The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a $592 million non-profit. It is also the creator and leader of the largest blacklist, by far, in American history. Its infamous list of “hate groups,” which currently consists of 940 separate entities in all 50 U.S. states, is the centerpiece of a massive smear campaign that conflates a small number of mostly insignificant fringe groups with entities whose sin is being politically conservative, but which are not “hate” groups in any meaningful sense of the word.

By equating a smattering of actual hate groups with respectable conservative organizations, SPLC seeks to delegitimize conservatives as repugnant monsters whose viewpoints do not merit a hearing. And by labeling mainstream conservative individuals and organizations as “hate mongers,” it seeks to deprive them of the funding they need to reach an audience or even stay alive. Consider, for instance, the SPLC’s branding of David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, as an “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim extremist” and as one of the “10 Most Dangerous Hatemongers” in the United States — solely because he opposes illegal immigration and warns against the dangers of Islamic jihad.

After Horowitz gave a speech to the bi-partisan American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in August 2018, SPLC organized a boycott that singled out his remarks as worthy of suppression and called on ALEC’s corporate sponsors to withdraw their support. The actual sin Horowitz committed was confined to one sentence in which he referred to Black Lives Matter as a “racist organization” and the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist” group.[1] Within two weeks, 79 leftist organizations had joined the boycott. This led to the withdrawal of financial support by major corporations like Verizon, AT&T, and Dow Chemical, and the loss of tens of thousands of dollars for ALEC.

The following month, SPLC’s slurs were the basis of major media attacks smearing Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis as a “white supremacist” for appearing at a Restoration Weekend event hosted by Horowitz, who was described as “an infamous racist” in a headline that appeared in the Huffington Post. (As a side note to this baseless slander, Horowitz is a friend of Arianna Huffington — who founded but no longer owns the Post — and was married in her home.)

The SPLC blacklist is enabled by — and could not be successful without — the mindless support of media outlets like the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and so-called “liberal” organizations like People for the American Way and Common Cause. It is also empowered by major support from billionaires like Apple CEO Tim Cook and JP Morgan chairman Jamie Dimon, and by the charitable arms of such major American corporations as Amazon.

Amazon’s alliance with SPLC is institutionalized in its popular “AmazonSmile” program, through which customers can purchase Amazon products at their regular prices and then indicate, at checkout, that they wish to have Amazon redirect 0.5% of the payment to a charitable nonprofit organization of the customer’s choice. In fiscal 2018, AmazonSmile funneled some $44 million to non-profits via this program.

Continue reading: The Biggest Blacklist in American History – Frontpagemag