To the Editor:
Hate and extremism are more than just ideas. Their impacts are felt every second of the day in every pocket of the country as communities we care about are attacked by a rising number of groups spreading their hateful propaganda to grow their base and further their agenda.
For nearly 40 years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has shined a spotlight on these groups, who they really are, and the hate-filled values they represent, as part of our annual hate-group report. We recently released our latest report, prompting some of those we listed for their hateful words and deeds to lash out.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform is one of those groups. You may have seen its ad published in the May print issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy seeking to undermine our credibility for highlighting their assault on nonwhite immigrants. This is FAIR’s latest attempt to deflect from its own history that is intertwined with white nationalists, filled with racially inflammatory vitriol and support of laws that attempt to thwart immigrants’ rights.
We stand firmly by our designation of FAIR as an anti-immigrant hate group and our First Amendment right to express our opinion — just as we believe they and others have a First Amendment right to disagree with us.
We define a hate group as an organization that, based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities, has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity — prejudices that strike at the heart of our democratic values and fracture society along its most fragile fault lines. The FBI uses similar criteria in its definition of a hate crime.
FAIR fits this description because for the past 40 years it has worked tirelessly to demonize nonwhite immigrants. We first designated FAIR as a hate group in 2007 after monitoring the group for a number of years and closely examining the personal papers of its founder, John Tanton, a white nationalist who still is listed as a member of the group’s Board of Advisors. Research on Tanton shows that he was at the heart of the white-nationalist scene for decades, corresponding with Holocaust deniers, Ku Klux Klan lawyers, and other leading white-nationalist thinkers of the era.
Under its current leadership, FAIR has continued to push the hateful ideas set forth by its founder. In a 1991 interview, Dan Stein, FAIR’s current president who was its director at the time, spoke about nonwhite immigrants to the Albany Times Union, saying, “It’s almost like they’re getting into competitive breeding. You have to take into account the various fertility rates in designing limits on immigration.”
Stein claimed to the Washington Post that he never said that, but we located the interview. Stein also praised Tanton during a March 2017 interview with the Detroit News, saying, “He lived an extraordinary life at every level. To do something great, one needs to have passion, purpose, energy. John has all those things.”
FAIR has also become active in pushing anti-immigrant laws at the state and local levels. Attorney Kris Kobach, who works for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, wrote the draconian anti-immigrant law in Alabama that led to massive human-rights violations and economic devastation. The SPLC filed a lawsuit against the state over this law and won, blocking many of the law’s provisions.
The work and agenda of FAIR can be best summed up in the words of Tanton: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
Any organization is free to disagree with us about our designation of it as a hate group. We are not trying to shut down their right to free speech. Instead, our goal is to educate the public about their agenda and their work. We have a team of dedicated researchers who closely track and monitor more than 1,600 extremist groups operating across the country, and we clearly list on our website the criteria we use to list an organization as a hate group.
Our evaluation closely tracks how other organizations, including the federal government, define hate. As the director of the Intelligence Project, I stand by our review process and emphasize that our decisions are based on facts related to an organization’s activity and its public statements, not on a disagreement about where a particular group falls on the political spectrum or on sincerely held religious beliefs.
Since it opened its doors in 1971, the SPLC has tackled hate and extremism. We have filed lawsuits that dismantled Jim Crow laws and eliminated barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBTQ community, and the disabled. We have crippled the nation’s most violent white-supremacist groups with multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims.
In the 1980s, the SPLC began monitoring white-supremacist activity amid a resurgence of the Klan. This effort developed into what is now the Intelligence Project. Today, the Intelligence Project is internationally recognized for tracking and exposing a wide variety of hate and extremist organizations across the United States.
In its ad, FAIR acknowledges none of our accomplishments and attacks us instead for our current workplace challenges. We are addressing these internal issues, too. Team members across the organization are working with SPLC interim president and CEO Karen Baynes-Dunning and Tina Tchen of Buckley LLP to create an organization that fully embraces the vision we have for the world around us.
Let me be clear: The issues we face internally have never impacted our work externally. We will continue to push back against hate wherever we see it and defend communities we serve by bringing victories through litigation and legislation.
As hate groups continue to rise, we are more committed than ever to being at the front lines in the fight for justice.
Heidi Beirich
Intelligence Project Director
Southern Poverty Law Center
Montgomery, Ala.