DonorsTrust Defies SPLC Pressure to Blacklist Turning Point USA
The Southern Poverty Law Center routinely attempts to shame charities into blacklisting conservative nonprofits to defund the SPLC’s ideological opponents, whom it brands as hateful.
This week, the SPLC released a report condemning six donor-advised funds for directing money to “extremist finance.” The report aims to shame the charity sector into blacklisting specific organizations.
The list includes many of the SPLC’s former targets, but it also features two new names: Turning Point USA and Project Veritas.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it had used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in which the SPLC fired its co-founder, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
The SPLC brands conservative Christian nonprofits that advocate religious freedom, such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council, “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” while it brands organizations that advocate enforcing U.S. immigration law, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, “anti-immigrant hate groups.” The SPLC brands organizations that warn about radical Islam, such as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, “anti-Muslim hate groups.”
The SPLC recently added parental rights groups such as Moms for America and Parents Defending Education to its “hate map,” branding them as “antigovernment extremist groups” that are part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.”
Each of these groups appears in the report published Wednesday by the SPLC.
“Hate and extremist groups have received upward of $23 million in cash from ‘donor-advised funds,’ recently released forms show,” Megan Squire, the SPLC’s deputy director for data analytics and open-source intelligence, writes in the report.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and other media organizations have reported for years that donor-advised funds can act as a consistent and significant source of income for groups peddling a variety of hateful and extremist beliefs,” Squire adds.
Squire analyzes the 2021 annual reports of the Bradley Impact Fund, Donors Trust, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, National Philanthropic Trust, Paypal Charitable Giving Fund, and Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, concluding that five of these six donor-advised funds directed more than $1 million to organizations on the SPLC’s naughty list.
DonorsTrust, which the Southern Poverty Law Center accused of sending $2.2 million to “hate and extremist groups,” condemned the SPLC report as an attempt to demonize those with different beliefs and insisted that the report wwon’t affect DonorsTrust’s commitment to serving its donors.
“DonorsTrust is committed to honoring our givers’ charitable wishes and their right to freely express themselves through their giving,” DonorsTrust President and CEO Lawson Bader told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “It’s sad that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center demonize those who simply have different approaches to issues or hold different deeply held beliefs on, for example, abortion or border security.”
“Demonized or not, DonorsTrust will continue to do what we’ve done since our founding: Defend all donors’ constitutional right to free speech and freedom of association, as upheld numerous times by the Supreme Court,” Bader added.
Fidelity declined to comment on the report, while the other donor-advised funds didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment, but some organizations blacklisted by SPLC did.
“Everyone should be able to give to the causes that they believe in, but left-wing political activists like the SPLC are trying to limit that freedom by targeting mainstream, conservative organizations,” Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of corporate engagement at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “The SPLC wants to silence rather than debate people they disagree with.”
“One way they do that is by pressuring financial institutions to cut off giving to organizations they put on their ideological blacklists,” Tedesco noted. “Their end game is tyranny, not tolerance. People should have the freedom to give to the charitable organizations they cherish most.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a discredited smear factory which already had to pay out millions over its slanderous claims,” Daniel Greenfield, executive vice president at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
“Its plot to cut off donations to patriotic groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Moms for America and Turning Point USA by targeting ‘donor-advised fund’ donations are not part of a fight against ‘hate’, but a conspiracy to suppress those who stand up to its extremist politics,” he added.
Project Veritas, which doesn’t often find itself in the SPLC’s crosshairs, contested that organization’s suggestion that it is “extreme.”
“Project Veritas has broken some of the most important stories in a generation,” Hannah Giles, the company’s CEO, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “The only thing extreme about Project Veritas is the extreme impact our reporting has on the national conversation regarding corruption in government, Big Pharma, education, Big Tech, and other powerful institutions.”
“Investigative journalism isn’t right or left,” Giles added. “We will always expose corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse—wherever it may be found. Unlike the SPLC, which keeps its doors open by convincing donors that ‘hate’ is around every corner, we offer hope to the American people through our relentless efforts to combat the propaganda that is so prevalent in our society.”
Squire, author of the SPLC’s report, reportedly has ties to Antifa.
