http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/260735/splc-klan-hunters-to-smear-machine
Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, a lot of people I knew wrote biggish checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They weren’t alone: According to tax filings, the group took in $136 million last year alone, bringing its total assets to a whopping half-a-billion dollars.
This surge in the organization’s popularity makes sense: The SPLC, after all, is the group that had once, nearly four decades ago, protected Vietnamese shrimpers from the Klan in Galveston Bay, sued several white supremacist groups out of existence, and delivered justice to the family Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian student bludgeoned to death by members of a Neo-Nazi group in Portland, Oregon. You’d think that an organization with such a gleaming record would be richly deserving of support, particularly as far-right thugs are once again openly on the march.
Then again, you could ask Sam Harris.
In late March, the SPLC included a piece about the best-selling author in its daily Hatewatch Headlines, a compilation of media reports on bigots, thugs, and other assorted creeps. Why was the neuroscientist and prominent atheist thrown in together with Mark Anthony Conditt, the Austin bomber who had murdered two black men, and Nazi war criminal Jakiw Palij? Because Harris defended Charles Murray, a political scientist best-known for arguing that genetic differences may account for varying levels of intelligence between races. The assertion drove many in academia and journalism to label Murray a racist; he was famously shouted out of an appearance at Middlebury College last March, and was labeled a “White Nationalist” and an “extremist” by the SPLC.