Rarely has a scandal caused such a thorough re-examination of major events over an entire decade as the one now engulfing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The criminal charges pending against the far-left organization for rampant fraud are noxious enough. But while the allegations are more than enough to take down the entire organization, what is far more significant is how SPLC’s alleged criminal activities so heavily influenced an incident that has become a monument in the left’s crusade to fundamentally transform America.
Reversing the Curse
SPLC was indicted on April 21 on federal fraud charges, with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche alleging that the group illegally raised millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations. The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting. The 11-count indictment for wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering charges that more than $3 million was paid to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other far-right extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said. The group countered by arguing that the program was used to monitor threats of violence and collect information that was frequently shared with local and federal law enforcement.
So, which is it? Was SPLC paying to expose the inner workings of extremist groups, or fueling the fires of racial hatred? A single allegation, if proven true, effectively answers the question. The federal indictment charges that SPLC officials supervised the posting of racially charged messages and helped organize and provide transportation for the participants in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. That would remove any lingering doubt about their motives and expose SPLC’s rationale as not just untrue but, worse, the opposite of the truth.
A World Without the Southern Poverty Law Center
Now, step back for a moment and consider the cascading consequences of Charlottesville, after which the howling haters on the left led the nation to believe that far-right extremism was the most grave threat facing the nation. It produced the “very fine people” hoax, which, despite his specific condemnation of the extremists at the rally, was used as hard evidence that Donald Trump and his ilk are irredeemably racist. Gullible Joe Biden took the spin at face value and claimed he was not planning to run for president in 2020 but changed his mind because of Charlottesville. So, no Unite the Right rally, no Joe Biden, and history is reshaped.
Other than sweeping statements from the Biden administration about the threat of white nationalism and the like, there is little evidence to back up the claim. In fact, such an assertion has become patently absurd in the wake of three attempts to assassinate Trump. In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League, no friend of the right, reported on the most prominent face of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, specifically its Loyal White Knights, which it describes as "the largest and the most active Klan group in the country with approximately 100 members." Total KKK membership is estimated at between 3,000 and 6,000 individuals nationwide. In a country of 340 million people, that is minuscule and exponentially lower than in the KKK’s heyday a century ago when its members numbered in the millions.
We know this much: SPLC funding in the months following Charlottesville increased dramatically. In 2016, SPLC’s net assets were $51 million; by October 2017, that figure had grown to $133 million. Fundraising off tragedies is a disturbingly common practice in politics, but it is especially odious when the people rattling the tin cup are engaging in jiujitsu of the most odious variety.
But most infuriating is that the sins of SPLC were visited upon the nation for years following Charlottesville. An atmosphere of race-based acrimony swept the land, manufactured by the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center and carried forward into the George Floyd affair and the Biden era, when the 46th president shamelessly inflamed racial tensions to the breaking point. It is an era most Americans would rather forget, and now we know what so many had suspected all along, that it was all built on a tissue of lies.
