“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money.”
(Author Peter Hasson)
Most of you know that, but just in case, the Capital Research Centerposted a nice little update story of where thing stands with the Southern Poverty Law Centerafter it was forced to give the boot to its longtime leader Morris Dees.
The article features Peter Hasson’s new book with the great cover—The Manipulators—about how Big Tech often uses the SPLC to police speech.
Embarrassment About SPLC Should Be Shared by Others (II)
After the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., fired its founder Morris Dees and publicly admitted that he mistreated people—reportedly on the basis of race and sex—we wrote last June about how some embarrassment surrounding that which occurred there should probably be shared by other organizations who relied on the discredited group’s work for longer than they should have. At the time, these groups included GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the Amalgamated Foundation—which purport to provide information that can be used to evaluate the quality of nonprofits, like SPLC.
Daily Caller News Foundation senior investigative reporter Peter J. Hasson’s new The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives reminds us of yet others who should perhaps share in the embarrassment, as well.
For many years, as Hasson overviews, the high-profile SPLC has liberally used its “hate-group” and “extremist” designations to unfairly label conservative groups and individuals, as it was engaging in questionable financial practices and fundraising tactics. After Dees’ departure, public scrutiny was more widely brought to bear on its behavior.
As part of that scrutiny, more than a few former SPLC employees and journalists from the Montgomery Advertiser reported that SPLC’s longtime tacit acceptance of Dees’ behavior was always something of an open secret.
After the scandal, SPLC retained attorney and onetime Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen, to conduct an investigation into what had been going on there. The work of Tchen—who many believe tried to influence the Cook County (Ill.) State’s Attorney earlier last year to drop 16 felony charges of disorderly conduct against Jussie Smollett for his fraudulent allegation of a racist, anti-gay attack—has not been open. There has been no “Tchen report” (or summary of one) released by SPLC, at least as of this writing.
“The SPLC is a once-respected discrimination watchdog that has long since devolved into a smear-mongering fundraising mill,” according to Hasson, and now often assists Big Tech campaigns to police speech.
“The SPLC routinely smears conservatives and other critics of left-wing identity politics because that’s how the group makes money,” he observes. “Ultra-wealthy leftists write massive checks to the SPLC to demonstrate their wokeness because the SPLC is to identity politics what Planned Parenthood is to abortion.” In fact, “SPLC’s fear-mongering is a lucrative operation, and one that’s tax-exempt to boot. The SPLC has more than $400 million in assets, including a cool $90 million stashed in offshore funds”—a number that The Washington Free Beacon reports is now $162 million.
Less than a week ago I told you about how Facebook is blocking sites like VDARE that apparently the woke and oh-so-smart people at Facebook don’t like, and it is no surprise to see Google hard at work doing the same.
Here is Robert Spencer, whose blog Jihad Watchhas been the go-to site for the latest news about the ‘religion of peace’ for going on two decades, finding the site buried by Google.
And, look who is here—Imam-extraordinaire Omar Suleiman!
Daniel Greenfield, the peerless Shillman Fellow and FrontPage writer, tweeted the news on May 7: “Google just erased my Sultan Knish blog and Front Page Mag articles from the first pages of results for my name doubt very much this is accidental.”
I did too, so I checked for myself, and sure enough: a Google search for “Robert Spencer” now does not bring up Jihad Watch, where most of my writing outside of books has been published for the last seventeen years, but it does give you defamatory and distorted attack pieces from the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center*** and the Saudi-funded Bridge Initiative, and nothing that doesn’t portray me and my work in the most unfavorable possible light.
This latest example of the tech giants’ determination to silence all dissenting voices reveals one often overlooked fact: they are desperately afraid.
Google is so afraid of Jihad Watch, in fact, that it is going to great lengths to make you think that the site (which you can find here) doesn’t exist at all.
Several years ago, under pressure from the Texas-based imam Omar Suleiman, Google changed the algorithm for its search results so as to bury anything critical of Islamic jihad violence or Sharia oppression of women. Jihad Watch, which for years had been the first result in a Google search for “jihad” (back when Google searches were based solely on relevance and the popularity of the site), fell off the front page of “jihad” searches.
Now Google has gone even farther to make sure you don’t see Jihad Watch. Just this morning, I was looking for an old Jihad Watch article from a few years ago that I needed for a citation, and I entered an exact phrase from that article into the Google search bar. What came back were two sites where the article had been republished, but no indication that it had ever been at Jihad Watch at all.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel of a totalitarian society, 1984, to which far more people refer than have actually read the book, the dissenter Winston Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth involves erasing from all historical records any mention of people who have been declared “nonpersons.” Foes of the regime aren’t just vilified. Their very existence is erased. Dissent is easy to control if all record of it ever having been enunciated is eradicated, and Google has apparently taken a page from Orwell’s book.
Of course, Jihad Watch is one of the least of the concerns of Big Tech. They’re erasing all manner of people who dissent from the Leftist agenda. Greenfield notes that “Google controls 80% of search. That means it controls what the internet looks like. And it’s continuing to erase conservatives from the internet. I’m just the latest victim. Its censorship and creepy surveillance have reached new heights during the pandemic.”
*** One of the funniest things I ever read from someone who had newly been labeled a hate GROUP by the Southern Poverty Law Center was Daniel Greenfield’s post in 2012when he learned he (with his blog Sultan Knish) had been added to the SPLC’s Hate GROUP list.
HOW I BECAME A HATE GROUP
Here are just a few snips:
When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group.
Being declared a hate group wasn’t in my plans for the day, but like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don’t even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group.
My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the “group” part, and one man and a cat don’t seem to be enough. Even when the cat is a well known bigot who hates mice, birds, car alarms that go off in the middle of the night, the plumber and sudden noises.
Still the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed, “Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield” as one of their “Active Anti-Muslim Hate Groups…”
I suppose I found this so funny because the SPLC has done the same to me (I have a cat) too!
So he funded the earliest version of a “hate crime” database, but according to Richard Tofel, the president of ProPublica, a founding partner and a recipient of the largess of Soros foundation grants, the database is not an effort to collect statistical data, but instead they are simply “soliciting people’s stories.” George Soros is out to get President Trump!
Those “stories” are then made available to leading media outlets where reporters can then supposedly sift through the “stories” and weed out the hoaxes from the legitimate cases.
But, Soros and media pals sure missed the boat on the Jussie Smollett hoax!
How many more of the “stories” collected by the project known as “Documenting Hate” are hoaxes as well? Continue reading “Soros Wanted to Document Hate Crimes in Wake of Trump's Election”→
After the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., fired its founder Morris Dees and publicly admitted that he mistreated people—reportedly on the basis of race and sex—we wrote last June about how some embarrassment surrounding that which occurred there should probably be shared by other organizations who relied on the discredited group’s work for longer than they should have. At the time, these groups included GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the Amalgamated Foundation—which purport to provide information that can be used to evaluate the quality of nonprofits, like SPLC.
