In a segment attacking Donald Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from the United States, CBS This Morning’s Major Garrett on Tuesday hyped the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an objective source on the subject who is hateful. Garrett began by saying of the businessman: “Trump cited polling data from the Center for Security Policy that he said indicated dangerous levels of anti–American sentiment among Muslims in the United States." With no mention of SPLC’s ideology, Garrett lectured, “The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups nationwide, described the head of the center, Frank Gaffney as, quote, "one of America's most notorious Islamophobes."
Southern Poverty Law Center
By Kristine Marsh | July 20, 2015 | 4:16 PM EDT
MTV wants white kids to feel bad about being white – and the media love it.
By Curtis Houck | June 24, 2015 | 1:41 AM EDT
During Tuesday’s edition of Fox News Channel's The Kelly File, host Megyn Kelly and liberal radio host Richard Fowler spared over a list from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that included drawings of women who have denounced radical Islam that include conservative authors Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. At numerous instances, Kelly and Fowler found themselves repeatedly talking over each other, with Kelly denouncing the SPLC as a “careless organization that cares not at all about the safety of the people it condemns” and uses “far left websites that hate these women” to bolster their claims.
CBS, NBC Hype ‘Increasing Mistrust Between Blacks and Whites; ‘Virus’ of Racism from ‘60s ‘Never Died’
By Curtis Houck | June 19, 2015 | 10:37 AM EDT On Thursday’s network evening newscasts, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News did their parts in touting the supposed state of race relations in America with CBS’s Scott Pelley holding up the deadly shooting in Charleston as “com[ing] at a time of increasing mistrust between blacks and whites” while NBC’s Harry Smith proclaimed that the “virus” of racism from the 1960s “never died.”
By Matthew Balan | May 4, 2015 | 5:31 PM EDT
On Monday's New Day, CNN's Alisyn Camerota played up how the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the group targeted by two suspected Islamists in Texas a "hate group." Camerota underlined that "other people say" that Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) is "even a hate group, and that they're vehemently anti-Islam....They talk about Islam, and they talk about it with, sort of, real repugnance, quite frankly."
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 4, 2015 | 3:18 PM EDT
In the wake of an attempted mass shooting at a free speech event hosted by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) in Texas, on Monday MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts hosted Mark Potok of the far left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and allowed him to equate them with a “Klan group that decides to hold a cartoon contest satirizing black people.”
By Randy Hall | November 13, 2014 | 6:43 PM EST
“Better late than never” is apparently the new motto of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's faux conservative, who said on Wednesday night's edition of The Colbert Report that one new member of the Republican “farm team” has claimed that Barack Obama is allegedly possessed by a demon even though he performed an exorcism to try and "drive out the evil spirit."
The host's target was Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former Navy chaplain and host of an online religious program carried by YouTube who received 70 percent of the votes cast in last week's midterm election and will soon become a member of the Colorado legislature.
By Mike Ciandella | August 15, 2014 | 12:33 PM EDT
How’s this for timing? The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, on the two-year-anniversary of the FRC shooting, launched its own attack on FRC – with the help of a study released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same group that inspired that shooter.
Here’s a quick recap: on August 15, 2012, a gunman entered the lobby of the Family Research Council in Washington D.C, planning to kill everyone inside the building and then smear Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in their faces (at the time, Chick-Fil-A was under fire for comments that its CEO, Dan Cathy, had made in support of traditional marriage). The gunman’s plot was only foiled by the quick thinking of the building manager, Leo Johnson, who ended up taking a bullet in the arm in the process.
By Kristine Marsh | June 10, 2014 | 4:43 PM EDT
Tip for liberal journalists: If you’re going to try to smear conservatives every time some homicidal nut shoots innocent people, it’s a bad idea to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center.
When Floyd Lee Corkins tried to shoot up the conservative Family Research Council in 2012, he later admitted he targeted the conservative organization because the SPLC listed the FRC as a “hate group” for it’s “anti-gay” stance on marriage. (Oh, and he brought along a big bag of Chik-fil-A sandwiches to stuff in the dead mouths of his would-be victims.)
By Kristine Marsh | April 15, 2014 | 4:13 PM EDT
Are “right-wing” extremists more dangerous than Al-Qaeda terrorists? According to CNN’s National Security Analyst Peter Bergen, they are. In a CNN commentary posted yesterday Bergen wrote, “U.S. right wing extremists [are] more deadly than jihadists.” He also also happens to be a director for the George Soros-funded liberal New America Foundation. What a coincidence.
Bergen claimed that “white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology.” He cited a New America study which counted 34 people killed by right-wing extremist acts and just 23 people killed by Al Qaeda-linked terrorism, after 9/11. Why start there? Wouldn’t the 2,977 people killed that day by jihadists skew those findings somewhat?
By Ken Shepherd | September 19, 2013 | 12:19 PM EDT
Floyd Lee Corkins, the "man who planned a mass shooting at a conservative Christian lobbying group’s Washington headquarters in 2012 has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the failed plot," the Associated Press reported shortly before noon Eastern Thursday. Yet nowhere in their four-paragraph story -- accessed here at WashingtonPost.com -- did the news wire note that Corkins admitted he was inspired by the website for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In April, the Family Research Council posted to YouTube a video of Corkins admitting to FBI interrogators that he assembled his target list from the SPLC's "hate map" (video embedded below with transcript):
By Mike Ciandella | August 15, 2013 | 1:33 PM EDT
Leo Johnson had the chance to kill Floyd Lee Corkins that August Wednesday in 2012. He chose not to.
“God spoke to me and told me not to take his life,” recalled Johnson, the building manager for the Family Research Council. “That’s not the act of someone who’s a hater, or involved with a hate group. I could have easily done to him what he tried to do to me and all of my colleagues.”
Corkins had walked into the FRC’s Washington D.C. offices with a handgun and a bag of Chick-fil-A, determined to kill everyone inside the socially conservative non-profit before smearing chicken sandwiches in their faces. As it happened, he never got past the lobby, and Leo Johnson, who took a bullet in the arm, was his only victim. Johnson, though unarmed and wounded, wrestled Corkins to the ground and disarmed him. The building manager’s heroics averted a possible massacre.