CBN Cites My Research; Southern Poverty Law Center Outed for Racketeering

CBN cites my research in connection with a case involving a politicized classroom at Towson University.  I'm wondering how the president's recent executive order will affect blatant violations of Section 501(c)(3) such as this one.  Sam Abrams recounts parallel violations by the administration of Sarah Lawrence College in a New York Times  article last October.  The college's blatant use of its assets for political advocacy should disqualify its tax exemption.  We have yet to see a meaningful action along these lines.  It may turn out that any college with a diversity office has run afoul of the tax code.

Also along related lines, in November 2016 the president of Brooklyn College, Michelle J. Anderson, quoted the Southern Poverty Law Center vis-a-vis on-campus activities of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  In my inimitable way, I wrote the president that the SPLC was as bigoted as any hate group.  President Anderson is not alone in quoting the fake claims of the SPLC.  They have been quoted in virtually every major media source. For example, I did a search on "Southern Poverty Law Center" in the New York Times digital archives through 2013 and found 2,222 hits.  I suspect 100% of the references were positive or implied that the SPLC was a reliable source. As usual, the media has gotten things dead wrong.

On March 19 Rich Lowry revealed in the New York Post that the SPLC has turned out to have been a racketeering organization that engaged in racial and gender discrimination internally and relied on fake commitment to political correctness to profit Morris Dees and his colleagues by using the threat of law suits and bad publicity as an extortion device. In effect, the Times and virtually all other Democratic Party-linked media were quoting the equivalent of Bernie Madoff or John Gotti on the subject of social justice--not once or twice, but thousands of times.  Lowry writes of the SPLC:


It used the complicity or credulousness of the media in repeating its designations to punish its ideological enemies and engage in prodigious fundraising. It raised $50 million a year and built an endowment of more than $300 million.

Imagine a left-wing outfit with the same shoddy standards as Sen. Joe McCarthy but with a better business sense.

Clear-eyed, fair-minded people on the left have long recognized the SPLC as a fundraising tool masquerading as a civil rights group, but its absurd overreach has in recent years earned skeptical coverage from the likes of The ­Atlantic and PBS.

I'm increasingly wondering about the sources of the incompetence of the media. One question is whether the anti-trust laws ought to be reinvented to apply to both print and electronic media. Another is whether the indoctrination on offer in American colleges are key to understanding the journalistic failures of CNN, the New York Daily News, and Inside Higher Education.