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The Southern Poverty Law Center just fired one of its founders.

We know practically nothing about why the SPLC fired Morris Dees and so it is fruitless to speculate about his supposed transgressions.

But we all know something about hate.

Most conservatives have been the object of hate over the past few years. Many have been slandered. Vilely.

Wealthy organizations comb through every single thing conservative commentators say to find the few quotes they can take out of context to smear them. They have lobbied financial institutions and web hosting companies to close bank accounts and take down sites. They have vilified anyone who dared question their unmitigated authority to be the absolute arbiters of morality.

This is hatred. It’s a pure hatred for anyone who might disagree with political beliefs they deem orthodox or correct and a frenzied insistence that any such unorthodox person be destroyed—no matter the means or the cost.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center has gotten rich from engaging in this hatred.

The SPLC now has a $432.7 million endowment, rivaling many prestigious colleges in America. Think about that. Nearly half a billion dollars.

And this leads us to the dirty little secret that all but the most gullible liberals must understand. If there is no hatred, there is no Southern Poverty Law Center. Their well-being and continued existence depends on continued hatred in this country. If hatred disappeared tomorrow, so would their jobs.

The SPLC is an already bloated institution that desperately needs there to be hatred and bigotry to survive and grow.

But the truth is that there is very little hatred—at least of the kind the SPLC specializes in combating—around the United States. Has anyone heard overt racism, sexism, or anti-gay language—directed at anyone besides white men—on any mainstream TV show? Probably not. And if they did, it would have been immediately denounced and vilified.

And so the SPLC finds itself with very little food to to feed its insatiable endowment. Given its interests and ambitions, it will happily misinterpret any number of things as hatred. There is no shortage of new ways to configure reality and see it as bigotry and thereby so catalog it. Nevermind that this sounds like a miserable way to walk through life: constantly looking for hatred and bigotry in everything.

But even by the SPLC’s estimates, there are only a few thousand members of the Klu Klux Klan in the country. That’s less than 0.002 percent of Americans. But when it comes to fundraising time, the SPLC will no doubt argue this 0.002 percent is a dangerous menace to our country.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s increasingly indiscriminate definitions of hatred have ensnared good people from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Ben Carson. They have spurred acts of violence, including an incident where gunman, motivated by the SPLC’s “hate map,” walked into the Family Research Council’s building and opened fire.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Dees was ousted because he fit some new criteria that the SPLC pulled out of thin air. In an age where the Left increasingly cannibalizes its own, these occurrences are becoming more and more common.

The Southern Poverty Law Center may have been started to address a legitimate problem. Most non-profits of their caliber were. But it is obvious that they have turned into a money hungry politically motivated smear group. The fact that many organizations view them as an expert on which groups should and shouldn’t be viewed as hate groups is beyond terrifying.

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