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.