Hate Groups are Masquerading as Mainstream Nonprofits
How grading persuasive speech outlines for my Public Speaking class led me down an unwanted rabbit hole of disinformation and hatred.
We’re in a different world today. Hate has gone mainstream. Today, the purveyors of hate don’t always burn crosses or use racial slurs. They might wear suits and ties. They might have sophisticated public relations operations. They might even testify before Congress. - Heidi Beirich SPLC
Sometimes, you find scary things in places you didn’t realize existed.
I am a Journalism and Communication professor at a local community college. In my Public Speaking class, one of the assignments is a persuasive speech. These speeches require students to research and use credible sources to support their ideas. Yesterday, as I sat in my quaint campus office quietly grading persuasive speech outlines, I found something disturbing.
As I read through a student’s persuasive speech on illegal immigration, a few right-wing talking points stood out (the use of the story of Laken Riley), which quickly then triggered my misinformation-spidey senses. So, I decided to look closely at some of this student’s sources, and what I found terrified me.
I will walk you through my fact-checking process to see the lateral reading skills I used to sniff out this propaganda website. Students use crappy sources all the time, but the information this student was citing was false.
The claim in this outline was that immigrants are a net drain on the economy because they have a below-average education level, so they can’t provide as much money as someone with a higher education. So they take more than they give (student’s words).
I had just written a piece on the economic benefits of illegal immigration, so my immediate facial expression was, "WTF?" I scrolled quickly down to the sources on this student’s reference page and found the following nonprofit organization: The Center for Immigration Studies.
Here, I found a very credible-looking website with lots of data and information, along with a statement at the bottom of the page:
The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.
I decided to dig further using lateral reading. I opened a new tab on Google and typed “Center for immigration studies.” Then, I opened Wikipedia to find a description of the group that was enlightening, but not in a good way.
It said:
Historian Otils L Graham founded the CIS alongside eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton.
Reports published by CIS have been disputed by scholars on immigration, fact-checkers, news outlets, and immigration-research organizations.
I was shaken. My spidey senses were right, but this was scary stuff. At the top of the website, there is even a Whistleblower button, which did I mention how terrifying that is? How incredibly horrifying. I kept reading and found that the SPLC has designated the CIS a hate group. YIKES! A hate group!
This website looks incredibly professional and would fool a large majority of people. This is propaganda disguised as credible information. So, I went a little deeper to see what the Southern Poverty Law Center had to say about them. I found some awful stuff. According to the SPLC,
In the nearly 30 years since the Southern Poverty Law Center has been monitoring the American radical right we’ve seen a major shift in the nature of organized groups that specialize in vilifying certain people because of their race, ethnicity or other characteristic. CIS is the brainchild of John Tanton, the father of the modern nativist movement, and part of a network of closely related anti-immigrant groups that Tanton founded. These groups have been responsible for much of the hysteria about immigrants that dominates conservative politics.
Digging a little deeper still, I found the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University, a multi-year research project on Islamophobia that aims to disseminate original and accessible research. It also had a file on CIS. There, they explain,
the organization’s research has a history of promoting anti-Muslim and anti-immigration policy recommendations and animus. These include the ways that “militant Islamic [sic] terrorists” could use the immigration system to enter the United States, the degree to which immigrants use welfare, the perceived problems with the refugee system, and what they claim is the cost of immigration to citizens.
They often produce press releases and fact sheets that convey propagandized disinformation in conservative-leaning media outlets like the National Review and the Federalist. Additionally, they are frequently asked to participate in panel discussions and testify before Congress. The first Trump administration relied heavily on disinformation from this group to justify many of its immigration policies and will no doubt do so in the future. White House advisor Steven Miller long relied on information from the CIS, and he will enter the new Trump administration as US Homeland Security advisor.
Additionally,
In an immigration topic on its website labeled “Black Americans,” CIS has attempted to blame job competition and high unemployment rates among Black Americans on immigration levels. In May 1992, Graham wrote an op-ed with Roy Beck, director of NumbersUSA, titled To Help Inner City, Cut Flow of Immigrants in which they argued, “We should not have to rediscover that massive immigration widens the divide between wealth and poverty, storing up social dynamite, especially diminishing life for African-Americans.”
If you had been following along with Trump during the election, he kept referring to immigrants as taking “black jobs.” That rhetoric sounds similar to some of the ideologies on this website. The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University details all of the disinformation presented on the website. It explains how the American Immigration Council has criticized CIS’s research several times for misrepresenting data or misapplying statistical methods.
So now, as you all can see, I have gone down a deep, dark rabbit hole because my spidey senses were triggered while grading a student outline. I didn’t stop there, however.
I found an article in Yes! Magazine that details some of the Right Wing Think Tanks that are behind some of the White Supremacist groups in the United States. IT GETS WORSE!
Media Matters for America found that from January 2019 to July 2021, there were over 200 articles that used these anti-immigrant hate groups as sources. These included pieces in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. The Times even published a guest essay by a fellow with CIS on their prestigious editorial pages in 2020.
It seems like a dereliction of duty for Journalists to report information that comes from hate groups. Determining whether an organization is a designated hate group is an extremely low bar that should be easily attainable.
Additionally, Google should remove CIS as a source from its news feed. CIS should be seen as what they are: an anti-immigrant hate group that played a crucial role in mainstreaming the “great replacement” theory in the American public discourse.
I can certainly understand a student making a mistake; it is relatively easy to be fooled by a website that looks legitimate, especially if news organizations are giving it credibility. However, it certainly makes my job harder to debunk these propaganda networks to my students if they are being propped up in such a way. These ideas also seem much more mainstream to be appearing in a student outline.
Needless to say, I am flabbergasted. I was just doing a little grading.
In my last substack, I published a Media Literacy Guide, which discussed lateral reading and reading upstream. These two crucial skills helped me uncover the truth about this organization. I hope you will find it helpful as well.
When I was in public radio, I was known as the person who loved to do research - like reading the lawsuit, or digging down to understand where the info was coming from. That made me odd. Since I had published my own newspaper before I made the transition to mainstream journalism, I had not realized the expectations were so low. It was flabbergasting. It was during this time (the mid-teens) that I was told the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t credible anymore. Because the disinformation had extended to discrediting the people who track disinformation.
OMG! I am trying your lateral approach and it is eye opening! Thanks.