A grand jury on April 21 indicted leftist “anti-hate” activist organization the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of perpetrating a massive fraud against its donors. From 2014 to 2023, the Justice Department alleges the SPLC steered more than $3 million in donor money to prop up the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups while presenting them as a growing threat – and Scott Walter, president of watchdog organization Capital Research Center – spoke with Liberty Nation News to explain how.
Capital Research Center has extensively documented the Southern Poverty Law Center and the many dark money leftist networks that operate within its orbit. You can read the dossier on the SPLC from CRC’s Influence Watch website here.
Joe Schaeffer: Today we have a special guest, Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, one of the leading watchdog groups in Washington, DC, covering this dark money, foundations, philanthropies [nexus]. And we’re talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center today, a group that they are very familiar with.
Hello Scott. Thanks very much for joining us.
Scott Walter: Great to be with you, Joe.
JS: My first question is to kind of define our terms here. I’ve heard, the SPLC, well, they’re not really an NGO, but they act like one. Well, actually they are an NGO. Is the Southern Poverty Law Center an NGO? And why does it matter?
SW: Well, originally the term NGO just meant anything that was neither a business nor government. Nowadays in common use it’s often used to describe groups that are getting money from the government or are working very tightly with the government. The SPLC doesn’t particularly get government money, but it definitely colludes with government agencies, especially the Department of Justice and the FBI, where the SPLC is trying to have its hate list, which, you know, claims to identify really bad actors out there, used for prosecutions or for other downgradings of groups’ respectability or ability even to function. And some of the groups on their hate list are really nasty. They’re, you know, genuine neo-Nazis and crazy fringe people like that. But, in recent years, they’ve started adding just mainstream Christian groups, mainstream conservative groups, and smearing these completely legitimate actors, whether you agree with them or not.
JS: Now, NGOs are sort of considered quasi-governmental. Would you call the SPLC quasi-governmental at one time?
SW: Well, as I said, they feed information to prosecutors, investigators with the government in hopes that the folks that they’re giving the information on will be prosecuted or at least investigated. And in some cases, you know, if it’s a skinhead motorcycle club gang that’s trying to hurt, you know, Jews or something, well, obviously that’s rotten....
[Amazon Smile had a program where] you could donate a bit of the revenue going to Amazon thanks to you to a charity of your choice. Well, except that Amazon wouldn’t let you give it to that charity if the SPLC had hate-listed it. Or sometimes you’d even have banks or donor-advised funds and whatnot refusing to allow monies to go to somebody on the hate list. And given how many people on the hate list didn’t deserve to be there, that was a serious issue.
JS: So they were able to use then this quasi-authority, this reputation, this cache that they got to present themselves as an authority like you said, presenting information to prosecutors and so forth. Isn’t that a core component of what they’re accused of in the indictment? You can’t get away with that kind of alleged fraud without having that reputation as a credentialed authority in the first place.
SW: Well, their undeserved reputation is definitely part of the Justice Department’s recent indictment. The technical charges are about the money flows, so wire fraud and that sort of thing where they claimed that they were combating all these really bad groups. But as the Justice Department discovered, in fact, they were propping up some of the genuinely nasty groups.
A great example is the National Alliance. They gave over a million dollars to the leader of the group. Now the problem is they gave that money from 2014 to 2023 even though their own reporting indicated that it was, and I quote, “moribund,” which is a fancy word for dead, beginning in 2009. Then they reported again in 2016 that it almost got a big cash infusion. But the SPLC had stopped that and it remained moribund and because that $200,000 didn’t make its way to the to the crazies, they did not get resurrected. What do you get resurrected from? The dead.
So clearly this group that had virtually no money, virtually no members, you know, did it have a history of saying grotesque things? Yes. But was it actually a threat from 2009 until today? No. And yet they gave over a million dollars to one of its leaders and the Justice Department essentially said that’s effectively fraud. You’re going and telling people that you’re protecting them from bad guys and it’s actually a lie. You’re giving money to bad guys and you know that those bad guys are not actually threats.
