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Let's get into it:
A superseding indictment has been released in the federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the details of how the storied non-profit drummed up hate in order to keep taking donations to fight that same hate are seriously shocking. They funded KKK cross burnings. The funders of the organizer of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. They paid to bring extremists to that rally. The SPLC was founded to fight for civil rights but it ended up funding racist and extremist activities.
Starting in the 1980s, the indictment reveals, the SPLC began recruiting informants. Nothing too crazy about that. But by the time 2010 rolled around, the relationship between the informants and the SPLC had changed substantially and the SPLC was no longer just gathering information but funding hateful activities. "Between in or about 2010 through in or about 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million dollars in tax-exempt donor funds" to field sources, informants, who used that money to:
Attend extremist group rallies across the country; host extremist group rallies throughout the country; grow existing chapters of extremist groups; create new chapters of extremist groups; recruit new individuals into extremist groups; make donations to extremist group leaders; purchase materials for cross burnings; purchase materials to make Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods; create racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies; publish extremist literature used in the recruiting of more members; and pay every day living expenses, which allowed the field source to focus on their extremist groups rather than seeking other employment.
The SPLC paid for KKK cross burnings and enabled extremists to pursue their extremism full-time. It is reasonable to believe that plenty of people who could not afford to be part of extremist activities would not be part of them were it not for the funding of the SPLC. In the meantime, the SPLC was going out and using the existence of these very same groups to justify their own existence and to get donors to pay them to fight it.
The SPLC was funding the hate they took money to fight. The indictment alleges that "the SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities. These activities were of the same nature as the activities about which the SPLC published articles on its website and other forums in an effort to obtain donations."
The SPLC took in hundreds of millions of dollars during this time period, all while lying to donors about the true use of their money. The SPLC made up businesses and funneled money through them to extremists. They used their money to fund the National Alliance, literally neo-Nazis. They funneled money to extremists to break into extremist headquarters and steal documents, then they wrote about those ill-gotten documents on their website, and used their report to get more donations.
One SPLC staffer was actually romantically involved with an extremist. They lived together and used donor money to fund their lifestyle. At one point, a field source who was leading the Nationalist Socialist Party of America, aka Nazis, reached out to the SPLC for help not being a Nazi anymore. Instead of helping the person get out of it, the SPLC paid them to stay in it, thereby facilitating a person staying in an extremist lifestyle when they no longer wanted to be part of it. And they used that person's activities to gain more donations from people who wanted the extremism to stop.
And that wasn't the only individual who tried to get out of the extremist life by asking the SPLC for help only to have the group turn around, pay them to stay in it, and then fundraise off their extremism, all while calling them hateful and racist for the donors' benefit.
The thing that is so crazy to me is that you could present all this information to a leftist and they wouldn't believe you, they would do whatever acrobatic balancing act they needed to in order to uphold their own narrative that the SPLC is good, that Trump is bad, and all the rest. But the indictment is shocking. It notes that one field source "was not involved in an extremist organization before [they] reached out to the SPLC seeking employment." They were instructed to make racist posts and to help plan the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Publicly, the SPLC said they were against it.
There was not enough hate to keep the SPLC in business to they had to create it.
Libby