Shame on Bob Moser and all the Others who Kept the Southern Poverty Law Center's Secrets (until now)

Who is Bob Moser you ask?
He is a writer at The New Yorker who tells us over a decade later what he learned about the frauds at the Southern Poverty Law Center when he worked there in the early 2000’s.

Moser told his story yesterday about how much of the staff (mostly former staff now!) was well aware of the hypocrisy of the organization that was driven more by a desire to make its leaders rich than doing good for the down and out.
I don’t know why he even wrote this article (clearing his conscience maybe), but I am glad he did.
What most outraged me was the fact that all of these employees he references knew what was going on, yet many stayed and worked there for a time with apparent total disregard for what their ‘good works’ could do to regular Americans who have opinions—people like me!

Frankly, the SPLC’s money-generating “hate-group list” puts my safety in jeopardy!

It is long, but the New Yorker story is a must-read and a must-send to everyone you know!
Here is how Moser begins,

The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

(How about a subtitle:  And the reckoning of all the gullible libs who worked there, saw the truth, and kept their mouths shut till now!)

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.
The first surprise was the office itself.

Continue here.
Hate-group list was a masterstroke by Dees!
Then this after a lengthy discussion about how it was more about raking in money especially from gullible northerners who would read about the “hate groups” in stories written by biased and uninformed reporters.
 

By the time I touched down in Montgomery, the center had increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list, which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the “rising tide of hate” discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups.

Read the whole article.

Then send it to every local newspaper that uses the annual “hate-group list.”