Why Are Southern Poverty Law Center Fascistics TAX EXEMPT?

Why Should The Partisan SPLC  Be TAX-EXEMPT?

by John Hinderaker   at PowerLine:

That is the question that Senator Tom Cotton asked today in a letter to the IRS. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an arm of the Democratic Party whose stock in trade is defamation. What tax-exempt purposes do baseless, politically-motivated smears serve? Excerpts from Senator Cotton’s letter:

Dear Commissioner Rettig,

I am writing to urge you to investigate whether the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should retain its classification as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Recent news reports have confirmed the long-established fact that the SPLC regularly engages in defamation of its political opponents. In fact, the SPLC’s defining characteristic is to fundraise off of defamation.

This business model has paid well. The SPLC has accrued more than $500 million in assets. According to the group’s most recent financial statement, it holds $121 million offshore in non-U.S. equity funds. The SPLC uses these assets to pay its executives lavish salaries far higher than the comparable household average.

Further, CNN reported that the organization “suffers from a pervasive racist culture,” and the SPLC’s leader has “been disciplined after a prior investigation into inappropriate conduct.” The New York Times has charitably described the organization as “in turmoil” and cited employees’ claims that SPLC leadership is “complicit in decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment and/or assault.”

Based on these reports, and in the interest of protecting taxpayer dollars from a racist and sexist slush fund devoted to defamation, I believe that the SPLC’s conduct warrants a serious and thorough investigation.

That is only the warmup.

While IRS guidance lists several examples of tax-exempt purposes, engaging in defamation as a business model is of course not one of them. The SPLC defames other organizations in several ways.

A nice summary of the SPLC’s disgraceful track record as a purveyor of partisan hate follows.

In addition to failing to have a tax-exempt purpose, the SPLC’s peculiar financial situation warrants your attention. Federal law prohibits tax-exempt organizations from inuring to the benefit of any private individual. Yet the SPLC has accrued more than $500 million in assets as of October 31, 2018. …

In 2017 alone, these funds were used to pay the organization’s founder and longtime leader, who was recently removed for unspecified inappropriate conduct, more than $400,000. … This is more than nine times the median household income for Montgomery, Alabama, where the SPLC is headquartered.

These shady financial practices have earned the SPLC a well-deserved “F” rating from Charity Watch, an independent organization that examines the financial abuses of nonprofit corporations.

As the president of a 501(c)(3) organization, I am naturally slow to question the tax-exempt status of another such organization, no matter how foul its conduct may be. But the Southern Poverty Law Center operates so far outside of any legal norms that the time has come for the IRS to pull the plug.

 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/why-should-the-partisan-splc-be-tax-exempt.php

What Did the Dem’s Fascistic Russia-CNN-MSNBC Sale’s Hoax Cost?

The cost of the Russiagate hoax

by Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

.

The media that promoted the hoax originally generated by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party are in full denial mode.  They don’t merely ignore their role, they defend it.

Jake Tapper is “unaware of any mistakes” that his employer, CNN, made in its coverage.  A 47-second video:

His CNN colleague Brian Stelter goes one step farther and takes the offensive, invoking the twin demons of the Left’s worldview: Donald Trump and Fox News. W  en Trump tweeted something that had appeared on FNC, why, that is reason to dismiss it:

Screen grab via Grabien.

This is a five-minute video, but the meat is this: President Trump right now is celebrating Robert Mueller’s no collusion conclusion.  He’s celebrating by condemning the press.  He’s repeating a Fox News talking point.  You can see it here.  Faith, he says.  But the papers were actually honored for covering Russia’s real 2016 attack against the U.S. election and for covering Trump’s connections to all that was real news.

https://share.grabien.com/share.php?id=587497&userid=2948&loginid=390&playercolor=%23ee1a3b&playersize=600&code=73d134c93d5d8a8570aa0a4991cb93ee

Meanwhile, a grown-up who lives on the Left, Stephen Cohen, takes a sober look at the real costs of the hoax in The Nation, the left-wing magazine for which he has written for years.  Cohen is an emeritus professor at Princeton, where he was a well known and respected scholar of Russia.  Cohen has been a sober voice throughout the hoax, well anchored in the reality of the ways that nation operates.  His thoughtful assessment is worth reading in full.  But here are the major points he makes.

Nearly three years of Russiagate’s toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy — damage done not by an alleged “Trump-Putin axis” but by Russsigate’s perpetrators themselves.  Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book War with Russia?  From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate, I will only note them here.

§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin “attacked our elections” and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere—national, state, and local. …

§ Defamatory Russiagate allegations that Trump was a “Kremlin puppet” and thus “illegitimate” were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. …

§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country.  Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. …

§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational institution.  Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud.  Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it.  They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party.

§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/the_cost_of_the_russiagate_hoax.html

Truth, NOT COMMUNISM, Must Be Taught in American Schools Again!

Communism in Our Schools and in Our Politics

by E. Jeffrey Ludwig   at  American Thinker:

           .

Even in high school, I found myself offended by my fellow students who were card-carrying communists in their beliefs and sympathies.  In fact, a sizable number of students clung to Marxism as dogma.  The high school was Central High School for Boys, a school for gifted boys located in Philadelphia, Pa.

