SCAM SPLC Pressures Funding Group to Blacklist Conservatives
"Southern Poverty Law Center is a scam and fraud willfully using threats of violence against Conservative and Christian groups. This latest effort to stop donations is yet another sad chapter in the pattern of anti-social or reputational terroism conducted by the SPLC", says Eugene Delgaudio, president of Public Advocate.
The Southern Poverty Law Center routinely attempts to shame charities into blacklisting conservative nonprofits to defund the SPLC's ideological opponents, whom it brands as hateful.
This week, the SPLC released a report condemning six donor-advised funds for directing money to "extremist finance." The report aims to shame the charity sector into blacklisting specific organizations.
The list includes many of the SPLC's former targets, but it also features two new names: Turning Point USA and Project Veritas.
As I explain in my book "Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center," the SPLC took the program it had used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in which the SPLC fired its co-founder, a former employee called the "hate" accusations a "highly profitable scam."
The SPLC brands conservative Christian nonprofits that advocate religious freedom, such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council (ADDED NOTE: Public Advocate of the US, Inc.) , "anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups," while it brands organizations that advocate enforcing U.S. immigration law, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, "anti-immigrant hate groups." The SPLC brands organizations that warn about radical Islam, such as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, "anti-Muslim hate groups."
The SPLC recently added parental rights groups such as Moms for America and Parents Defending Education to its "hate map," branding them as "antigovernment extremist groups" that are part of an "anti-student inclusion movement."
................DonorsTrust, which the Southern Poverty Law Center accused of sending $2.2 million to "hate and extremist groups," condemned the SPLC report as an attempt to demonize those with different beliefs and insisted that the report wwon't affect DonorsTrust's commitment to serving its donors.
"DonorsTrust is committed to honoring our givers' charitable wishes and their right to freely express themselves through their giving," DonorsTrust President and CEO Lawson Bader told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. "It's sad that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center demonize those who simply have different approaches to issues or hold different deeply held beliefs on, for example, abortion or border security."
"Demonized or not, DonorsTrust will continue to do what we've done since our founding: Defend all donors' constitutional right to free speech and freedom of association, as upheld numerous times by the Supreme Court," Bader added.
Fidelity declined to comment on the report, while the other donor-advised funds didn't respond to The Daily Signal's request for comment by publication time.