with vigor by the open borders leftists:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions."

For example, open borders Marxists have repeatedly attacked John Tanton, who single-handedly fostered huge advances in the environmental and immigration sanity realms. See A Case Study in Disinformation - Attacking John Tanton. Other examples are noted in these articles: Alinsky Does Amnesty and the Political Persecution of Dinesh D’Souza.

The joke's on them

When you come across a racist attack levied against an immigration patriot - that is, a repetitious rehash of contorted material previously contrived, ask yourself:

What are they trying to prove? Is this the best argument they can come up with? It's gotta be a joke, right? Nobody could deliberately want to look that childish, inept, and stupid.

 


 

Related

Crazy SPLC smears black woman as white nationalist, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, November 5, 2015:

"As a black American, I am outraged at the lengths the hate-mongering left goes to smear advocates for sanity and control regarding immigration....

So if you subscribe to the SPLC and IMAGINE 2050 because you think they are fighting for minority Americans, you’ve been scammed, duped and used. They lie about anyone who doesn’t fall in line and with their anti-American ideology. Just as they lied about me, Ms. Espinoza, U.S. Inc. and everyone who attended the educational event in Washington...."

- Inger Eberhart, MBA, MA, Advisory Board member: The Dustin Inman Society, Writer: The Social Contract Press, Californians for Population Stabilization

 

The Practice of Ritual Defamation - How Values, Opinions, and Beliefs Are Controlled in Democratic Societies, by Laird Wilcox, The Social Contract, Spring 2010:

An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it. To debate opens the issue up for examination and discussion of its merits, and consideration of the evidence that may support it, which is just what the ritual defamer is trying to avoid. The primary goal of a ritual defamation is censorship and repression....

It is not used to persuade, but to punish. Although it may have cognitive elements, its thrust is primarily emotional. Ritual defamation is used to hurt, to intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate, and discussion upon which a free society depends. On those grounds it must be opposed no matter who tries to justify its use.

Learn more about the widely discredited SPLC hate group

 

Time to Remove Socialist “Huddled Masses” Plaque from Statue of Liberty, by Selwyn Duke, Canada Free Press, February 2, 2018

Statue of Liberty - Liberty Enlightening the World

The Statue of Liberty stands firm on liberty, not a poem, enlightening the world Read more about Open borders Marxists resort to childish name calling

Ritter answers Rep. Barnhart’s smear attack on OFIR and IP 22

OFIR member Jerry Ritter has written a great exposé of the vicious attack on our organization and our efforts to advance Initiative Petition #22.  We clearly have the deep-state opposition to immigration controls worried. 

Friends, let’s keep on collecting signatures!  As with Measure 88 - the driver card bill, we know we can do this.  Request some 10 line signature sheets, ask your friends and neighbors to sign the petition, when mail them in!  It's as simple as that!

We need your help!  To Request signature sheets call 503.435.0141 or go to the campaign website and click on the link to request signature sheets.

Mail filled sheets to:

Stop Oregon Sanctuaries

PO Box 7354

Salem, OR 97303

 

  Read more about Ritter answers Rep. Barnhart’s smear attack on OFIR and IP 22

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