Now read the backgrounder:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no12/vo12no12_splc.htm
SPLC's "Extremist" Cash Cow
by William Norman Grigg
In July 1988, Morris Dees of the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was in search of a new foil for his
fund-raising efforts. SPLC's Klanwatch auxiliary had been a potent
fund-raising tool, and the SPLC's high-profile campaign against the Ku
Klux Klan had earned the group tremendous notoriety. However, Dees
lamented to an associate that "the Klan thing is winding down" and that
the SPLC might be left without a raison d'?tre. "Who knows what the
Southern Poverty Law Center will be doing a year from now?" Dees mused
to a reporter. The militia movement coalesced just in time to rescue the
SPLC's financial prospects.
Nobody has profited more from the contrived hysteria over the militia
movement than Dees, a millionaire direct-mail maven who co-founded the
SPLC in 1971. With a donor list adapted from the 1972 George McGovern
presidential bid (which Dees served as chief fund-raiser), the SPLC
quickly amassed a formidable operating budget. The purpose of the SPLC,
according to Dees, was to take on "precedent-setting cases, the models
for new directions in the law." Twenty-five years later, Dees has become
the "expert" on "right-wing extremism" most frequently quoted in the
media and consulted by law enforcement agencies.
The jacket of Dees' new book Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat,
is decorated with effusive endorsements from the likes of Jimmy Carter,
Leon Uris, and the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman. The February
1996 edition of the Klanwatch Intelligence Report, which assails the
"Patriot Underground" as America's leading domestic terrorist threat,
was distributed to over 6,500 law enforcement agencies across the
nation. False Patriots: The Threat of Anti-Government Extremists, a
64-page "special report" from the SPLC published in April, is presently
making the rounds of law enforcement agencies and media sources. "When
169 people were killed in the Oklahoma City explosion, it became clear
that there was something more to the Patriot movement than their weekend
war games," declares SPLC Militia Task Force Director Joe Roy in the
overview to False Patriots. "It is critical that media, law enforcement
and other public servants have a clear understanding of the danger these
Patriots represent."
Selling the "Cause"
Like nearly all professional critics of the "far right," Dees has
displayed few compunctions about consorting with terrorists and
criminals who inhabit the far left. In 1975, Dees was a member of the
defense team in the murder trial of Joan Little, a black convict who was
accused of killing a prison guard with an ice pick. During the trial
Dees was removed from the defense team and slapped with a felony charge
of suborning perjury from a witness; the charge was later dropped
without explanation.
As reporter Mark Pinsky recorded in the March/April 1976 issue of the
Columbia Journalism Review, Dees' allies in the Little case included the
most unsavory elements of the hard left:
[T]he great untold (or unreported) story of the Joan Little trial ...
was the role of the Communist Party, through its National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Repression, in controlling the entire (and
considerable) political movement surrounding the case. Angela Davis, a
leading figure in both national organizations, became the most
frequently quoted movement figure and constant companion of Joan
Little.... Party members were visible and influential on the defense
committee, and the party frequently set up rallies of support around the
country.
This is not to suggest that Dees is a doctrinaire Marxist; rather, he is
something of a leftist entrepreneur. Millard Fuller, an attorney and
business partner of Dees in the 1960s, recalls: "Morris and I, from the
first day 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." A 1988 profile in the leftist
Progressive magazine quoted Dees as saying, "We just run our business
like a business. Whether you're selling cakes or causes, it's the same...."
Since the SPLC's founding in 1971, Dees has sold the "cause" of "racial
justice," a campaign for which he had previously displayed little
conviction. As a student in 1958, Dees worked on the gubernatorial
campaign of George Wallace; at the time, he later recalled, "I had a
traditional white Southerner's feeling for segregation." Although Dees'
preferred self- portrait is that of a lifetime champion of racial
toleration, he had little to say when black activists were beaten by a
mob in Birmingham in 1961. According to Fuller, Dees believed that "it
would be bad business if rising young lawyers and businessmen spoke out"
against mob violence. Dees and Fuller did later become involved in the
affair -- as legal counsel for a member of the mob. Recalled Fuller,
"Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens' Council."
