MIKE DAVIS: Southern Poverty Law Center: A tale of a racism scam
Since the 1970s, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has characterized itself as an organization that combats extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). This week, because of an indictment that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel secured through stellar leadership, we learned that SPLC wasn’t fighting the Klan — but funding it using generous donations from people who thought they were helping fight racism.
James Alex Fields, a White supremacist, ran over and killed a Jewish woman named Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Following the attack, the SPLC doubled its income, using the event to fundraise and claiming it needed more money to combat racism. Yet, thanks to the indictment, we learned that SPLC allegedly paid people to attend the rally and provided transportation.
The rally also spawned the "very fine people" hoax. Left-wing critics falsely claimed that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people." In reality, the president said that there are very fine people on both sides of the debate over removing statues of historical figures like Gen. Robert E. Lee.
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Following the discourse, former President Joe Biden asserted that the Charlottesville event spurred him to run for the presidency in 2020, and even served as the vehicle for Biden's "Soul of America" campaign theme.
The SPLC is also accused of paying people to post racist materials on online forums, fueling racial hatred. The organization sold its donors a bill of goods, doing exactly the opposite of what it promised.
Over a decade, millions of dollars in donations to SPLC went to hate groups like the Klan and Aryan affiliates. According to the indictment, the SPLC funneled this money through fictitious groups such as "Fox Photography" to mask the true source of the donations. In addition to donor fraud, the SPLC is also accused of lying to banks about its transactions.
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This indictment is profoundly important because the SPLC has played a significant role in American politics, especially in recent decades. The group labeled others as "extremists" and "hate groups," and government agencies like the FBI relied on those designations.
That is why the FBI began investigating Moms for Liberty, a group of concerned mothers who attended school board meetings and voiced objections to parts of school curricula. Thanks to the SPLC, the FBI investigated the group as a potential domestic terrorist organization.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray absurdly said that White supremacy was the biggest domestic threat — a claim SPLC instigated.
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Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk were also labeled by the group as "extremists" just months before a deranged leftist assassinated Kirk.
The SPLC gave the same designation to mainstream groups like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The ADF has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, along with federal and state courts, hundreds of times to protect Americans' constitutional freedoms. Yet, according to the SPLC, the ADF is in the same league as the Klan — a group the SPLC allegedly funded.
While raking in donations from some of the largest corporations in the world — including Apple, JPMorgan and MGM Resorts — the SPLC sought to deplatform and debank people and groups it deemed "extremists."
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The SPLC met with PayPal as part of its debanking efforts and urged Amazon not to sell conservative books. The SPLC also participated in social media censorship on platforms like Twitter before Elon Musk's acquisition, urging Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to ban those with views the SPLC disagreed with.
The group targeted advertisers for conservative shows, branding Fox News' Laura Ingraham "the high priestess of hate." Ingraham has had a distinguished media and legal career, having clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court. The SPLC attempted to destroy Ingraham because she represented a threat by articulating the case for conservatism.
If the indictment is accurate, the SPLC was running one of the biggest cons in American history. To secure donations, the SPLC fomented racial division because not enough genuine division existed.
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In reality, America has made such enormous strides toward equality that SPLC had to fund a fabrication to convince people the nation is racist. The SPLC must be held accountable, not only for donor fraud, but for the far more serious offense of poisoning American public discourse.
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The SPLC led Americans to believe racism was prevalent when, according to the indictment, the SPLC was causing much of the problem. Blanche and Patel heroically exposed the scam, and a superseding indictment hopefully will follow.
SPLC executives must pay a severe legal price for this monstrosity, which, in addition to the alleged massive donor and bank fraud, has done incalculable damage to public discourse.
The indictment is a wonderful start on the road to accountability, and people must go to prison for this unconscionable charade.