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Visa, Mastercard Block Donations To David Horowitz Think Tank After SPLC Labels It A ‘Hate Group’

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Visa and Mastercard blocked the ability for people to donate to a conservative think tank after the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center labeled it a “hate group.”

David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, emailed his supporters Wednesday that his organization is “under attack by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),” The Daily Wire reported Thursday.

“For years, the SPLC has labeled the Freedom Center a hate group and tried to get organizations like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter to ban us and silence our message,” Horowitz added. “Yesterday, SPLC finally convinced Mastercard and Visa to cut us off. Now we can’t process donations from any major credit card companies.”

The two credit card giants controlled nearly 85 percent of the credit card market share at the end of 2016 based on the number of cards in circulation, according to WalletHub.

The SPLC lists Horowitz as an “extremist” on its website for his so-called “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black” positions, “despite Horowitz being a founding intellectual member of the New Left in the 1960s, and an advocate for civil rights and equality.”

The SPLC has a well-documented history of inaccuracies, typically by adding conservative politicians or anti-Islamic extremism activists to the organization’s notorious “hate lists.”

Some notable people the SPLC has mislabeled in some form or another as an “extremist” or “hateful” include Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and British politician Maajid Nawaz.

The SPLC placed Carson, a former Republican presidential candidate, next to neo-Nazis on the “extremist watch list” in early 2015. After public backlash, the SPLC apologized and removed Carson from the list, The Daily Caller reported in February 2015.

Nawaz, an anti-radical Islam activist and former radical Islamist himself, defeated the SPLC in court for falsely labelling his advocacy organization, the Quilliam Foundation, as “extremist,” in mid-2017. The SPLC apologized and Nawaz was awarded $3.3 million on June 18, Newsweek reported.

The SPLC also assists Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter determine which organizations are “hate groups,” The Daily Caller News Foundation reported in June.

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