About two decades later, Dees created the SPLC's "Klanwatch" auxiliary
to conduct a legal struggle against the KKK. Deborah Ellis, a former
SPLC attorney who believes that the "Klan is no longer one of the
South's biggest problems," states that "I felt that Morris was on a Klan
kick because it was such an easy target -- easy to beat in court, easy
to raise big money on."
According to a 1987 financial report, the SPLC had built up an endowment
of almost $23 million, despite the habitual pleas of financial
desperation included in the organization's direct mail solicitations. By
1994, the SPLC's endowment had swollen to $52 million, and it figured
prominently in an eight-part investigative report published that year by
the Montgomery Advertiser. By that time, the SPLC's fund-raising
practices had provoked the disapproval of watchdog groups that monitor
charities: In 1993, the American Institute of Philanthropy assigned the
SPLC a "D" grade on a scale of A to F.
The Advertiser also reported the complaints of 12 black former employees
of the SPLC about the "paternalistic" attitudes they dealt with on the
part of the organization's leadership. Gloria Browne, a black former
SPLC attorney, suggested that the group was less interested in
addressing social problems than in finding a profitable niche. Despite
the group's efforts, according to Browne, "the market is still wide open
for [their] product, which is guilt."
"Total Warfare"
But the SPLC does more than merely peddle guilt. Randall Williams, who
worked with the SPLC's Klanwatch project from 1981 to 1986, recalls: "We
were sharing information with the FBI, the police, undercover agents.
Instead of defending clients and victims, we were more of a super snoop
outfit, an arm of law enforcement." It is the role of self-appointed
sentinel against "right-wing extremists" that has given the SPLC its
prominence -- and has made the group a potent threat to constitutional
liberties.
In an interview with Soldier of Fortune magazine, Laird Wilcox, another
frequently quoted "expert" on political extremist groups, expressed some
pointed criticism of Dees and his organization. "What has happened to
Dees and the SPLC ... is what often happens to fanatic, single-minded
idealists," maintains Wilcox. "They tend to define themselves in terms
of their enemies, i.e. 'anti-Klan,' and their crusade develops a kind of
'overdrive' where the end easily justifies the means, just as it does
for all extremist groups. The SPLC tends to view their critics and the
groups they hate as essentially subhuman ... and the campaign against
them acquires the character of 'total warfare,' where any distortion,
fabrication or sleazy legal tactic is justified in terms of the struggle."
These tendencies are readily visible in the SPLC's campaign against the
militia movement, according to Wilcox. "The SPLC knows that bona fide
'links' between the militias and 'hate groups' are few and far between,
and they know that the [accused] perpetrators of the Oklahoma bombing
have no ties whatsoever to any militia organization. But in fund-raising
letters and media appearances they simply lie about it because it raises
money and helps to cause immense mischief for the people they hate."
Degrees of Extremism
The SPLC's False Patriots report divides the "patriot" movement into
five categories: "Armchair Patriots," who discuss and debate "arcane
political theories" on computer networks; "Lifestyle Patriots," a
category which includes everyone from survivalists to home schoolers;
"Professional Patriots," which includes journalists, alternative media
activists, and conservative mail-order entrepreneurs; "Outlaw Patriots,"
such as tax protesters and self-described "sovereign citizens"; and,
finally, "Underground Patriots," who organize secret resistance cells in
anticipation of urban guerrilla warfare. The unstated but obvious
assumption here is that law-abiding patriots -- home schoolers, for
example -- differ from "Outlaw Patriots" or "Underground Patriots" only
in the degree of their extremism.