The magazine Wired profiled Squire as Antifa’s “secret weapon,” noting that although she doesn’t identify as a member of Antifa, she refuses to condemn the extremist group’s use of violence.
Eventually, Squire joined the SPLC as deputy director for data analytics and open-source intelligence and spoke at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit held in September 2022 in Pittsburgh.
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‘Heartbreaking’: Maine Parents Resent Daughters Losing to Trans Cross-Country Runner
Parents of high school girls in Maine having to compete against a biological male say they fear the end is near for women’s sports.
“In the mind of these young ladies, it’s going to really deter them from even giving the effort, because we’re never going to be able to beat this person,” said Chris Boyington, whose daughter lost to transgender runner Soren Stark-Chessa in a recent Maine cross-country race.
Soren Stark-Chessa, a biological male runner who “identifies” as a female at Maine Coast Waldorf High School in Freeport, went from the middle of the pack in boys’ races to winning the Fastest Sophomore Girl award at Maine’s largest high school cross-country race, in Belfast, Maine, on Sept. 30.
At the Festival of Champions that day, Stark-Chessa placed fifth, though his time would have placed 162nd in the boys’ race. He is set to run against girls again at the state championship meet on Oct. 28.
The 2021 Maine Human Rights Act makes it unlawful to “deny a person equal opportunity in athletic programs” on the basis of “sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Previously, the Maine Principals’ Association didn’t allow transgender students to compete if the student would have an “unfair athletic advantage,” but association members voted to repeal the policy at an April 27 meeting, deciding the policy violated state law. The principals group maintained its Gender Identity and Equity Committee.
The 2022-2023 Maine Principals’ Association handbook defines trangender as “an individual whose gender identity does not match his or her assigned birth gender.”
Association Executive Director Mike Burnham told The Daily Signal the transgender athlete issue is in the hands of the state legislature.
“The MPA, and its member schools, don’t make state law, but are required to follow it,” he wrote in an email.
The majority of the handbook remains in effect other than the gender equity and inclusion policy, Burnham said. The association’s board of directors is working on updating changed portions of the handbook, though the handbook containing the prior gender policy remains on the association’s website.
When Cathy Ross, the mother of two runners, heard biological males were competing in girls’ high school sports in other states, she thought it could never reach her conservative community in Houlton, Maine. Houlton is just two miles from Maine’s border with New Brunswick, Canada.
Ross first heard about transgender athletes beating high school females in Connecticut. Biological male athletes beat Chelsea Mitchell, who calls herself the fastest girl in Connecticut, in more than 20 races during her high school career.
Biological males have won more than 30 separate girls’ and women’s sports titles in the past 19 years, with the trend accelerating greatly in the past three years, according to a tally by the Washington Stand.
Ross was shocked when a female-identifying male competed against her two high school-age daughters at the Festival of Champions.
“Anybody who’s the parent of a daughter, if they have watched their daughter work hard and try to succeed at this, only to be thwarted and to not have a fair chance, I would think that any parent, no matter what their political background is, would feel just as strongly that this is not fair,” Ross said.
Ross said Stark-Chessa took the spot of a girl who would have been in the top 10, discouraging her daughters and their teammates.
“It has been very frustrating for them,” she said. “It’s humiliating for them. I think it’s very confusing in the sense that they’re looking at this world around them and wondering, ‘How did the adults allow this to happen?’”
Ross said her girls are in a lose-lose situation, as they don’t want to pretend Stark-Chessa is a girl and congratulate him on beating females, but they fear they will be seen as “hateful” or bad sports otherwise.
“Eventually, if more young men get the idea, it’s possible that you could end up with nothing but biological boys in the top 10 in the girls’ race, and then what do you have left? You don’t have girls’ sports anymore,” she said. “At that point, the girls are going to be despondent, and they won’t bother. They will have lost the exact thing that so many women prior to us have worked so hard at achieving, which was sports specifically for girls.”
Federal Title IX was enacted in 1972 to ensure athletic equality for women and girls, but laws prohibiting so-called discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” have brought an influx of biological males into female spaces.
Boyington, who lives in Milford, Maine, said his daughter is constantly practicing to achieve her athletic goals, but he fears the entrance of a biological male in her races will greatly reduce her chances.
