The SPLC Hate Group Unravels as President and Legal Director Resign Amid Sexual Misconduct Scandal


Following accusations of racism, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center Richard Cohen and its legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday. Morris Dees, the co-founder and chief fundraiser of the SPLC, was fired by Cohen the prior week. Writer, Bob Moser, who was employed by the SPLC, published an article in the New Yorker exposing the SPLC as a fundraising scam. Moser says the SPLC’s business model centers around keeping its donors in constant fear using gimmicks such as “hate maps” and “hate lists.” -GEG

The Southern Poverty Law Center – the “vicious left-wing attack dog” used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify “hate groups” – is unraveling. 

A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims – with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism,” the head of the SPLC, Richard Cohen, as well as the organization’s legal director, Rhonda Brownstein, resigned on Friday. Morris Dees, Richard Cohen, Rhonda Brownstein

Cohen had been with the organization 33 years and was one of its most prominent figures. 

At 5:03 p.m. Friday, Cohen sent a message to staff, with the subject
line “Stepping Down,” announcing that he, too, would be leaving the
organization that he and Dees had turned into a research and fundraising
juggernaut.

“Whatever problems exist at the SPLC happened on my watch, so I take
responsibility for them,” Cohen wrote, while asking the staff to avoid
jumping to conclusions before the board completes an internal review of
the Montgomery, Ala., organization’s work culture. –LA Times

Earlier this week, the SPLC board of directors appointed Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen – who, in an unrelated matter, unsuccessfully tried to pull strings and have the Jussie Smollett case transferred from the Chicago PD to the FBI. Tchen is heading up the inquiry into the sexual misconduct claims.Tina Tchen

Also out on Friday was Rhonda Brownstein – who had worked with the organization for nearly three decades, according to the Montgomery Advertiser‘s Melissa Brown. 

Inside the SPLC “Scam”

As the Washington Examiner‘s Beckett
Adams writes, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “scam,” which has
taken ” no care whatsoever for the reputational and personal harm it
causes by lumping Christians and anti-extremist activists with actual neo-Nazis.”

As it turns out, the SPLC is a cynical money-making scheme, according
to a former staffer’s blistering tell-all, published this week in the New Yorker. The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it’s an earnest effort to combat bigotry.

The only thing worse than a snarling partisan activist is a slimy conman who merely pretends to be one. –Washington Examiner

““Outside of work,” recalls Bob Moser of his days working for the
organization, “we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery
bars and restaurants about … the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and
the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting
extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous
than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. ‘The S.P.L.C.—making
hate pay,’ we’d say.”

“[I]t was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in
what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam,” added Moser. 

The way Moser tells it, the center’s chief founder, Morris Dees, who
was dismissed unceremoniously last week for unspecified reasons,
discovered early on that he could rake in boatloads of cash by
convincing “gullible Northern liberals that his group is doing the hard work of fighting “hate.”

But the center’s supposed mission of combating bigotry doesn’t actually matter to its top brass, Moser says. It’s just a business choice and one that has been extremely lucrative throughout the years.
Moser’s article reminds readers of the time Dees actually said of the
SPLC in an interview with then-Progressive magazine reporter John
Egerton, “We just run our business like a business. Whether you’re
selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.” –Washington Examiner

Read full article here…

Additional sources:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-a-scam

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-reckoning-of-morris-dees-and-the-southern-poverty-law-center