WASHINGTON, DC- The punch line literally writes itself. After years of accusing conservative groups of fomenting violent extremism, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been indicted in federal court, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made the announcement, accusing the far-left extremist nonprofit of paying members of so-called right-wing extremist groups, The New York Post reported.
The nonprofit (the IRS should examine that status) was charged in an 11-count indictment filed in an Alabama federal court and is accused of paying at least $3 million to eight members of the far-right groups. Fox News Digital reported that the charges include six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, Blanche announced.
The SPLC claims it fights so-called white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement, with the alleged goal of dismantling such groups. Tuesday’s indictment seems to indicate that the SPLC, in fact, helped support these groups.
In one case, the SPLC paid roughly $270,000 to a member of the group that planned the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, an incident that resulted in the death of one person, injured dozens more, and which Joe Biden claimed spurred him to run for president.
Blanch added that between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight people, at least three who were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, the Nationalist Socialist Party of America Nazis, and the American Front, Fox News Digital reported.
“It was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing, not dismantling extremism, but funding it to carry out this scheme,” Blanche continued. “SPLC created bank accounts in the name of at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose.”
“The SPLC is a nonprofit that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups,” Blanche told reporters.
“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
FBI Director Kash Patel called the scheme a “widespread, decade-long, multi-million dollar fraud” that was concealed through a “banking network.”
Patel said the SPLC “fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups.”
“The money was passed from SPLC to one sham account, to a second sham account, and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups,” Blanche said. “This was designed to shield the source of those funds, and because of this, SPLC is also charged with one count, as I said earlier, of conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
“They set up shell companies and entities around America so that the financial institutions that we rely on as everyday Americans were deceived in believing that money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center in the perpetration of this scheme and fraud, but rather fictitious entities,” Patel said. “They stood up to perpetuate this ongoing fraud. This is a serious and egregious violation of a group that purported to dismantle violent extremist groups, but in turn actually only fueled that hatred.”
One group targeted for a hit piece was Turning Point, USA. In its roundup of “2024 Year in Hate & Extremism,” the SPLC accused Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point, of embracing “a white nationalist conspiracy theory while celebrating then-President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation.”
That referred to the “replacement theory,” which accuses Democrats of embracing mass illegal immigration to secure voters for themselves. Democrats have indeed embraced that theory by actions if not by name, although some have admitted they need more illegal aliens in order to expand the census and therefore keep their House seats.
Now we know that the SPLC appears to have done nothing but perpetrate a con game on innocent (or naive) liberals.
As expected, the SPLC denied the allegations.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC–an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” interim CEO and president Bryan Fair said in a statement, The Hill reported.
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