The measures recommended by the SPLC to counteract the supposed danger
presented by the patriot movement include a federal ban on militias, the
imposition of policies forbidding police and military personnel to
participate in militias and patriot groups, aggressive federal
surveillance of patriot organizations, specialized training for
government employees to help them "in identifying extremist threats,"
and the adoption of anti-patriot editorial policies by the media:
"Journalists should be careful not to present Patriot views of the
Constitution without balancing them with prevailing legal
interpretations." In short, the SPLC would have the federal government,
the media, and the major opinion-molding elites define the patriot
movement as something akin to a criminal conspiracy.
Dees is also seeking to suppress political activism of which he
disapproves through the use of civil suits. In 1989, Dees and the SPLC
filed suit against neo-Nazi agitator Tom Metzger, claiming that he was
complicit in the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant by a skin head gang in
Portland, Oregon. The jury found in favor of this claim and assessed
$12.5 million in damages against Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance
(WAR) organization. The troubling aspect of this case was that no effort
was made to prove that Metzger had planned the crime or even had
specific foreknowledge of it. Dees claimed that "the murder was a direct
result of the training and direction that an agent for Metzger had given
the Portland skinheads with Metzger's full approval."
WAR is certifiably a subversive organization, and Metzger
unapologetically seeks to incite racial hostility and violence. Although
he may not have instigated the Portland murder, he did express approval
of the heinous crime. For this reason, there was a certain rough justice
in the Portland verdict. However, Dees is using a variation of the legal
strategy from the Metzger case against other political enemies.
On April 19, 1995, Dees learned of the Oklahoma City bombing while he
was in Navarre Beach, Florida in pursuit of a lawsuit against abortion
opponent John Burt. Dees maintains that Burt was involved in a
"conspiracy to stop abortions being performed" by murdered Pensacola
abortionist David Gunn. The criminal trial of Michael Griffin, who was
convicted of murdering Gunn, provided no evidence of a conspiracy
between Burt and the assailant; nevertheless, Dees maintains that they
collaborated to create a "climate" of violence, and that "the killing
was a foreseeable consequence of the conspiracy." It is not difficult to
envision the uses which Dees and the SPLC would make of this legal
strategy should it prove successful in the John Burt case.
Hypocrisy and Contradiction
Like most self-styled "progressives," Dees is defined by his hypocrisies
and contradictions. In the 1994 congressional elections, he insists,
"race was the underlying issue that accounted for the Republican
victory" as "politicians, talk show hosts, and religious zealots ...
fanned the flames of prejudice and fear." However, Dees does not
perceive racial prejudice to be motivation for mob violence -- much of
it abetted by radical black radio personalities and "rappers" --
directed against Korean-Americans during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Rather, he sees that murderous and destructive rampage as yet another
indictment of "white racism": "When southeast Los Angeles rioted after
four policemen were acquitted of beating Rodney King, the rage was
black, but the fear was white."
Dees allows that abuses of government power occur, but apparently they
only victimize the left. He condemns what he calls "law enforcement's
violent reaction to the Black Panthers of the 1960s" and declares that
"we should never forget the FBI's excesses during the civil rights and
Vietnam protest eras." He also declares that "I have been a target of
government abuse myself. Because I served as the national finance
director for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, the Nixon
White House put me on its enemies' list and sent a team of IRS agents to
pick over all my financial records."
Nevertheless, he expresses no sympathy for those -- like the Branch
Davidians and the Randy Weaver family -- who have had to endure much
more than the stress of an IRS audit. "I am more concerned with the
victims of militia terrorists than with FBI or ATF excesses," he smugly
pronounces, neglecting to mention that not a single act of documentable
militia terrorism has yet taken place. Recalling that the SPLC had been
approached during the Waco siege to offer legal assistance to the Branch
Davidians, Dees archly declares that had he done so he would have been
"on the wrong side of history."
Without a hint of irony, Dees describes the final assault on the
Davidian church as an attempt "to rescue the children at Waco." Such is
the compassionate wisdom of the media's favorite "authority" on
"right-wing extremism."
