Southern Poverty Law Center isn't a source.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/splcworldview.html
More recently, however, it is the SPLC that has found itself on the defensive. Critics from across the political spectrum charge the Center with betraying its professed commitment to advancing civil rights. The SPLC levels accusations of racism unjustly, branding as “bigoted” many groups and individuals whose only crime lies in their refusal to embrace the SPLC’s leftwing agenda. Some accuse the SPLC of pursuing revenue rather than justice, by orchestrating fundraising campaigns that exaggerate the prevalence of racism to ensure a steady stream of donations from the Center’s alarmed supporters. The SPLC consistently claims to detect evidence of white racism infesting virtually every crevice of American society. The Center
states, for instance, “Like most of the southeastern U.S., Georgia has seen an explosion in Hispanic immigration in recent years — over a half million since 1990 alone. As hate groups exploit the racial tension stemming from the area’s growth, locals have launched violent attacks against immigrant workers.”
The SPLC’s ideological biases are evident in its
map of Active U.S. Hate Groups. Although the SPLC denounces extremist religious groups like the Jewish Defense League and Westboro Baptist Church, no mention is made of even a single extremist Muslim group. Similarly, while far-right groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens are tagged as hate groups, the SPLC withholds judgment on extremist leftwing groups. The aforementioned Intelligence Project, an SPLC initiative that monitors hate and extremist groups around the United States, is conspicuously selective in its scrutiny. Whereas rightwing groups are routinely the subjects of Intelligence Project reports, the political left, as evidenced by the dearth of critical literature, is above suspicion. In 2003, for instance, the SPLC hosted a forum called “Right-Wing Extremism in a Transatlantic Perspective,” which, as one SPLC report noted, sought to develop strategies to combat “the radical right.” Of the radical left, no mention was made.
As part of its transparently one-sided approach to outing alleged hate groups, the SPLC is not above flinging fictional charges against its ideological adversaries. One particularly egregious example was a 2003 article called “Into the Mainstream,” featured in the SPLC’s quarterly magazine,
Intelligence Report. Authored by fringe leftist
Chip Berlet, this tendentious report deliberately mangled quotes and omitted context, to make the case that “right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” Among the groups that came in for the SPLC’s scorn was the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and its founder, David Horowitz. After wresting, out of context, several of his quotes on the subjects of African Americans and slavery, the report charged Horowitz with a “selective rewriting of history”—a distortion so patently dishonest that it prompted Horowitz to pen an open letter to SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, wherein he answered the attack and called on Dees to apologize and remove the report from the SPLC’s Web site. Dees complied on neither count.
In support of the charge that the SPLC unfairly targets groups that do not share its politics, critics point to the Center’s comparatively charitable treatment of leftwing groups. Radical organizations like
United for Peace and Justice, for instance, are hailed as “
social justice groups,” a designation that also extends to feminist groups like Equality Now, a number of gay rights groups,
Human Rights First,
Amnesty International, and
Jesse Jackson’s National
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.