“She’s got so much athletic ability and so much potential,” he said. “It would break my heart to see that taken away because of something like this.”
Boyington said he wishes the Maine Principals’ Association would find a way to protect girls’ sports.
“I have no ill feelings toward the trangender community. I really don’t care what anybody else wants to do in their life,” he said. “But I feel like there’s other alternatives without being discriminating, that maybe [Stark-Chessa] can identify the way he wants to identify and still run with the boys, or, let him run with the girls and just compare his time to the biological males to keep a fair playing field.”
Katherine Collins is the mother of a freshman cross-country runner. Collins’ daughter and her teammates fear they will have to run against biological males like Stark-Chessa for the rest of their high school running careers.
“You can see this kid from 200 meters away, and you can look at his thighs and know he’s a boy,” Collins, who lives in Winterport, Maine, said. “His heart is bigger, his lungs are bigger, he’s pumping more hemoglobin through his arteries and veins, his legs are bigger. And that’s because he’s a boy.”
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Reporters Capture Stark Differences Between Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine Protests
Following the Hamas attacks on Israel, thousands of protestors across the world have been coming out in support of either Israel or Palestine. But the differences in the demonstrations between the two have been stark, with mostly mourning from pro-Israel demonstrators and justifications for violence and even calls for Jewish genocide from among the pro-Palestine protestors.
On Oct. 7, Hamas militants began an attack on Israel, leaving 1,400 dead and roughly 200 abducted. Mostly civilians, including the elderly, women, and children, were among those who were killed or tortured.
Many pro-Palestinian protests have shocked the world, such as one in Australia where demonstrators chanted, “Gas the Jews,” “F–k the Jews,” and “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest” in Arabic). The protest drew roughly 1,000 people who chanted in front of the Sydney Opera House holding flares and Palestinian flags.
Across the world in the U.S., many smaller protests took place in cities and on college campuses. In Indianapolis, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protestors faced off.
The pro-Israel protesters sang songs while carrying signs that said things like, “There is no excuse to killing babies” and “Hamas=ISIS.”
Meanwhile, the pro-Palestine protestors echoed a common chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” This chant is a call to action to make the State of Palestine occupy the land from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Israel is in between, so if this actually happened, Palestine would become the 57th Islamic state by fully eradicating Israel, including “ethnically cleansing” the Jewish people who currently live there, as the Palestinians have decreed that they refuse to live alongside the Jews.
At George Washington University, dozens of students gathered for a planned “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine.” Many of the attendees covered their faces. Daily Signal Reporter Mary Margaret Olohan was given a face mask and told to wear one by the pro-Palestine participants so “they” wouldn’t identify her later in pictures.
On the George Mason University campus, an alum said the pro-Palestine protest there was “terrifying” for the Jewish students on campus. She added that the protests were “enabling Hamas to continue to oppress the Palestinian people.”
On Oct. 17, a pro-Palestinian group called for a cease-fire outside the White House. Forty-nine of these protestors were arrested for allegedly blocking entrances and crossing barriers.
The following day, pro-Palestinian protestors entered a House of Representatives office building protesting and calling for a cease-fire. Over 300 were arrested, and at least three were charged with assaulting a police officer, according to the Capitol Police.
“Demonstrations are not allowed inside congressional buildings,” Capitol Police said on X (formerly Twitter) before the protests. “We warned the protestors to stop demonstrating, and when they did not comply, we began arresting them.”
Many American college students have come out in support of Palestine, including over 30 Harvard student groups that said they held Israel “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attacks.
At George Mason University in Virginia, many of the students denied the atrocities that happened to Israelis or tried to justify it.
“The one time [Hamas] decide[s] to fight back because it is their land, they’re just going to make a big deal of it, that doesn’t make any sense to me,” one student said.
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Royals stand strong against Hamas, while BBC had to be shamed before calling group 'terrorists'
As in America, the Middle East conflict sparks fierce debate and opposing viewpoints among citizens of our strongest ally, the U.K., creating deep division within British society. Indeed, in recent days, thousands of pro-Palestinian activists swarmed London to demonstrate support for the Palestinian cause.
