Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed
Welcome to my favorite news story of the year. I’ll let Tyler O’Neil from the Daily Signal do the dirty work here:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has raised money for decades claiming to dismantle white supremacy, but it funneled millions of dollars to white nationalist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, according to a federal indictment handed down Tuesday.
The SPLC claims it was funding informants inside the extremist groups.
While the SPLC “purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference that “the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”
Blanche highlighted one example from the indictment, where the SPLC paid a member of the leadership group that planned the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
O’Neil has been wearing out the SPLC within the pages of the Daily Signal for a couple of years now. He deserves a lot of credit for exposing that organization for what it is.
Namely, perhaps the most shameless, defamatory criminal syndicate ever to run the long con on the American polity.
Everything about the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least in this century, has constituted a conspiracy against the public for ideological fun and profit. It’s an organization that was initially staffed up to fight the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, or more to the point it was staffed up to raise money purportedly to take up that cause.
Except the Ku Klux Klan’s influence in Alabama was already on the wane in 1971 when Julian Bond, Joseph J. Levin, Jr., and Morris Dees started the SPLC. Within a decade, it was an irrelevant organization as to its stated purpose — fighting white supremacists who were keeping black people down in the South.
White supremacists haven’t had the power to do that to black people in the south for half a century. Truth be told, it’s mostly been black Democrat politicians, and northern white Democrat politicians, all of whom have assured us of the importance and relevance of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who’ve been most effective in immiserating the black community.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t useful.
The Democrats have used the SPLC as a catchall organization for smearing people they disagree with as “extremists,” racists, bigots and cranks. They elevated Dees into some sort of public watchdog protecting civil discourse in this country while he was putting out periodic enemies lists of people and organizations to be shunned by people of good faith. And, for this work, the SPLC was lavishly funded.
The list of people smeared by the Southern Poverty Law Center is a who’s-who not of racists but people the Democrat Party doesn’t like.
They were put forth as the arbiters of “hate” in American politics. Every news organization wishing to drop hit pieces on conservative politicians, media people, and organizations — Moms For Liberty, a school choice group with a reasonably tame agenda, is a perfect example of a recent SPLC victim — relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s stamp of disapproval in order to cover the Right in defamatory dung.
None of this works if the public can’t be sold on the presence of an anti-American political threat from the Right, though. If there are no redneck Hitlers in waiting to scare ordinary Americans straight, then the narrative and the smear begin to fall flat.
And that’s why the SPLC spent more than $3 million paying grifters to play-act as “white supremacist” leaders. Without “informants,” which is the cover story for this long-running fraudulent campaign, there would be no raison d’etre for an obsolete organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and certainly no justification for affording them the credibility to judge who’s a Nazi and who isn’t.
Especially when the Democrats have, since 2009, insisted that it was white supremacist rednecks in the red counties across America who represented the greatest terror threat. Not Antifa communists or transgendered lunatics or Islamist jihadis, who commit actual terrorism with nearly banal regularity, but instead neo-Nazi Neanderthals nobody seems to be able to find.
Unless Christopher Wray’s FBI ginned them up, that is. Like, for example, when FBI informants cooked up a fake plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer at the height of the COVID panic and ensnared a few local dunces into a heap of legal trouble along with some splashy headlines.
And the SPLC was in on that gag.
We now know that the Charlottesville debacle of 2017, in which a legitimate protest by regular Americans who thought it was terrible to defenestrate historical landmarks was hijacked by something called the Unite The Right into a tiki-torch-carrying neo-Nazi vigil which led to a riot resulting in injuries and at least one death, was funded at least in part by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That was money invested with some real ROI; when President Trump spoke about Charlottesville and attempted to differentiate between the statue defenders and the neo-Nazis, the SPLC’s media pals played dumb and accused him of defending the Nazis. It was a coup aimed at derailing some of Trump’s growing support in minority communities, and it worked, at least for a while.
Was the SPLC involved in stoking the disturbances at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Seems like the money didn’t miss it by much, if at all.
How much of the rise of Nick Fuentes and other unacceptable types attributed to the American Right (though Fuentes is hardly a reliable conservative voice; increasingly, it’s something akin to political diaper rash emanating from his podcast pie-hole) came out of the SPLC’s bank accounts?
Now that the grand jury has decided this is perhaps actionable at law with that indictment in Alabama, perhaps we’ll find out.
In the meantime, I’ll be satisfied to know that finally, somebody is willing to do something about one of the most egregious grifts of the century. Let’s call this a very true expression of social justice, if not actual justice on the way.
READ MORE by Scott McKay:
Mitch Landrieu, Low-Functioning Political Vampire