Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,10
about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, special interest in Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS nonprofit, and acknowledgments that interest in the issue on Capitol Hill was related to the upcoming elections.
Social Welfare as a Pretext for Partisan Politics
The proliferation of social welfare and advocacy nonprofits capitalizing on rage donations has polarized our politics in new ways. These groups were ideally suited to operate in this role, because our largest and most successful charitable nonprofits have already been functioning as fronts for political fund-raising. Using their venerable histories of social welfare work, they are able to trade on their credibility as nonprofits to generate donations that are ostensibly intended for nonprofit work, but that may actually be converted to partisan political campaign activity.
For some of America’s most successful nonprofits, their original purpose has become little more than a side hustle. Their real purpose is now to fund and promote progressive politics.
Nowhere is this problem more apparent than at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), ostensibly operating to fight intolerance. The group is known for its hate map that in 2018 identified 1,020 organizations provocatively labeled by SPLC as hate groups. The term is designed to inflame passions and open wallets—the real purpose of the SPLC. But the group’s targets are frequently not purveyors of hate, but purveyors of ideas SPLC cannot tolerate.
In 2010, SPLC labeled the Christian group Family Research Council as a hate group. The justification? The group “hates” the LGBT community because they object to policies supported by that community, such as hate crime laws, gay marriage, and gay scout leaders. SPLC claims Family Research Council has embraced “junk science” to raise concerns about LGBT parenting. Instead of taking issue with that “junk science” in the marketplace of ideas, SPLC simply labels these organizations with a debate-killing epithet.
Soon after Family Research Council appeared on the hate list, the organization was the target of a politically motivated shooting in 2012. Telling a security guard at the organization’s Virginia headquarters that he disagreed with the group’s politics, a twenty-eight-year-old gay rights volunteer carrying a 9 mm handgun and fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches opened fire. The shooter later told investigators he planned to shoot as many people as possible and then smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces as a political statement.
Conservative backlash to SPLC following the attack received muted media coverage of the “conservatives pounce” variety, suggesting there was no way to know for sure whether SPLC’s hate designation motivated the shooter. The shooter himself laid those concerns to rest in subsequent interviews with federal investigators. In video obtained from the FBI by Family Research Council, the shooter can be heard saying, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
Even as SPLC points the finger at the tiniest organizations on the right, major violent movements like Antifa on the left get a pass. The group has lobbed bricks and glass bottles at police, thrown Molotov cocktails and smashed windows on the University of California, Berkeley campus, slashed tires of right-wing activists, and doxxed 1,595 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers by publishing their names and photographs. Despite Antifa’s pattern of violence, SPLC president Richard Cohen told Congress, “Antifa is not a group that vilifies people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and the like.” He told the Washington Free Beacon in 2017, “There might be forms of hate out there that you may consider hateful, but it’s not the type of hate we follow.” We all know what type of “hate” they follow.
What’s not hateful to the SPLC? Apparently when the governor of Virginia, a Democrat, appears in a yearbook photo allegedly either wearing blackface or dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, that incident merits no response from the fighters of hate at SPLC. When it comes to hate on the left, SPLC’s approach is to see no evil, hear no evil.
In the fight against hate and intolerance on the right, SPLC deploys both. The results are nothing if not profitable. The organization sits on a $471 million endowment. In 2017, thanks in part to the anger resulting from the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, SPLC raised $132 million.
Public reporting indicates SPLC has moved $121 million to offshore accounts. The reports don’t indicate how the offshore dollars are invested, but in its 2015 business tax filings, Southern Poverty Law Center reported having bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands. The Cayman Islands is