Making Hate Pay by Tyler O'Neil

Author:Tyler O'Neil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-01-16T18:47:05+00:00

Chapter 8

The SPLC’s Impact

The white nationalist riots in Charlottesville seem to have supercharged the SPLC’s blacklisting power. While the organization once worked with law enforcement and the FBI, it had little cultural power beyond getting northern liberals to open their pocketbooks. Slowly, over decades, it built influence in the schools through the Teaching Tolerance program, but in recent years the SPLC’s blacklisting power has made impressive strides in big business, Big Tech, and the Democratic Party.

The Saga of SPLC Blacklisting.

While the SPLC benefited a great deal from Charlottesville, its blacklisting operation had some notable victories before the riots—and its influence continued long after the immediate outrage subsided.

In October 2013, a briefing at the U.S. Army Camp Shelby in Mississippi repeated the “hate group” accusation against FRC and the American Family Association. Fox News’s Todd Starnes reported that many of these incidents took place. While Secretary of the Army John McHugh put an end to these briefings, the fact that they took place at all is quite notable.211

In January 2017, the Christian nonprofit D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) tried to register for Amazon’s charity service AmazonSmile, which donates 0.5 percent of the purchase price of eligible products to eligible charities. Amazon rejected DJKM, explaining, “We rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which charities are in ineligible categories.”212 DJKM later filed a suit against Amazon, but Amazon booted other charities off as well, including Alliance Defending Freedom, the Center for Immigration Studies, and the American Freedom Law Center.213

In June 2017, the charity rating website GuideStar marked dozens of nonprofits “hate groups,” citing the SPLC list. GuideStar placed banners on the page for each nonprofit accused of being a “hate group,” complete with the SPLC logo and a link to the SPLC page accusing each organization of being a “hate group.”214

At the end of June, GuideStar removed the “hate group” labels.215 The Christian nonprofit Liberty Counsel proceeded to sue GuideStar for unfair business practices under the Lanham Act, but the suit was dismissed.

In July, ABC News and NBC News adopted the SPLC accusation to blast ADF as a “hate group,” as did the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.216

“Why is ABC and NBC willing to promote propaganda and cut and paste the Southern Poverty Law Center press release?” Kristen Waggoner, a senior vice president at ADF, asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “Americans are losing trust in the media for this very reason.”

After the Charlottesville donations, the tech assault on the Daily Stormer, and the assault on non-racist “hate groups,” the SPLC blacklisting started to reach horrifying dimensions. Credit card companies also started to get in on the blacklisting game.

In August 2018, the crowdfunding company Patreon closed the account of Robert Spencer—founder of SPLC-accused “hate group” Jihad Watch, not to be confused with the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer—mere weeks after he had created it. Patreon did not give an exact reason but claimed Mastercard forced the company to remove his account.217

“I’ve been notified by Mastercard that we must remove

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