A Glimpse into the Zombie Left's future

The sad fate of the SPLC is a cautionary tale to left-wing nonprofits who try to energize their donor bases by embracing extremism.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre has published a comically bad attempted hit piece against campaigners to reform youth gender care. It highlights how many formerly-glorious do-gooder nonprofits, including the ACLU and GLAAD, are disintegrating into liberal-guilt fundraising sweatshops.

The piece, promoted as a report “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience” breathlessly describes a secretive network of agents of “white supremacy and the religious Right” (including, they allege, LGBT Courage Coalition co-founder Jamie Reed). It even features a digital version of the classic red-string crazy conspiracy board trope:

Needless to say, the “report” doesn’t even attempt to substantiate its lurid claims. There’s really no need to get into the weeds with a lengthy rebuttal, because there’s nothing to rebut. Yes, many individuals and organizations are working to reform youth gender care in the US and Canada, and yes, they communicate with each other. No, they’re not “white supremacists” (!) and in fact many of the people named are themselves lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans, detrans, and intersex.

This is unfortunately par for the course for the SPLC, which has earned an ugly reputation among people in the know. For decades, the SPLC has been roasted as the “poverty palace” of Alabama, a mail-order fundraising outfit that churned out endless propaganda about secret undergound networks of neo-Nazis and Klansmen to scare their white liberal mailing list into sending them cheques. A lot of the proceeds wound up in the personal bank account of co-founder Morris Dees.

Here’s JoAnn Wypijewski, writing at the ultra-progressive monthly The Nation way back in 2001:

What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing instead? Mostly making money. I would never have suggested that it "devote[s] all [its] resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations," because the center doesn't devote all of its resources to any kind of fight.

…A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for "excessive" reserves. On the subject of "hate groups," though, Cohen is almost comically disingenuous. No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center's millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, "Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years."

Hate sells; poor people don't.

…Why the organization continues to keep "Poverty" (or even "Law") in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.

Their “millionaire huckster” head was finally fired in 2019, after the SPLC’s disastrous attempt to pivot towards fundraising around anti-Muslim prejudice. They took a stance so extreme, they ended up getting sued for anti-Muslim prejudice themselves: they were swindled by Islamist extremists into labelling their opponents, moderate liberal Muslim campaigners, as — you guessed it — a secretive network of agents of hate, disguised as friendly, moderate, secular Muslims. The SPLC had to pay over three million dollars to Maajid Nawaz, a British-Pakistani reformed former Islamist who campaigns for liberal, secular, Muslim principles.

You’d think they’d have learned their lesson. But here we are: it looks like nothing’s changed. In their latest pivot, this time towards “LGBTQ+” fundraising (and their bizarre attempt to link it to their mission to combat white supremacism), they’ve been drawn to the extremist party line yet again, attacking moderate, liberal LGB and T people and our allies as a secretive hate network.

Because that’s what moves the purse strings in their mailing list.

However, it’s not accurate to say that nothing’s changed at the SPLC. The quality of this latest attempt to scare up money is so poor, and riddled with so many typos and spelling mistakes (we lost count after a staggering 117), it’s clear there’s deep dysfunction and existential trouble within the Poverty Palace’s walls.

Perhaps their tattered reputation is having an impact on their ability to retain staff? What else could explain them releasing such an embarrassingly disorganized publication?

It’s a warning to other formerly-great groups, like the ACLU and GLAAD, who’ve strayed far from their missions, blinded in their quests to keep their donor bases engaged, in the post-Obergefell, post-Bostock, and post-Affordable Care Act era. With marriage, family, workplace, and housing protections finally secure for LGB and T people across all fifty states, the fundraising orgs have run into the arms of “queer theory” extremists to drum up new causes and new enemies — attacking many of the very people they were originally founded to defend.

They, too, are likely to find themselves facing ugly headlines, legal losses, and executive-suite bloodbaths in the years to come. They, too, will likely find themselves, like the SPLC is today, embarrassing shells of their former glory — zombie orgs churning out ever-more-absurd nonsense to their ever-dwindling donor rolls.

Please send your submissions and action alerts to LGBTcouragecoalition@gmail.com