The increasingly Orwellian cancel culture has a hateful law firm determining which charities are worthy of donations. U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., wants answers.
At issue is a practice of AmazonSmile, an Amazon service that allows consumers to direct 0.5% of each purchase to a charity of their choosing. There’s just one catch. Amazon excludes conservative organizations as recipients by claiming they filter out “hate” groups.
“Organizations that engage in, support, encourage, or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering, or other illegal activities are not eligible to participate,” explains an AmazonSmile policy statement.
The statement explains the components of AmazonSmile’s hate filter.
“Amazon relies on … the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which organizations fall into these groups.”
It is hard to imagine an organization less credible than the Southern Poverty Law Center, which left-wing journalists use to demonize conservatives as haters.
The center began as a highly virtuous organization in 1971, suing one major Ku Klux Klan chapter so effectively the organization dissolved and sold its headquarters to help pay the judgment.
Over the subsequent 50 years, the law firm gradually became a left-wing propaganda mill enamored with fundraising. It has amassed an endowment of nearly a half-billion dollars that largely funds left-wing political activism.
The organization raises money by alarming Americans about hate groups. That’s a noble mission. Problem is, the larger the hate list the more the donations. To maximize income, potential donors must have a hate group in their backyards –whether it’s true or not.
The list must contain big name “hate groups,” such as the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom — the latter a premier nonprofit law firm that wins landmark First Amendment cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.
We can choose to support or oppose the work of nonwoke religious conservative organizations. Disliking them and what they believe does not make them akin to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi skinhead groups, and other organizations that advocate or commit hatred and violence.
To raise money in the Pikes Peak region, the law center lists several “active anti-LGBT” groups. Those include the Colorado Springs-based Pray in Jesus Name Project, the Family Research Institute, and Christ the King Church in Larkspur — none of which have histories of hate crimes or violence.
At most these groups are harmless, seldom-heard-from and barely known even to locals. They have countercultural religious-right beliefs about marriage and human sexuality and are free to preach them in a free society.
As Amazon excludes religious conservatives, it invites customers to fund Planned Parenthood — a federally funded abortion business founded by racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger who co-founded The Negro Project to reduce the Black population and promoted it at a Klan rally.
“One author called the SPLC’s ‘hate map’ — which designates various groups the SPLC considers to be extremist — ‘an outright fraud’ and ‘a willful deception to scare older liberals into writing checks to SPLC,’ ” Buck wrote to Amazon President and CEO Jeff Bezos, in a letter signed by all other minority members of the House Committee on the Judiciary.
“Amazon’s reliance on the SPLC as a barometer to determine the eligibility of charitable organizations on AmazonSmile serves to discriminate against conservative views.”
It further enriches a wealthy law firm that could qualify for inclusion on its hate list. Just last year, an uprising of the law center’s employees exposed a “systemic culture of racism and sexism within its workplace,” as reported by CNN and an array of other media outlets.
The public should know about hate groups. That includes Klan chapters, white supremacists, Black supremacists, neo-Nazi skinheads, and genuine enemies of the LGBTQ community such as the Westboro Baptist “God Hates (gays)” Church in Kansas.
No rational person should fund a hate group. In trying to identify them, don’t count on the Southern Poverty Law Center — a fraudulent outfit with a history of hostility toward Christians, Jews, conservatives, women and minorities. Amazon should cut ties to this divisive firm before alienating half of a deeply divided country.
The Gazette Editorial Board
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