As Nicholas Stix remarked yesterday, following Ron Smith’s courageous Anti-Southern Poverty Law Center column:
Smith received mostly supportive letters from around the world, yet the four letters that the Sun published ...were all from hostiles, two of whom—our old friend, Mark Potok, and Peter McCullough, a name new to me—work for the SPLC.
(Actually, I think McCullough is just a financial supporter.) In fairness to the Baltimore Sun, the outrage which publishing Smith’s heresy triggered must have been awesome: no wonder it is trying to make amends to the Left.
Mark Potok’s letter is worth inspecting for the quality of its reasoning.
There is none. All Potok does is assert that
What Mr. Smith declines to say is that Mr. Stix is a well-known white nationalist who recently prepared a lengthy introduction to an article, published by the National Policy Institute, that paints "a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America."…
Many of Mr. Stix's articles, which dwell heavily on what he sees as a huge wave of anti-white hate crime committed by black people, are archived at the VDARE Web site.
There is no explanation of what the National Policy Institute is, or why having articles archived on VDARE.com is such a sin.
This from the director of the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project”, - the SPLC, which makes a major project of swamping schools with brainwashing materials laughably entitled “Teaching Tolerance”.
In reality, Potok and his colleagues are hate-filled bigots interested only in repressing opposing views, not in understanding them - and certainly not in tolerating them.
(I see the National Policy Institute offers two free essays on the SPLC, which I have not read.)
Thanks to those who responded to my bleg and looked at the SPLC’s 2006 Form 990.
At October 31 2007 the SPLC had $193.5Mm in cash and securities. It had $20.2Mm in real estate (net of depreciation). Total liabilities were only $21Mm.
Clearly, at various times in its 37-year history, income has substantially exceeded expenditures. (In 2006, the SPLC reported total revenue of $44.7Mm and expenses of $29.9 Mm).
The five officers of the SPLC were paid an aggregate of $1,225,000 – including $326,825 to the appalling Morris Dees. The top five non-officer employees were paid an aggregate $714,035, including $138,707 for Mark Potok (who on this showing deserves a raise). Poor Heidi Beirich does not place.
Obviously the SPLC is extremely wealthy. From the point of view of practical philanthropy, it is not in need.
The biggest obvious puzzle is upon whom the 81.2% of the payroll not accounted for above (a matter of $8.34Mm) is spent? Total employees were 138 at year end. This implies the other 128 averaged $65,278. The SPLC does run a significant direct mail operation and reviewing the many small grants for the so-called “Teaching Tolerance” indoctrination program must be labor intensive, but surely mainly at the clerical level. The median income in Montgomery Alabama, the SPLC’s home, is $31,877 (male) and $25,014 (female).
The “Middle Management” of the SPLC must be an interesting group.
