SPLC: self-perpetuating propaganda machine
Once upon a time, long long ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) actually did decent work in the field of civil rights. But for a long long time now it’s functioned as a partisan finger-pointer to effectively target many ordinary groups and people on the right, listing them as racist hate groups. The SPLC somehow came to be widely considered the authority on this – why or how I don’t know, but it was easy to see it had happened.
That’s why the recent DOJ indictment of the group is so potentially important and certainly eye-opening, although the left will almost undoubtedly continue to defend them and label the whole thing as merely paying “informants.” I already wrote about the indictment in this post, including a link to the indictment and to the press conference announcing it. So I won’t go over that ground again here, except to say that the charges are serious and go way beyond paying informants.
From Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who has been studying the SPLC and its methods since 2009:
Jacobson said he believes the indictment is extremely detailed, names names, and describes conduct that is far more specific and far more serious than the crisis management line SPLC has been feeding to sympathetic media, which is that they were simply paying informants the way any organization fighting hate would do. He said the indictment describes shell companies, fictitious accounts, suspicious money transfers that triggered bank fraud detection systems, and alleged lies told to banks when those systems flagged the transactions. That is not a description of routine informant payments. It is a description of a deliberate financial concealment structure, and the bank fraud charges reflect that distinction.
His first piece on SPLC appeared in 2009, and by 2010 he had already identified what he described as a pattern of fabricating or vastly inflating the existence of hate groups for fundraising purposes. He investigated a Ku Klux Klan group that SPLC had listed on its hate map in Rhode Island, where he is from, and found no evidence the group existed. He called the state police hate crimes unit, which also said it had no knowledge of any such group. The same thing happened in 2012 with a neo-Nazi group SPLC listed in Rhode Island. He said over the following fifteen years he wrote nearly fifty pieces documenting how SPLC’s hate map, which is its primary fundraising tool, was built on inflated and in some cases apparently invented groups. …
Jacobson said SPLC functioned essentially as a domestic political terrorist organization in the sense that landing on its list could be career-ending for individuals and company-ending for organizations, and that the terror the list created was amplified by the corporate partners who agreed to use SPLC designations as the basis for deplatforming decisions. He described being told by a client relationship management platform that it would expel his organization if it appeared on the SPLC list, calling that a vivid illustration of how the SPLC’s list functioned as a private extortion mechanism backed by the implicit threat of corporate enforcement. He said Amazon, PayPal, and other major companies participated in that enforcement network, and that the roughly eight hundred million dollars in total assets SPLC is believed to have accumulated could not have been built without significant support from corporate America alongside the celebrity and foundation donors who have received more attention.
He offered an analogy he said is not perfect but captures the essential fraud: it is like taking your car to a mechanic for a state inspection, being told something is broken and being charged to fix it, without being told the mechanic broke it himself. SPLC allegedly created or supported the very hate it was fundraising to combat, did not disclose that to donors, and pocketed the contributions. An arsonist collecting money to put out fires he set is another version of the same scheme …
More at the link.
Another way to look at it is this classic take from Iowahawk, written ten years ago. It’s not specifically about the SPLC, but it certainly applies to it:
1. Target a respected institution
2. Kill & clean it
3. Wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 25, 2016
It is likely that the SPLC is not alone in this sort of practice of fundraising off its own arson. It may be the most egregious, however, and possibly the most influential. The left will continue to make excuses and frame it as “Republicans pounce” and they may even work for Democrat voters. But these are nevertheless some fascinating developments, and the case will be tried in Alabama rather than DC or New York.
NOTE: Here’s an article about one instance of the SPLC’s threats. Also, I noticed in the video of the indictment announcement, that Blanche said this was not a new investigation, and that it had been opened quite a while earlier but stopped at some point during the Biden administration (I’ve cued up the brief segment):
Hmmm.
I also found this comment somewhere:
What always enraged me about the SPLC was how the organization intentionally used its misleading name and initials to fool imany donors who thought they were sending money to Martin Luther King’s SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Even today, many geriatric libs probably think both groups are the same.
Simple economics.