SPLC – Fighting Hate, or Spreading It?
JS: And we know the Biden administration, the FBI at that time, used the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource. Investigating the traditional Catholic groups, they leaned more than once on SPLC information to go after those citizens, those private citizens. So again, it’s not like – they get the veneer of respectability like an ACLU or an Amnesty International and then they get to use this radical activist group with an agenda to go after political opponents.
SW: That’s right. You know, it’s appalling that they would do that to traditional Catholics or, you know, traditional Protestants, traditional Jews, whatever. And another one on this, they put on their hate list Moms for Liberty and another parents group, the group called Defending Education. Those are wonderful groups. They’re made up of absolutely salt of the earth moms and dads who are understandably worried about their kids’ education, but are not exactly gonna be burning crosses in somebody’s lawn or lynching anybody. I mean, it’s preposterous. And yet they’re put on the hate list.
By the way, also put on the hate list was Turning Point USA. And Charlie Kirk, God rest his soul, when he and his group were put on the list, he warned there are real-life consequences to smearing somebody by calling them a hate group. And he pointed to a shooting that had occurred at another group on the hate list from a shooter, crazy shooter, who literally told the police, “I targeted this group because it was on the hate list.”
JS: Yeah. And so you guys are sort of the experts on the dark money network. We know that it’s got vast influence throughout America and the West. Is this a, do you think – I don’t want you to give a subjective answer – but is this an effective way to dismantle it? Criminal indictments going after this organization, and could it possibly lead to more criminal indictments of other people in the network?
SW: Well, it’s certainly possible if the other folks were aware of what the SPLC was doing. I’m not sure that that’s the case. The other thing is on the one hand you’re right to point out that this can be a way to weaken bad actors, because you know the SPLC was invented to take out the Ku Klux Klan starting around 1970, and they used lawsuits to bankrupt all the big Klan groups, which, by the way, that was a good thing. If they’d just shut down after that they’d have a happy memory and a happy history.
So, it’s reasonable to go after folks who are genuinely doing bad things, but in the case of the SPLC, I just have to warn you, they have around three quarters of a billion dollars in their bank account because they were so good at scaring lefties into writing them checks off of junk mail. So, it’s not easy to bankrupt or take down a three quarters of a billion-dollar operation.
JS: Well, Morris Dees, their original founder, is in the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. If you’re looking to take a target that can always be regenerated, hate’s a pretty good target. It can be loosely defined and you can go anywhere with it and you can always ask for donations. It’s a human condition that’s never going away.
SW: You’re right. There definitely will always be people who hate and at this point any goofball who can just set himself up with a simple URL and a website and say hateful things, you know that’s great, and they can protect you from him, even though in fact he hasn't left his mom's basement in the last five years.
JS: Yeah, it’s a tree that can always be shaken is the way I see it. Real quick, we got about a minute. People are following it in the headlines and the news. If there was one thing you could tell people that they’re not getting from just the mainstream news accounts on this about the Southern Poverty Law Center, what would it be?
SW: Well, honestly I think the most important thing is the part that I pointed out a second ago. The National Alliance, which, that’s a genuinely nasty, ugly thing. It’s just not very big and scary. But it was a genuinely rotten, despicable group that deserved to be criticized. And it is the group that got the most of these monies. Its leader, I should say, got the largest amount of money that the Justice Department has found. And yet it was a completely dead group. So when the media parrots what the SPLC is now saying, “Oh, our informants were protecting people from big dangerous things.” No, that’s a complete lie. You were just making sure that the leader of the group kept the lights on so you could continue to scare people because the group had said nasty things even though now it has virtually no money, virtually no members.... The Washington Examiner had a great story on that by Robert Schmad, who put all those pieces together.
JS: Yeah. So I mean, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars that they were able to benefit from by keeping these sort of groups alive, as you say. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Walter. I appreciate it. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, top watchdog if you want to look into these dark money groups and what they’re doing behind the scenes today. Thank you, sir.
SW: Thank you.
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