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Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center Paperback – January 14, 2020
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Racial discrimination. Sexual harassment. Off-shore accounts. Inflated and biased attacks on “hate.” These are some of the many reasons Americans should mistrust the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Southern Poverty Law Center started with noble intentions and has done much good over the years, but a pernicious corruption has undermined the organization’s original mission and contributed to a climate of fear and hostility in America. Hotels, web platforms, and credit card companies have blacklisted law-abiding Americans because the SPLC disagrees with their political views. The SPLC’s false accusations have done concrete harm, costing the organization millions in lawsuits. A deranged man even attempted to commit mass murder, having been inspired by the SPLC’s rhetoric.
How did a civil rights group dedicated to saving the innocent from the death penalty become a pernicious threat to America’s free speech culture? How did an organization dedicated to fighting poverty wind up with millions in the Cayman Islands? How did a civil rights stalwart find itself accused of racism and sexism?
Making Hate Pay tells the inside story of how the SPLC yielded to many forms of corruption, and what it means for free speech in America today. It also explains why Corporate America, Big Tech, government, and the media are wrong to take the SPLC’s disingenuous tactics at face value, and the serious damage they cause by trusting this corrupt organization.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 14, 2020
- Dimensions6 x 0.55 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101642934399
- ISBN-13978-1642934397
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Product details
- Publisher : Bombardier Books (January 14, 2020)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1642934399
- ISBN-13 : 978-1642934397
- Item Weight : 12.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.55 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #695,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,512 in Discrimination & Racism
- #4,965 in Historical Study (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Senior Editor of PJ Media, Tyler O'Neil is an author and conservative commentator. He has written for numerous publications, including The Christian Post, National Review, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Signal, AEI's Values & Capitalism, and the Colson Center's Breakpoint. He enjoys Indian food, board games, and talking ceaselessly about politics, religion, and culture. He has appeared on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight." He is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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Having had several friends and associates who were sixties civil rights workers, one of whom was also a friend of Morris Dees, I immediately became interested when I found that there was a book which exposed some of the whispered scandals which they had attached to the SPLC.
In the small gossip mill which is Alabama politics there are a lot of stories which have grown over the past fifty years. It is extraordinarily refreshing to see some of them laid to rest, others confirmed and a few found to be much worse than expected. I enjoyed reading this book, for which I paid full Amazon price, and no, this is not a compensated review.
The book is generally readable, but it has one big problem: abbreviations. The writer will mention a group, the abbreviation for the group's name and then just use the abbreviation. This gets really bothersome for less well known organizations, so the reader might want to use a yellow marker to highlight the sentences where one or another abbreviation is defined, then create a cheat sheet on the blank page next to the table of contents, for instance: SPLC = Southern Poverty Law Center, KKK = Ku Klux Klan, FRC = Family Research Council, et cetera.
The writer opens with an introduction, explaining some of the basis for his interest in exposing the power and potential for damage that SPLC designation as a "hate group" can cause people and organizations which often just disagree with their boilerplate political viewpoint. This becomes a thematic thread which binds historical and biographical details into a coherent whole.
The bulk of the book is an in depth history of events occurring both before and after the SPLC fired Morris Dees, and which chart its rise and fall as an organization worthy of respect. There are too many historical details, quotes and findings to mention in such a brief review. I will mention thought that the author is thorough, clear, logical and well spoken.
In reading the body of the work one fact emerges: since I, like many other non attorneys, wasn't educated in the art of argument, the author's precise exposition of the SPLC's specious logic was difficult to follow without external assistance. I found the book "Bad Arguments" by Rober Arp, et al to be quite helpful to explain the basis for several of Mr O'Neil's criticisms. This or another textbook on argument would be particularly helpful, especially if the reader has trouble following the numerous examples he discusses in his synopses of a selection of the numerous legal cases which have been filed in the history of this organization.
I'd believe this book to be an important tool to help elucidate the background history, motivation and results of SPLC's categorization of other people and groups as being hateful. Reading it brings to mind the old adage, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".
Why did I give four stars instead of five? The two reasons were my dislike of the use of abbreviations and the fact that I felt it necessary to use a reference to understand some of the book's critique of SPLC's actions.
The Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Hoax
APR 9, 2020 8:00 AM BY ANDREW HARROD5 COMMENTS
Former Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “staffers have admitted that the hate accusations leveled by the SPLC are a ‘con,’ a deceptive scheme to raise money,” writes PJ Media Senior Editor Tyler O’Neil. In his new book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, O’Neil shreds the SPLC’s claims to be an impartial “hate arbiter” and exposes the SPLC as a corrupt, leftist smear merchant.
Established in 1971, the SPLC has established a powerful presence in media, government, and corporations, to the detriment of mainstream conservative organizations slandered by the SPLC as bigots, as O’Neil documents. News organizations such as ABC, NBC, and CNN have uncritically referenced SPLC materials, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress in 2019 about the SPLC as a Google “trusted flagger” of bigotry. AmazonSmile, which donates a percentage of Amazon product purchases to eligible charities, also relied upon the SPLC in 2017 to exclude groups such as the American Freedom Law Center and D. James Kennedy Ministries.