When the demand for hate groups and hate crimes outstrips the supply, they must be invented.
Yup. The left has a serious supply and demand problem when it comes to systemic racism in this country.
The truth comes out slowly, but comes out.
I don’t think this will kill the SPLC, but corporations will likely feel less pressure to donate, and the return on doing so will be less useful.
On FNCs program “The Five”, courtesy of Obama critic Matt Margolis, comes this written and clip account between Greg Gutfield and the painful voiced Jessica Tarlov. Tarlov tries to defend the SPLC, but Gutfeld brings strong counter-examples for the win.
Sure. There’s always bigotry and racism somewhere, says Gutfeld. But is the Left’s well funded NGO system responsible for creating the Racist White Supremacist bogeyman? Or was all this hysterical galloping in the media, beginning in 2014 (by citation counts of words like “racist” or “racism”), really organic? Or not? https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/04/23/greg-gutfeld-absolutely-shreds-jessica-tarlov-and-it-was-vicious-n4952128
Tarlov cannot hold her own. I recall that in 2010 or -11, the Economist magazine reported on a poll, YouGov In
believe, of Tea Party supporters. It found racist sentiments in this group no different than in the average American. Yet the Taxed Enough Already movement was smeared as racist bigots!
And even when race hustling second term Prez. Barry turned the volume, the stats by advocacy groups for about a decade maintained that neo-Nazi’s in the US and KKK supporters were no more than 10-12000, and no less than 4-6,000. And virtually stable in both’s counts. According to the ADL and SPLC! (In other words, both group’s stats mostly overlapped, and no bulge in the tale of the numbers were reported….Until race monger Barry became more nasty, producing the citation count in media cited by Gutfeld.
Now, assuming an even spread of race hostile organizations, were the the Charlottesville turnout for Unite the Right” protest in 2017 an indicator of swelling bigots? No.
I recall then calculating that the turnout in Charlottesville was about right, assuming protesters drove no more than 5-8 hours to be there, about one day’s driving distance. So, again, the hysteria is all vile theatrics of the rising Woke kind. Like with climate crisis, it was not vindicated by honest estimates and considerations.
This topic and discussion of the DOJs charging documents against the SPLC have exploded on the Right in the last few days, since Sunday. Meantime, the NYTimes “reports” on a rightside backlash against, for example, richly funded former NGO execs, who lost funding in USAID cuts last year.
My God, behold the river of tears!
the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) actually did decent work in the field of civil rights.
Did it? Was it ever anything but a grift and politicized? They were founded in 1971, after the main work of the civil rights movement had been done. They sued to force Alabama to reapportion its legislative districts.
They were suing the Klan by 1979. Did suing the Klan actually advance civil rights? In 1919 when the Klan was actually politically powerful, perhaps it might have, but by 1979? The Klan was perhaps a criminal organization, perhaps a terrorist one, but they were not politically powerful and had only a small number of members, not like in the 1920s when about 20% of Indianans were members and nationally they numbered in the millions. Suing them might have been a good thing, like suing the left-wing terrorist groups operating then would have been, but seems more like a criminal issue than a civil rights issue.
But the skinsuiting was done by Morris Dees in the 1980s; he was only original one left in the organization by 1986 when they stopped even pretending to be about civil rights. Dees was ousted in 2019 over “treatment of minority and female employees,” according to CNN.
I was too young to know what SPLC was up to in the 1970s, was it really civil rights or was it just the same stuff as now, and the 1970s national media was not going to be any more honest about it then they would anyway. (I do remember their work in the 1990s and it was the same kind of stuff they’ve been doing lately.) But I think it’s wise to start questioning whether these people and organizations who appear to “change” are really changing, or have they operated this way all along and we’re only now finding it out.
Burn that foul nest of criminals, seditionists and traitors to the ground.
Do you really think anything will happen to them? I don’t.
SHIREHOME,
I agree. I’m so tired of this crap being exposed and no one in jail, or other real consequences.
Yes, I think something will happen to them. The indictment apparently has damning evidence, and the trial will be in Alabama, not DC.
