One of the most notorious far-left groups in the nation just\u00a0handed 60 employees their pink slips.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time the Southern Poverty Law Center has seen a mass exodus from its workforce, but this round of layoffs may signal an important shift in the political winds just as the national election cycle begins to heat up.<\/p>\n
As an erstwhile staffer claimed on X, formerly known as Twitter, the SPLC\u2019s recent downsizing comes even while the non-profit is \u2018hoarding\u2019 over $1 billion of donor funds in reserves. While that assertion dwarfs\u00a0much more reliable reporting tabbing the number just north of $160 million, what would appear to be a gross exaggeration actually provides a perfect window to understand the shell game the SPLC has been playing on the American people for the last four decades.<\/p>\n
After all, exaggeration and outright lies have been the common currency at the SPLC for decades.<\/p>\n
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After gaining a reputation for successfully bringing to an end what was left of the Ku Klux Klan through lawsuits in the early 1980s, the SPLC shifted into full-time fundraising mode under its co-founder, Morris Dees.<\/p>\n
A member of the Direct Marketing Association\u2019s Hall of Fame, Dees was unceremoniously booted from the SPLC in 2019 while longtime president Richard Cohen resigned in disgrace\u00a0amid swirling allegations of racism and sexism at company headquarters\u2014a lavish facility employees have dubbed \u2018The Poverty Palace.\u2019<\/p>\n
And don\u2019t kid yourself into thinking that anything has changed. In 2021, one ex-SPLC staff member\u00a0wrote at The Daily Beast\u00a0that even the follow-up efforts to address this toxic culture were designed to \u2018protect the reputation of SPLC and not to enact or recommend changes that would benefit staff\u2014changes that were desperately\u00a0needed.\u2019<\/p>\n
Apparently sniffing out the fact that the con was on decades earlier, the entire legal department\u00a0resigned in protest. This was a group that could read the writing on the wall. As one former employee, Bob Moser,\u00a0put it in a 2019 article for The New Yorker, \u2018It was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we\u2019d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.\u2019<\/p>\n
Of course, pawns only have value if they can remove an opponent\u2019s pieces from the board. The key to that goal has been the SPLC\u2019s absurd \u2018Hate Map,\u2019 which for years has lumped together KKK holdouts with mainstream conservatives and conservative organizations\u2014including my employer, Alliance Defending Freedom\u2014in a blatant attempt to push us to the margins of American life.<\/p>\n