The Southern Poverty Law Center may not, we hope, be long for this world. The Trump administration’s new indictment has exposed the organization’s practice of funneling millions of dollars through fake bank accounts to “informants” sitting in senior positions at the very “hate groups” it claimed to monitor. Even if the SPLC survives, the criminal proceedings may leave it so damaged and exhausted that it sheds most of its influence.
Others have charted out the potential financial incentives behind the SPLC’s alleged misconduct: the demand for “hate” in America exceeds the supply, so to create sufficient far-right activity to keep donations flowing, the SPLC was perhaps ready to pay off the operatives it supposedly fought. The SPLC meanwhile contests any wrongdoing and maintains that its informant program saved lives and was known to the legal authorities.
It is important that we understand the real stakes of this battle. The fate of the SPLC is not merely a question of whether it has acted unlawfully. It is not a test of the left’s right to grift. Because the SPLC is more than just a grift, far more, and its need for far-right bogeymen isn’t just so it can keep neurotic Upper East Side housewives writing checks.
To focus only on this indictment undersells the immense damage the SPLC has done to the American republic, and the immense importance of bringing that damage to a halt. The truly noxious crime of the SPLC is not that it exaggerated the scale of “hate” in American life. Rather, it is that the SPLC conjured “hate” as some society-wide emergency in need of constant policing, and then exploited that fake emergency to silence political opponents, roll back American freedom and entrench a repugnant new caste system in American life.
The nonprofit silenced opponents, rolled back freedom and entrenched a repugnant new caste system
Approximately zero Americans live in serious fear that a “hate group” monitored by the SPLC will so much as make a public appearance in their lives, let alone cause any harm.
Their favorite target, the Ku Klux Klan, has been a non-factor in American politics for literally a century, since its costume-selling pyramid scheme collapsed along with its membership in the mid-1920s. When has anyone ever worried about buying a home in a neighborhood where the Klan flourishes, or genuinely feared an attack by the neofascist Patriot Front?
Even the SPLC’s own data has to tacitly admit this. If you visit the SPLC’s “hate map” at this very instant and scroll down, you will find a brief “by the numbers” section encapsulating the scope of American hate. The section lists 1,371 “active hate and antigovernment groups,” 118 “white nationalist groups” and – presented with apparent seriousness – 5,665 “white supremacist flyering incidents.” An organization with an $800 million endowment is warning the public about noxious paper flyers.
But that is what the SPLC is stuck with, if it wants a frightfully large number, because more significant “hate crimes” have a notable pattern of being made up. When actor Jussie Smollett paid two Nigerian bodybuilders to stage an attack on him in 2019, the SPLC amplified his hoax, claiming it fit a common pattern of whites preying on gay minorities. When the lie collapsed, Smollett became a national punchline and “hate crime hoax” finally entered the public lexicon. But in fact, hate crime hoaxes are common in America.
The SPLC’s cultural (not to mention fundraising) power peaked right after Donald Trump’s first election victory. In November 2016, the SPLC blasted out a report claiming that 867 “hateful harassment” incidents had occurred since his victory weeks earlier. The Associated Press, the Washington Post and CNN all dutifully amplified the claim. Few ever bothered to examine the SPLC’s source: unverified submissions to the organization’s tip line, and alleged crimes that often had no known perpetrator.
The specific incidents that emerged from that moment of national hysteria are instructive. A Muslim student at the University of Michigan claimed a drunken man threatened to light her hijab on fire – a story widely believed and widely spread, until she admitted fabricating it.
A Muslim teenager in New York said a gang of Trump supporters assaulted her on the subway while onlookers did nothing, received national headlines, then admitted she invented the story to avoid punishment from her parents for staying out too late.
Yet another Muslim teenager in Lafayette, Louisiana, reported that two white men (one in a convenient Trump hat) robbed her of her wallet and hijab while shouting slurs. It was, of course, another hoax.
Two Muslim women in a single month inventing nearly identical hate crimes, receiving national media coverage, and then being exposed as frauds, might all be chalked up to coincidence. Three doing it shows a pattern, reflecting a cultural incentive the SPLC and its ilk have been stoking for decades.
Hate crime hoaxes, it is worth saying, are not fake hate crimes. They are genuine ones: deliberate lies designed to malign an entire group of people and inspire collective hatred against them. In medieval Europe, false accusations that Jews had poisoned wells or killed Christian children inspired deadly pogroms. The modern hate hoax is the spiritual successor of those ancient smears. And thanks to the SPLC, the reliable target of hate hoaxes are white Americans, smeared over and over as violent racists lashing out at other groups.
The SPLC itself has long gotten in on these hateful smears. In 2022, for example, it published a report, “Rising Against Hate: AAPI community responds to racist attacks.” The subject of the article was a supposed surge of racist hate crimes targeting Asians due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The article lists three specific violent attacks as worthy of note: a woman fatally shoved in front of a subway car, an elderly woman punched hundreds of times in an unprovoked assault and a woman stalked home to her apartment and murdered.
All three of the perpetrators in those crimes were black. But in its telling, the SPLC goes out of its way to vilify whites: its article was listed under the heading “Dismantling White Supremacy,” and then-SPLC president Margaret Huang said the supposed explosion of anti-Asian hate was “part of a larger challenge of white supremacy.”
The SPLC’s agenda was not to curb hate, but to promote it, by casting white Americans as the villains in a morality play. By now, white Americans are well aware of the consequences of being America’s designated villains: deliberate discrimination in admissions, hiring, promotions and far more. Those who complain about such discrimination are, ironically enough, apt to be labeled as hateful extremists by the SPLC.
And that brings us to the main purpose of the SPLC’s operations. All of the group’s hate-mapping and group-counting and hoax-affirming is a facade to let the SPLC position itself as a credentialed anti-hate authority, so that it can then lump effective conservative opponents in with neo-Nazis and the Klan.
The SPLC’s agenda was not to curb hate, but to promote it, by fingering white Americans as the villains
When the SPLC labels Charlie Kirk a white supremacist and Turning Point USA an “anti-government extremist group,” it isn’t suffering from oversensitivity or excessive enthusiasm. It’s fulfilling its raison d’être. The word “hate,” as the SPLC deploys it, would be more honestly rendered as “heresy.” What the group actually polices is ideological dissent from current left-wing orthodoxy, with a longer-term goal of making such dissent difficult or impossible.
It ought to be a basic American right to access a bank account and a credit card, absent fraudulent or criminal behavior. For most of this country’s history, that was the norm. The SPLC has worked methodically to change it. After the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, the SPLC led the campaign pressuring PayPal to ban individuals and groups connected to the rally.
After January 6, the SPLC was a central player in pressuring Amazon, Apple and Google to deplatform Parler, a free-speech social media platform, because some participants in the Capitol riot had used it. The logic was transparent: whatever the First Amendment might say, no social media company should be permitted to exist without ideological speech controls shaped by the SPLC’s own political preferences. Needless to say, the SPLC has campaigned hard to have right-wing accounts banned from X, YouTube and every other platform of note.
The indictment alleges that the SPLC lied to its donors and profited through donations by secretly promoting its enemies. If the Trump administration can prove that charge and destroy it with that indictment alone, it should be celebrated. But this endeavor is not worthy because it is stamping out what seems to be a clever donation scam. It is worthy because it is high time we destroyed the organization that has become America’s richest and most formidable hate group.
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