Who knew that the SPLC invented the self licking ice cream cone by repurposing (inverting) one of their favorite props!
Don’t make me draw a picture!
/\
/°°\KKK
$$ SPLC
\../
\/
@Niketas Choniates: They were suing the Klan by 1979. Did suing the Klan actually advance civil rights?
I’d say so. I grew up in the South and I knew people in the Klan. Sure, most of the heavy lifting was done by the Civil Rights movement and the general shift in the zeitgeist, including the South.
But suing the Klan out of business was a good thing to do and took some dangerous people off the streets.
Including my high school surfing buddy, who became a Green Beret, then went whole hog into the Klan and the paramilitary White Patriot Party. He was sentenced to prison for ten years for conspiring to buy a rocket launcher to blow up the SPLC headquarters.
Later he discovered that many members of the White Patriot Party were informants, including the head of the party.
Niketas:
Yes, in 1971 the SPLC was a law firm specializing in civil rights cases. There still was significant de facto segregation and true discrimination in the South. The SPLC hadn’t yet become a hate-labeling group.
One of its early cases was this, for example:
Or this one, which fought the government-funded involuntary sterilization (and without parental consent) of young (12 and 14) black girls who were mentally disabled.
By the way, I found those cases in about a minute of searching. I wasn’t following the work of the SPLC at the time, either. They probably did good work through much of the 1970s, or at least for their first few years.
huxley:
Fascinating.
@huxley:But suing the Klan out of business was a good thing to do and took some dangerous people off the streets.
But did it actually advance civil rights? Suppose your buddy had gone into the Weathermen or M19 or FALN instead, and conspired to blow up the Birmingham PD with a rocket launcher? Breaking up his organization and putting him in prison would have been a good thing, but no one would be claiming it advanced “civil rights”.
To me it looks like the SPLC came in after all the hard work was done, and best you can say is helped finish off a gravely weakened criminal organization. In the 1990s they ran the same playbook against the Aryan Nations in Idaho. Bad guys? Sure. Bad as the Klan in the 1970s? Not hardly. But nobody’s civil rights were being advanced in Northern Idaho thereby.
Aryan Nations
Deplorables put in the basket before their time. Weaponizing the Federal agencies with Slick Willie and Janet. For the greater good.
@neo:There still was significant de facto segregation and true discrimination in the South.
I’ll give them credit for the sterilization case, but not the YMCA. The YMCA case is part of the slippery slope that led to what happened to Masterpiece Cakeshop.
Agree or disagree, looks like we can give them like at most 10 years of actually doing any civil rights work.
ISTR at the time of Charlottesville trying to determine just how many of these threatening “far right racists” were actually in attendance, even before accounting for the fact many of them may have been plants, and never really finding out. Reminding me of another quote from Iowahawk, “covering stories, with a pillow”.
Niketas Choniates:
You’re so tiresome. I said upfront:
Sure, most of the heavy lifting was done by the Civil Rights movement and the general shift in the zeitgeist, including the South.
Putting the Klan out of business and my friend into prison underlined the message of Civil Rights in important ways.
Whether that satisfies your endless appetite for nitpicking is another matter.
huxley, just remember nik is never wrong and you’ll be fine.
@huxley: We agreed more than we disagreed. We don’t disagree that finishing off the Klan was a good thing; I actually said that before you did. We don’t disagree that the SPLC came in after the hard work for civil rights had all been done.
We might disagree about what finishing off the Klan had to do with civil rights. If you find it tiresome we need not explore it.
Niketas:
You are wrong about the Y. It was used by the city, in an actual agreement with the city, to avoid desegregation of public facilities.
Nor were those the only cases they took in their early days.
In 2019 I did a case study of how the SPLC’s guilt-by-association model worked: https://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/twentynine-three/tsc_29_3_nachman.pdf
I gather some people say we cannot really legislate away prejudice, but it appeared to me that by the time we had the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) [and let’s forget about the Great Society boondoggle] plus reasonable and stupid affirmative action (busing?), by the 1990’s the kids in the schools were pretty much multi racial friends, plus more and more women and blacks appeared in law, medicine, engineering, business leadership, sports, entertainment, etc. so that by 2007 we could well believe the issue was declining rapidly, if not yet totally gone and irrelevant. Then we had Obama and the rest is bad history about a racialist industry. Magnified by a Censorship Industrial Complex.
