Busted! Feds Charge SPLC With Funding Klansmen, Neo-Nazis
Without loud and visible racists, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would cease to exist. Is that why it allegedly subsidized them so heavily for so long?
A federal case brought by the Justice Department against the SPLC accuses the group of paying millions of dollars to prominent racists. The indictment notes that the group paid the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the leader of the National Socialist Party of America, and the president of the American Front.
The feds allege that the group set up bank accounts for fictitious entities to pay racists with funds difficult to trace back to the SPLC, such as on “loaded,” prepaid cards. Apart from this deception, the indictment highlights the group’s pledge to its donors to “dismantle” racist organizations at the same time it bankrolled those working for them with millions of dollars. It traces $3 million in donor funds put into the pockets of various haters over the course of a decade.
The specific charges in the 11-count indictment pertain to wire fraud, money laundering, and false statements to a federally insured bank. A Montgomery, Alabama, grand jury returned the indictment.
The most jarring paragraph of the 14-page document comes on the fourth page.
“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” it reads. “F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”
Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterprotester, died in Charlottesville. The SPLC not only funded an organizer who transported protesters there, according to the Department of Justice, but it also oversaw his “racist postings.”
Setting up agents provocateur does not amount to anything new among left-wing groups.
Matthew Dallek revealed a “previously undisclosed counterintelligence operation waged by the ADL to infiltrate and dig up damaging information about the John Birch Society” in his book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. It resembles the SPLC program in terms of both tactics and in its duration, which extended from the late 1950s into at least the early 1970s. The methods used by the Anti-Defamation League included assets who joined white supremacist groups while posing as Birchers and who attempted to goad JBS leaders into issuing racist declarations.
“They obtained chapter membership lists, ran credit reports on individual Birchers, ferreted out their employment records, traced their financial transactions, wrote down their license plate numbers, obtained a codicil to a Bircher donor’s will, stumped them with tough questions during call-in radio shows, set up a Birch chapter meeting on false pretenses so an ADL target could be ‘interviewed,’ and studied their personal and professional associations,” Dallek wrote in his 2022 book. “Some of the scariest or most unflattering bits ended up in the press.”
Unlike hate groups infiltrated by the SPLC, the John Birch Society did not advocate racism or antisemitism but merely an outlook contrary to the leftism prevalent at the ADL. Dallek, however, reveals no financial windfall for Birchers from the ADL (perhaps the ADL windfall came in the tiny and unintentional validation of the organization’s conspiratorial tone). And that amounts to part of the outrage here, that the feds say the SPLC bankrolled — allegedly a million dollars in one case — all sorts of vile individuals.
The Justice Department has already won its case against the SPLC. Possibly, the SPLC successfully defends the wire fraud, false statements, and money laundering charges in a court of law. In the court of public opinion, the Southern Poverty Law Center just lost all of its credibility.
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