An organization that has enjoyed power and influence, and years of fawning media coverage, is being revealed as a well-heeled con artist.

The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center is in internal chaos after its co-founder was booted last week and now its president has stepped down, too.

The organization’s board of directors fired Morris Dees without giving a reason, but media outlets quoting SPLC sources says the 82-year-old attorney created an environment that was hostile for minorities and unsafe for female employees due to sexual harassment.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Jeremy Tedesco tells OneNewsNow that firing Dees is a huge black eye for the once-legitimate civil rights group.

“There's been allegations for years,” says Tedesco, “that they have their own internal problems with race and gender discrimination, and other things.”

ADF, a conservative legal group, is among many organizations that have been labeled a “hate group” by the SPLC alongside literal hate groups such as Neo-Nazis.

Just as it was intended, the designation has been used by corporations, the media, and federal agencies as a political and social barometer that ostractizes conservative groups for a lack of "tolerance" and "diversity."

ADF made national headlines last year, for example, after winning the Masterpiece Cake Shop ruling before the Supreme Court, but the “hate group” label is often mentioned in the same news story as the ruling.

Writing at National Review, former ADF attorney David French points out the SPLC reached a multi-million-dollar settlement with a British Muslim, Maajid Nawaz, who was accused of being an “anti-Muslim extremist” by the SPLC.

The organization also described Ben Carson as an “extremist” and was forced to back down. French further writes:

For those who cared about truth, the SPLC’s transformation from a valuable anti-Klan watchdog into a glorified version of Media Matters for America was plain and obvious. It steadily expanded its definition of “hate groups” to include mainstream Christian organizations such as my former employer, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it labeled as “extremists” men such as American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray.

Mississippi-based American Family Association, the parent organization of American Family News, which operates OneNewsNow, is labeled as a “hate group” in Mississippi along with Klan groups and black nationalist groups.

AFA's supposed offense is being "anti-LGBT" according to the hate map.

French addressed such discrepencies in his op-ed, pointing out how journalists who dug deeper discovered the SPLC will designate a "hate group" in your town when in reality it's one person with a website.

“The SPLC evidently wasn’t practicing what they preached within their own offices in Montgomery,” AFA president Tim Wildmon says of the former staff members now speaking out about racism and mistreatment of women.

“I personally hope,” Wildmon tells OneNewsNow, “this will lead to the demise and discrediting of the SPLC because it’s clear they only exist to raise money.”

Wildmon

Tedesco points out that it was the left-wing New Yorker magazine that quoted a former SPLC employee who wrote a blistering op-ed about the organzation, describing it as a “con” who fleeced gullible people of their money, which was obvious to employees who worked there.

"We were part of the con, and we knew it," Bob Moser wroter.

In that same story, Moser calls the hate group listing a “masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents” and admits that it remains a “valuable resource” for journalists.

Tedesco says the SPLC is attempting some crisis management right now, which he calls an attempt to “whitewash” the negative publicity.