In the context of creating self licking NGO ice cream cones, previously we usually had mention of fraud, waste, and abuse in the $30B to $100B range, i.e., a small fraction of the total national budget. This SPLC thing, plus DOGE results and other related fraud disclosures, suggest quite a bit more might be uncovered. Anyone want to bet over $1000B?
How is it that someone could not (or did they?) sue the SPLC for deformation, at least to the point of disclosure and “show us your evidence or ST*Up”?? Wouldn’t fake or flawed evidence be fairly easily struck down?
@ R2L – the DOJ indictment is saturating the search page I use, but there is this one case.
Basically, the judge ruled against admitting the plaintiff’s projected sources of evidence, then dismissed the case because they had no evidence.
Hard to know if it is indicative of any others, but that sort of thing would certainly discourage filing defamation lawsuits.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/04/18/judge-shielded-splc-from-scrutiny-in-groundbreaking-defamation-case-appeal/
Given the “cancel culture” of the recent past (not yet ended, sadly), it would be as damaging to fight back as to give in.
Everyone knows that only racists claim they aren’t racist.
Regarding the reference to this not being a new investigation, I have read the fraudulently opened bank accounts mentioned by Neo were discovered by the bank or banks holding them around 2020, were investigated internally, and the bank confronted the SPLC which then closed the accounts. This activity was almost certainly reported to FinCEN but given the timing they probably just sat on the report rather than refer it to the DOJ.
I agree with Chuck, and as the Southern Criminal Lawfare Center has a Billion stashed away they can go on for a very long time. Bet those employees make very good salaries.
It NEVER did any ‘decent work’. It was founded by a direct-mail maven to con marks out of contributions. You gave money to the $PLC, and you contributed to Mrs. Morris Dees’ collection of odd knick knacks.
==
The most prominent case they ever brought was contra a descendent of Robert Shelton’s klan faction, whose members had kidnapped and murdered a youth ca. 1982. The net result of the case was that the assets of the organization – a quonset hut worth about $51,000 – were transferred to the youth’s mother. They hoovered up a seven digit sum in contributions to fight this case.
==
Exposes of Dees operation were appearing in metropolitan newspapers in Alabama as early as 1994 and 1995. Harper’s magazine published one around about 2000. That so many media figures and cancel culture operatives in commercial companies would cite the $PLC tells you that those people are pig ignorant or were using the $PLC’s defamatory circulars as an excuse.
It’s worth pointing out that the Charlottesville rally was originally an attempted experiment; one of the excuses for why the ratchet kept moving leftward was that the right never demonstrated publicly for their goals. So the Charlottesville organizers set up a protest against destroying physical, public history.
Naturally, within a week of it gaining traction the media was loudly claiming that the only reason someone could possibly be against destroying monuments to Confederate heroes is because one was a crypto-racist.
A week or two later the ‘Unite the Right’ messaging went out; at the time I (not particularly loudly) noted that they agreed with the media message, except that their problem with crypto-racists was the ‘crypto,’ not the ‘racist,’ and took the Charlottesville rally as everybody else coming out of the closet.
Then people were killed at the rally; the media had already bought into the ‘Unite the Right’ messaging, which made it easy to smear the entire right with those deaths. And prove the Charlottesville experiment a failure.
And now we know that the reason the racists agreed with the media leftists isn’t because they didn’t understand what the right was saying; it was because they were paid by the media leftists.
In one move they guaranteed a leftist monopoly on rallies of that sort while parleying the fallout further into elevating the SPLC into a sort of racism QUANGO.
The best posts from The Bee manage to skewer more than one leftist sacred cow at a time.
IYKYK
https://babylonbee.com/news/splc-says-funding-kkk-only-3-of-what-they-do
“SPLC Says Funding KKK Only 3% Of What They Do”