For decades now, the left has trusted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) above all entities, assuming it to be an unimpeachable bastion of righteousness. In all those years, no one — no one! — among our nation’s legions of intrepid journalists ever dared, or apparently even thought, to question the accuracy or honesty of the SPLC’s “hate group” listings. The SPLC was more infallible than the pope ever dreamed of being.
Now, however, the ongoing revelations of how desperately, shockingly, astoundingly corrupt the SPLC really was, the organization is dead in the water. There’s just one problem: it’s still alive. The Justice Department has indicted the SPLC and exposed its practice of funding racist and neo-Nazi groups, and then turning around and collecting donations by claiming to fight those very same racist and neo-Nazi groups. And new revelations on Tuesday show that the situation was even worse than that.
As PJ’s Catherine Salgado reported Tuesday, the SPLC “not only funded the KKK and other white supremacist groups in order to manufacture a racism crisis which it used to fundraise, but one of the group’s leaders allegedly channeled over $1 million to her neo-Nazi lover.”
An SPLC top dog’s neo-Nazi lover. Yes, it’s getting comical at this point, but there’s still a dark side: despite all these revelations, and the fact that no one is likely to take it seriously ever again, the SPLC still has hundreds of millions of dollars. Much more needs to be done to end the baneful influence of this sinister group.
For one thing, nothing has been done so far to roll back that influence. The popular X account “Insurrection Barbie” pointed out in April that the “SPLC’s hate map got hardwired into corporate America. Amazon’s AmazonSmile program used SPLC lists to exclude charities. PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon, Airbnb, Eventbrite, Mastercard, Visa many used SPLC classifications to deplatform people and organizations. Bezos later admitted to Congress that Amazon’s reliance on SPLC was ‘an imperfect system’ and that he’d ‘like a better source.’”
Bezos may have told Congress that the SPLC was “imperfect,” but he never stopped relying on it. He still does to this day. I know this from experience. Because the SPLC designated it a “hate group,” my organization, Jihad Watch, was banned from Amazon Smile years ago. That ban is still in place. Neither the SPLC nor Amazon allows any appeal of its sacred judgments.
And Amazon Smile was just the tip of the iceberg. Because the SPLC put me on its blacklist, I was also demonetized at YouTube and banned from PayPal, GoFundMe, and Mastercard, as well as Patreon, Zelle, and numerous other services. PayPal and Patreon relented after they heard from my attorneys. YouTube last year reversed itself without explanation. The others have remained impervious to all entreaties. GoFundMe is so vindictive that it doesn’t even allow me to donate to other people, as well as to receive donations myself. The SPLC’s hit pieces on me and my organization would show up at the top of all searches for my name and Jihad Watch, which led to an unknowable number of lost professional opportunities.
Pardon the sob story. I write about my own experience because it’s the only one I know in detail, but I am by no means the only victim of the SPLC. There are hundreds of us. Maybe thousands. And the SPLC has cost us untold amounts of money, as well as irreparable harm to our reputations and professional standing.
That’s what should be done with the SPLC’s money. Now that we know what a sham operation it was running, financing race hatred and then collecting money from leftist idiots to fight that race hatred, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s massive fraud on the American people should be ended. But that means much more than just that the SPLC should be forced to close, although that is certainly the first step.
Related: Embarrassment of the Week: ‘Islamophobic’ Killer Is Named… Yeah, You Guessed It
The organizations that defamed, deplatformed and denied service to law-abiding Americans on the basis of the SPLC’s defamation and smears should be penalized financially and made to reinstate the banned people to all denied services. The SPLC itself should be dissolved, and its assets divided up among those whose lives it endangered and whose careers it tried to destroy by branding them “hate group leaders.”
The SPLC has at least $787 million. Imagine how much different, and how much healthier, the country would be if pro-life, pro-Constitution, and pro-freedom (opposed to jihad violence and Sharia oppression) groups all got a boost from that. The left had a near-perfect money machine humming along until the second Trump administration, while patriotic groups are always struggling to stay afloat. Imagine if patriotic groups received a healthy infusion of the SPLC’s ill-gotten cash. America’s future as a free society would suddenly look a whole lot brighter.
