TROUBLE AT THE POVERTY PALACE

The Week’s Most Grueling, Mewling, and Befooling Headlines

TROUBLE AT THE POVERTY PALACE

The Southern Poverty Law Center is misnamed for the following reasons:

1) SOUTHERN: Despite the fact that its headquarters are located in Alabama, it is aggressively anti-Southern by dint of the fact that it views Southern history as one giant stain against all things good;
2) POVERTY: Its endowment is close to a half-billion dollars, dwarfing that of the NRA and even the ACLU;
3) LAW: It is very selective in what laws it deems worthy of defending: For example, it equates the enforcement of current immigration laws with “hate.”

Despite its relentless posturing as an anti-“hate” organization, it seems propelled by a cancerous hatred toward all things white and male. And most disturbingly for anyone who believes that objective journalism is not only desirable but somewhat achievable, the mainstream press unquestioningly reprints SPLC press releases as if they were gospel truth. The SPLC also advises huge tech companies on exactly what constitutes “hate” and why it should be banned.

But despite its leaders’ savviness regarding how to make millions by exploiting modern taboos, they seem unaware that there is no end to “social justice” and that merely by having light skin and being male, their own witch-hunting would ultimately turn the witches on them, too.

On March 13, the SPLC—which has been linked to at least two terrorist shootings—announced that it had fired its co-founder Morris Dees, a lawyer and direct-marketing millionaire who once campaigned on behalf of George Wallace and received money from the KKK to defend people who’d assaulted Freedom Riders at a bus station in Montgomery, AL. It would also surprise the SPLC’s seemingly endless pool of gullible donors to learn that as recently as 1994, Dees—by then a multi-millionaire—claimed, “probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”

According to Dees’s divorce papers, his stepdaughter Holly accused him of trying to molest her with a sex toy when she was 18:

He was in his underwear and he sat on the bed where Holly was lying on her stomach facing away from the door. He touched her on the back and woke her up. He told her that he had brough [sic] her a present, and he presented her with a vibrator. He plugged it in and said he had brought it to her. He proceeded to rub it on her back and said ‘Let me show you how to use it.’…[H]e started to place it between he [sic] legs when she raised her voice and said no loudly….About two hours later, she had fallen back asleep and he came back in….He brought the vibrator with him, plugged it in and said again, ‘Let me show you how to use it.’ He tried to show her again by putting it between her legs, but she raised her voice again and he stopped. He took it and left.

One day after Dees was fired, the Los Angeles Times reported that two dozen SPLC staffers had signed a letter protesting “mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism” at the organization. Hilarious!

On Friday, SPLC president Richard Cohen resigned his position “in order to give the organization the best chance to heal.”

Last Wednesday—published before Cohen’s resignation and possibly a contributing factor to it—the New Yorker ran an essay by former SPLC staffer Bob Moser that did a bang-up job of shaming the shamers at their own shame game:

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women….The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam….

Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.

We pray for the day when, due to the relentlessly reduction ad absurdum nature of the “social justice” biz, the only person left working at the SPLC is a cancer-stricken, one-limbed, polysexual transgender mulatto Jewish dwarf infected with all known strains of HIV. Then, and only then, will justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.