Amidst this ideological battle, the British monarchy has stepped forward with a clear and unambiguous stance, condemning the barbaric atrocities of Hamas against innocent Israelis. The values of fairness and humanity embraced by this position are foundational to Western societies, but they are currently under threat by terrorist organizations like Hamas.
In times of chaos and crisis, the world turns to its leaders for wisdom, guidance and comfort. But, as a presidential republic, America lacks a respected apolitical voice of integrity provided in Britain by its monarchy. Our often-misguided celebrities and social influencers let us down in this regard, more often than not.
The horrors committed by Hamas have focused the minds of many around the globe, sometimes in alarming ways. Consider the egregious handling of the conflict by many of our universities, and some of our U.S. news outlets.
This is no different in Britain, where until late last week, the national broadcaster, the BBC, refused to refer to Hamas murderers as "terrorists," notwithstanding the British government’s official designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
For the moment, President Joe Biden, in his support of Israel, has come down on the side of civilization over barbarism. But electoral winds could challenge his laudable stance at any juncture.
Britain is fortunate in its royal family to have a clear-eyed, benevolent element of society that reminds its people of their noble shared values. These values, under threat by extremists like Hamas, are the very principles of fairness and humanity that underpin liberal Western civilization.
The royal family moved swiftly and courageously to condemn the appalling terrorist acts, and, unlike the BBC, did not hesitate to identify them as such. The palace’s statement reported that the king was: "appalled by and condemns the barbaric acts of terrorism in Israel."
Jerusalem deputy mayor details posture in Israel after Hamas attacks, demands proof of life for hostagesVideo
Charles personally called Israeli President Isaac Herzog to express his condolences and solidarity. Herzog rightly expressed that the king’s call was an important gesture to Jewish people around the globe. This acknowledgment by Israel’s president underlines the king’s standing as a critical figure of global leadership, beyond just the borders of Britain or the commonwealth.
Faithful to his role as head of nation, the king also held a private audience with Britain’s chief rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis to express his care and concern for the U.K.’s Jewish population.
For their part, Prince and Princess of Wales William and Kate issued a heartfelt statement condemning the Hamas attacks while recognizing, Israel’s "right of self defence." Their distress over the unfolding events was palpable. Prince William went a step further by writing a letter to Ephraim, underlining his own solidarity with the Jewish community.
The support for an embattled Israel was not limited to the royal family. It has been affirming to witness Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and a huge swathe of British parliamentarians, authors and public intellectuals express vocal and unambiguous support for Israel since the murderous Hamas attacks commenced. Along with the royal family, these enlightened voices also reinforce our great ally’s position and values in these times of global anxiety and despair.
Undeniably, kings and queens play valuable roles in times of international crisis, and the British monarchy, in particular, has consistently demonstrated its effectiveness in this regard. An outstanding illustration is the late Queen Elizabeth II’s response to the 9/11 attacks.
Just two days after the 2001 attacks, Queen Elizabeth broke with tradition and ordered the band of the Coldstream Guards to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
Her majesty further demonstrated solidarity by attending a service of remembrance at St. Paul's Cathedral, where she ordered "The Star-Spangled Banner" to be played, wiping away a tear as thousands of churchgoers sang along.
For their part, Prince and Princess of Wales William and Kate issued a heartfelt statement condemning the Hamas attacks while recognizing, Israel’s "right of self defence." Their distress over the unfolding events was palpable. Prince William went a step further by writing a letter to Ephraim, underlining his own solidarity with the Jewish community.
These actions, like the present royal family’s gestures of solidarity with those innocents — both Israelis and Palestinians — enduring loss and violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, will never be forgotten.
In turbulent times, the world craves moral clarity and a restored sense of stability. Risking public scrutiny, King Charles III and his family have risen to the occasion to shine a light on what is right, just and compassionate. The horrors of the October 7 attack are stark reminders that, though we live in relative peace and security, evil is very much at work remotely.
In a world filled with complexities and chaos, the British monarchy serves an important purpose in reminding citizens of all civilized nations of our fundamental values, and the necessity to defend them at all costs.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/royals-stand-strong-against-hamas-bbc-shamed-group-terrorists
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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