A pro-American immigration reform group has filed a legal request to have the IRS revoke the non-profit status of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for campaigning against President Donald Trump during last November's election.
The SPLC is a George Soros-funded hate group which has become the left's unquestioned go-to authority for smearing conservative entities as "hate" groups (it has designated, for example, the Freedom Center's own Daniel Greenfield as a hate group all on his own - bravo, Daniel). Breitbart reports that the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which is the legal affiliate of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), claims that the SPLC's election-season anti-Trump headlines, contributors’ statements and “educational” initiatives collectively violated tax laws governing non-profits.
“To vindicate itself as a fair and balanced agency, the IRS must strip the SPLC of its privileged tax-exempt status,” said Dale Wilcox, the IRLI’s general counsel. “Their attacks on the President during his campaign were some of the most egregious I’ve ever seen,” he said, adding that “hoarding over $300 million in donor contributions, the group can afford to pay taxes anyway.”
Breitbart has more:
According to tax law, donors can get tax breaks when they contribute to groups that register as 501(c)(3) non-profits. But the law also says that 501(c)(3) must not “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
According to the IRLI complaint, the SPLC posted headlines during the campaign which mentioned the name of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and painted them in an extraordinarily negative light. Examples include “Trump’s Continuing White Nationalist Problem” and “Trump Stump.”
An editorial by SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok during the campaign included the following statement about Trump: “the demagogic New York billionaire has poured vitriol on anyone who dared to criticize him, [and] proposed a crude immigration plan that virtually all sensible observers see as brutal and completely unrealistic.”
The SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” project is alleged to have distributed a report called “The Trump Effect,” consisting of school teachers’ narrative explanations of the anxiety Trump was causing their students. The SPLC also issued a 13-page report titled “Hate in the Race” focusing extensively on then-candidate Trump and his alleged ties to “hate groups.”
Among the SPLC's designated “hate groups” is FAIR and IRLI. The SPLC is “running out of ‘hate groups’ to name and defame [so] they’ve now had to pick up the immigration issue and this is why they’re attacking President Trump and his 63 million voters,” said Wilcox.
In 2014, the FBI stopped using and re-posting SPLC sources in its website on combating hate crimes. A recent article by conservative charity watchdog Philanthropy Roundtable called the SPLC’s lists “arbitrary” and a “political tool,” citing the listing of social scientist Charles Murray as a “white nationalist” and ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an “extremist.”
Ironically but predictably, the SPLC itself is in league with extremists. In 2012, domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins used the SPLC’s supposed “Hate Map” to find the offices of the Family Research Council, a Christian non-profit labeled a “hate group” by the SPLC because it opposed the legalization of gay marriage. Corkins walked into the FRC’s offices with over 100 rounds of ammunition and opened fire. Miraculously, only one man was shot before Corkins was subdued.
He later confessed to prosecutors that he had intended to smear Chic-Fil-A sandwiches on his victims’ corpses in a show of solidarity with pro-gay activists.
The Corkins saga unfolded as the SPLC increasingly filled the rolls of its list with Christian groups whose traditional beliefs the SPLC finds “hateful.”