Wikipedia was my source on that one; I was mostly familiar with his Civil Rights activism, SNCC, and legislative career.

I’ve read a lot about SPLC over the years, and their original mission was legit, and needed.
Then they succeeded, and started looking for new targets – and decided that enriching themselves and defaming conservatives was their new lease on life.
Yes, now it’s a grift.
Kind of like the trajectory of the ACLU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Bond

Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Poverty_Law_Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr. in August 1971[23] as a law firm originally focused on issues such as fighting poverty, racial discrimination and the death penalty in the United States. Dees asked civil rights leader Julian Bond to serve as president, a largely honorary position; he resigned in 1979 but remained on the board of directors until his death in 2015.

In 1979, Dees and the SPLC began filing civil lawsuits against Ku Klux Klan chapters and similar organizations for monetary damages on behalf of their victims. The favorable verdicts from these suits served to bankrupt the KKK and other targeted organizations.[24] According to a 1996 article in the New York Times, Dees and the SPLC “have been credited with devising innovative legal ways to cripple hate groups, including seizing their assets.”[25] Some civil libertarians said that SPLC’s tactics chill free speech and set legal precedents that could be applied against activist groups which are not hate groups.[24]

That last charge has been amply demonstrated to be true.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy never fails.

But, I didn’t know this had happened:

In 1986, the entire legal staff of the SPLC, excluding Dees, resigned as the organization shifted from traditional civil rights work toward fighting right-wing extremism

https://americandigest.org/pournelles-iron-law-bureaucracy/

Related, and observably true as well.
https://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/

MLK Sr.

Jr. had a courtesy appointment as pastor there; his primary employment was as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The congregation where he was actually a working pastor is in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bond was a leading figure in the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee, which was taken over by head cases in 1966 and ceased to exist in 1968. He was in the Georgia legislature from 1969 to 1987. Not sure what legislation he shepherded while there. He had a faculty sinecure at one of the Maryland state campuses for quite some time, though he had no post-baccalaureate degree. AFAIK, he was never associated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was a grift from the get-go.

Now that is funny.
Otherwise I don’t think Warnock and Bond are much alike other than being black Democrat activists.
Bond is really more like a sixties Obama, who actually accomplished something; although heading the SPLC is a down-mark now, they started off on a better track, then lost their way.

I am not at all impressed with McCarthy. The most impressive Cal Republican is Tom McClintock. He should have been governor but he was wildly outspent in the GOP primary by Bill Simon Jr, an inherited wealth lightweight who then lost to Gray Davis. What followed has been the decline of California.

The last set of public remarks I’ve seen by Kevin McCarthy were not those of a man who specialized in either. What they specialize in is working a room and running fundraising and publicity campaigns.

That’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing that.