SPLC 'Hate Group' List Revealed to Be a Cynical Fundraising Scheme
On Friday, Citizens for Corporate Accountability (CCA) delivered a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding his corporation stop using the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) "hate group" list. On Thursday, CCA bought a full-page ad in the Montgomery Advertiser, the newspaper in Montgomery, Ala., where the SPLC is based, demanding the far-left smear factory withdraw its "hate map" and submit to a truly independent investigation. The SPLC gained its reputation by taking the Ku Klux Klan to court, but in recent decades it has used its "hate group" list to smear mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, listing them along with the KKK. Shamefully, news outlets, social media companies, and major corporations have taken the "hate group" list as gospel.
Amazon has been one of the worst offenders. The website runs a charity donation program called Amazon Smile, and it has excluded conservative and Christian groups from the program based on their presence on the SPLC list. D. James Kennedy Ministries sued the SPLC and Amazon in response. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a prominent Christian law firm, was also excluded, despite the fact that its ideological opponents at ACLU and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have insisted ADF is not a "hate group." "It is regrettable that Amazon has played a part in this corrupt speech suppression effort by using the SPLC’s lists in the Amazon Smile program," CCA Executive Director Brian Glicklich told PJ Media in a statement. "Today, however, there is no legitimate reason for Amazon to continue its reliance on this fraudulent and fatally flawed product." "We request and require that Amazon immediately terminate use of SPLC’s 'hate group' list and associated materials in determining eligibility for the Amazon Smile program," Glicklich said.
The letter, sent to Bezos and Amazon Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs Jay Carney, demanded that Amazon drop the "hate group" list and "publicly renounce" it. "The 'hate group' list falsely purports to identify dangerous organizations promoting hate and violence, and Amazon has acceded to the demands of SPLC that Amazon terminate participation of named organizations in the Amazon Smile program," the letter states. "However, this list mixes together racist and violent organizations like the Ku Klux Klan with those that simply espouse mainstream political and social views with which the SPLC and apparently many of its donors disagree. For this reason, the list is permanently compromised, and cannot be relied upon for business decisions by Amazon or any other organization."
The letter also mentions the far-left smear factory's debilitating racism and sexism scandal. In recent weeks, the SPLC fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, President Richard Cohen stepped down, and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson removed herself from the Board of Directors. Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's former chief of staff and a lawyer who attempted to help Jussie Smollett's hate hoax, is leading an internal investigation. Conservatives have decried the choice of Tchen, due to her liberal connections.
Mainstream media outlets have covered the organization's corruption, and two exposes have revealed the "hate group" list to be a crass marketing ploy. "Numerous employees and journalists have reported that the SPLC's so-called 'hate group' list is not a principled database, but rather a highly successful and cynical fundraising tool," the CCA letter reads. "Former employees have described in great detail how the now-terminated SPLC founder developed the list to generate large donations from 'gullible northern liberals.'"
Current Affairs Editor Nathan J. Robinson slammed the "hate map" as an "outright fraud," a "willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC."
The "hate group" list has numerous problems. First, the group defames mainstream conservative and Christian groups that are not hateful at all. The list also inflates numbers by counting each chapter of an organization as a separate "group." In addition, as Robinson pointed out, some of the "groups" are defunct, have only one person, or may just be a blog. A PJ Media analysis found that the "hate group" list inflates the numbers at least three times over.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/letter-amazon-must-disavow-splcs-permanently-compromised-hate-group-list/