marketing business that he'd started at college, selling everything from doormats to cookbooks. He sold this business in 1969, making himself a multimillionaire. He had a flair for Manichean political prose; he had worked as a volunteer for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, raising some $24 million in donations. His reward was McGovern’s mailing list of idealistic, well-heeled white liberals, whom he promptly soaked to finance the fledgling SPLC.

[ Related: Southern Poverty Law Center roiled as second founder resigns]

During the 1970s, the SPLC won significant civil rights victories, such as the racial integration of Alabama’s state troopers and a state redistricting that allowed blacks to win legislative seats in Alabama for the first time. By the 1980s, however, Dees was redirecting the center’s litigation away from those classicsaid were more pressing civil rights issues. It was at this juncture that Cohen and Brownstein joined the center. The 1995 Advertiser series claimed the center spent only 31 percent of its revenues on program services such as litigation and public education. Its net assets had grown to $52 million by then. By 2000 it more than doubled, to $120 million, and Ken Silverstein, writing in Harper’s magazine, pointed out that there was almost no connection between the “hate groups” the SPLC relentlessly publicized and actual hate crimes, nearly all of which were committed by lone wolves. For example, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was never credibly connected to any militia group. Writing in 2009 for the leftist magazine CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn accused the SPLC of