In the public sector as well, Democratic senators including Dianne Feinstein and Tim Kaine have relied upon the SPLC to oppose judicial nominations and support hate crimes legislation. Similarly, using SPLC materials, Michigan’s attorney general and Department of Civil Rights in 2019 launched a “hate crimes unit.” SPLC ideology additionally has entrée into public schools via the SPLC’s 1991-established Teaching Tolerance program.
The SPLC’s ugly reality belies this veneer of respectability. Revelations in 2019 exposed an SPLC rife with racism and sexual harassment in the organization’s Montgomery, Alabama, headquarters. One former SPLC employee described it as a “virtual buffet of injustices,” while previously, during a 1994 journalistic investigation, black SPLC employees even compared it to a “plantation.”
These scandals, which caused SPLC founder Morris Dees to resign from its leadership, were hardly unpredictable, given his character. “The SPLC’s notoriously handsome founder has married at least five women,” O’Neil notes, while documenting in lurid detail the unconstrained libido of this philanderer. Reflecting white southern racist history, this native Alabamian also initially supported segregationist Democrats in the 1950s, and even once defended a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member in court who had beaten civil rights activists. “Dees represents the truth that people can change—and the SPLC should remember that when they destroy a person’s reputation for a previous association with a ‘hate group,’” O’Neil trenchantly observes.
The SPLC likewise reflects the business savvy of Dees, who discovered his genius for direct mail operations in mail-order businesses before applying his talents to the SPLC, explains O’Neil. Donations of $500,000 or $1 million from corporations including Apple and JP Morgan Chase, often placed in Cayman islands bank accounts, would make the SPLC “one of the wealthiest charities in the country, if not the world.” “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same thing,” was Dees’ maxim.
As O’Neil shows, Dees’ junk mail pitches have suckered low-income, would-be do-gooder contributors into imagining the SPLC as a “bare-bones place” and led them to make sacrifices for the SPLC, such as foregoing a new overcoat for the cause. Meanwhile, the SPLC’s Montgomery headquarters features a monument to civil rights heroes by celebrity architect Maya Lin, with the quotation “Until justice rolls down like waters” from Martin Luther King. By contrast, cynical SPLC staffers would mock this “Poverty Palace,” saying “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” Meanwhile, one study revealed that the SPLC in the years 1984-1994 never spent more than 31 percent of revenue on programs, contrary to the 80 percent minimum set by the watchdog Charity Navigator.
The SPLC won its reputation by fighting the KKK, but O’Neil examines how the SPLC has worn out whatever laurels it once thereby deserved, as “by the 1980s, the Klan was largely a spent force.” While nationwide KKK membership dropped below 10,000, the deceptive “SPLC easily raised millions by telling liberal donors up north how dangerous the Klan was.” Yet the SPLC’s legal team in 1986 resigned en masse over Dees’ KKK “obsession,” which “idealistic lawyers saw…as a distraction from the issues they really cared about, like getting innocent people off of death row.”
Today O’Neil reveals many of the SPLC’s “hate group” listings as “hilariously sad,” including Kennesaw, Georgia’s “Wildman’s Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop,” run by an unreconstructed pro-Confederacy southerner. The SPLC also once cited Iowa’s historic town of Amana Colonies because white supremacists claimed to have held a book club in a town restaurant. The SPLC will additionally list as a separate “hate group” each organization chapter; thus the grassroots national security organization ACT for America inflates to 47 “hate groups” in the SPLC’s distorted hate group listings. Moreover, several “hate crimes” denounced by the SPLC have turned out to be hoaxes.
The SPLC’s strident leftist biases are apparent in a 2016 SPLC lawsuit against a Mississippi charter schools program (with many black student beneficiaries) as well as in extreme LGBT advocacy. The SPLC has condemned this author’s esteemed colleague Jennifer Roback Morse, president of the Ruth Institute, for defending the Catholic Church Catechism‘s teaching that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.” The SPLC has also blackballed as “anti-LGBT” her fellow Catholic, renowned Princeton University intellectual Robert George; O’Neil accordingly wonders whether the “SPLC should call the Catholic Church a ‘hate group.’”
Despite these travesties, the SPLC assumes an aura of authority that others dispute, including former American Civil Liberties Union director Nadine Strossen, who rejected the SPLC “hate group” label for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Facebook spokesperson Ruchika Budhraja likewise told PJ Media that Facebook does not share the SPLC’s “hate group” designations for various groups, including the Family Research Council (FRC). Perhaps if the deranged homosexual Floyd Lee Corkins II had only listened to Facebook, this domestic terrorist might not have relied upon an SPLC “hate list” to target FRC in an attempted 2012 mass shooting.
Yet the SPLC has conveniently cast aside all claims of objectivity in the face of defamation lawsuits by growing numbers of individuals and groups defending against SPLC character assassination. Once cornered in court, the SPLC suddenly claims that its “hate group” judgments are mere free speech expressions of “opinion,” devoid of any legal liability. Nonetheless, British Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz won a $3.375 million defamation settlement from the SPLC in 2018.
To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the SPLC can have its own shoddy opinions, but it cannot have its own facts. These “stubborn things,” as John Adams once called them, patently reveal the SPLC’s fraudulence. In ably assembling these facts, O’Neil has done valuable service for all who oppose the SPLC’s baleful influence.
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