Later, as I continued my studies in the Ivy League, I saw that there was a consistently strong element of intellectuals who were not in the least embarrassed to express their interest in communism.

Once, as I stood with a crowd of students who were watching to see the outcome of events when a cadre of students locked themselves into the Harvard administration building and chained the doors, I was standing next to H.G., a fellow graduate student who had gone to the same high school and college as I had.  He was rooting for the locked in students and for “the revolution,” which he hoped was near.  I asked him, “Herb, how can you be for communism or for ‘revolution’?  You are the same as I am — Jewish, son of working people or middle-class people — we went to the same high school, the same college!  How can revolution or communism be good for anyone?  He said nothing but looked at me with eyes filled with contempt.  Later, he would become a professor of economics at Harvard University.

Years after these early contacts with communists, I was converted to Christ.  Although I had been anti-communist for years, only when I was welcomed into the Kingdom of God by my Lord and Savior did I begin to fully realize the enormity of the error that lay in Marxist-Engels-communist thought.  Communism was not a doctrine merely to be disputed by men; rather, the communists had picked a (losing) fight with Almighty God.  It was unworthy as a human doctrine not only by the lights and understandings of non-communist thinkers and actors on the political and economic stage, but, as a repudiation of Almighty God, and particularly Jesus Christ, it was a doctrine opposed to God Himself.

It was not only the “part” of communism that announced its atheism that was wrong.  Marx had said that “religion is the opiate of the people.”  But all the principles and historical concepts as well as the methodology of dialectical materialism were wrong and attempts to deceive people and turn them away from godly ways.  “Bourgeois morality,” attacked by Marxists, was a way of saying Judeo-Christian, biblical values are wrong.  The doctrine of dialectical necessity, whereby history moves forward by a series of steps in a historical thesis, which gives rise to its antithesis, which in turn gives rise to a new cultural-economic paradigm — the synthesis — was itself a denial of the biblical view of history as governed by Divine Providence, and leading to the triumph of Christ over all creation by our redemption, His return and rule, and the final judgment on all the living and the dead.  History is not moving dialectically, as Marx, building on the work of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, believed.  Rather, history is moving forward providentially.

What irony, then, that when I came to teach history at a public high school in New York City, and the teachers, most of whom were atheists, heard I am conservative and, even worse, a born-again believer.   I was quietly approached by one of the veterans, who said, “You know Jeff, communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, but it is alive and well in this high school.”  I realized that by saying this to me, he was challenging not, as he thought, only me, but also Almighty God through His Son Jesus Christ — and that it was a challenge he would sooner or later have reason to regret, for he would surely lose (see Deuteronomy 32:37–39).  I did not rail against him, but kept my peace, knowing he had identified himself as a mocker of the Lord.

On another occasion, another group of leftists were sitting in the cafeteria, laughing uproariously.  When I came in, one called out to me, “Jeff, are we all going to hell?”  I smiled but did not take the bait.  However, two weeks later, I was having lunch and sitting across from one of the communists.  (I didn’t just pin this label on these individuals; rather, they self-labeled as communists.)  Another one sat next to me, along with a third gentleman who was not a communist, but, to be kind, let’s say he was susceptible to leftwing interpretations of current events.

The one across from me asked me if I thought that people really go to hell.  I replied that if someone committed a crime at 3:00 pm, and for some reason died at 11:00 pm and had not repented of his crime and received Christ as His Lord and Savior, he would find himself in hell.  It was obvious to my colleague that I was referring to any unrepentant individual, not only to a criminal.  My colleague stared at me.  He said, “I find that statement to be very offensive.”  The man sitting to my left was making faces at me all the while, which I saw out of the corner of my eye.  He grimaced and contorted his features in mockery of me.  “I’m sorry you feel that way, R.L.,” I replied, “But I surely believe that that is exactly what would be the outcome.”  He gave me a stare of stern, silent rejection.  I stared back, peaceful, resolute, and content.

Now let’s fast-forward: The Democratic Party has been sliding more and more to the Left for decades.  Now there is no doubt in my mind that they have embraced communism.  The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) supported Barack Obama in 2012 and its leadership said it would vote for Hillary Clinton but did not officially endorse her in 2016.   “God” was booed at the 2012 Democratic Party convention.  The communist drift that has gone on in that party for decades seems fulfilled in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and the ascendancy and election of a list of presidential candidates who have embraced the so-called Green New Deal, which is nothing less than a full-fledged plan for the government takeover of the entire economy, suggests the growing ascendancy of communism within our beloved USA.

As ominous as this development is, we cannot think the battle being waged is between the Dems (communism) and the Republicans, or even the Libertarians.  No.  Republican support alone or “conservatism” (the meaning of this term has been debated for a long time) will also draw us into error.  Opposition to the Democrats must then be couched in a biblical, pro-Christ agenda to be valid.  Republican conservatism without justification in Christ is just another man-made, fallible doctrine destined to collapse, or to lead to sin and hopelessness.  Political aspirations will fail the country if not built on the foundation of Jesus Christ.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/communism_in_our_schools_and_in_our_politics.html