The Center for Security Policy (CSP) is a 501(c)(3) organization that describes its mission as “to identify challenges and opportunities likely to affect American security, broadly defined, and act promptly and creatively to ensure that they are the subject of focused national examination and effective action.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has said that it plans to add CSP to its list of hate groups in 2016.

CSP is headed by founder Frank Gaffney, who serves as a columnist for far-right sites Townhall.com and Newsmax.com, as well as a contributor for WorldNetDaily.com.  Gaffney served in the Reagan Administration as an Assistant Secretary for Defense. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Gaffney as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes” who is “gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within.” CNN has referred to Gaffney as an “anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist.” In one CNN appearance, Gaffney argued that “the goal of most ‘Muslim-American organizations’ and mosques ‘is to destroy western civilization from within.’”

SPLC argues that CSP serves mostly to “reinforce Gaffney’s delusions” by “issuing alarming ‘investigative’ reports.” Those reports, featured on CSP’s website, serve as an illustrating window into the group’s raison d’etre of promoting Gaffney’s Islamophobia. They include: Star Spangled Shariah, The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s Jihad on Free Speech, Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America, and Civilization Jihad. The website also advertises Gaffney’s “course in 10 parts,” The Muslim Brotherhood in America. Gaffney has obsessively advanced a conspiracy theory that Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide, is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. SPLC called the claim “groundless” and Sen. John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner, both Republicans, condemned it.

CSP is the party behind a bogus poll cited by GOP frontrunner Donald Trump in his December 2015 proposal to ban all Muslim immigration into the United States and prevent Muslim-Americans overseas from returning. The poll, which suggested that large swaths of the Muslim population sympathize with violence against American civilians, was identified as “very shoddy” by the Washington Post for several reasons, including: 1. It was an opt-in online survey of 600 people, 2. The questions were asked in an agree/disagree format, which historically favors “agree” answers, 3. A large portion of the survey’s target population speaks English as a second language, suggesting that “a nuanced survey question may be more difficult to navigate.” The American Association for Public Opinion Research has stated that opt-in surveys “cannot be considered representative of the intended population.”

CSP’s funding comes from the usual suspects of major conservative donors; its top donors are the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Koch Brothers’-connected Donors Capital Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. In addition, the group has received funding from major defense contractors.