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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9692 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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...What SPLC is accused of doing, though, doesn't fit into any of these categories, and there's no clear violation of nonprofit law. What the indictment accuses them of is fraudulently soliciting donations by using the funds in a manner that is inconsistent with the mission statement as it appears on their website. If what they are accused of doing is a matter for Federal criminal charges, then practically every nonprofit in the country should be charged, mostly for stuff that is entirely unobjectionable.

Consider the following fictional example: The Allegheny Trails Alliance is a nonprofit whose advertised mission is to support trail maintenance and construction on public lands in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They donate $10,000 in unrestricted funds to support a trail construction project in Garret State Forest in Western Maryland, which is outside of their technical operating area but is frequented by the same people who frequent trails in PA and WV. Is this wire fraud? What if they pay a contractor to perform invasive species removal at a state park where they have a maintenance contract? Is this wire fraud because it isn't directly related to trail construction or maintenance?

Inconsistent is one thing and I can see how there is wiggle room in the definition. But what they are being accused of is not just inconsistency with the mission statement, it is doing stuff directly opposed to the mission statement and directly opposed to what they said the money would be used for. From the indictment:

The Southern Poverty Law Center's ("SPLC") stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. The SPLC's paid informants ("field sources") engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

Here is I think the strongest example of the SPLC doing the exact opposite of what they claim to do:

F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC website contained an "Extremist File" webpage for F-30 from which the SPLC solicited donations. Between 2014 and 2016, the SPLC secretly paid F30 more than $70,000.00. This overlapped the time period in which F-30 was featured on the SPLC's "Extremist File" webpage.

If the SPLC specifically opposes this guy, and solicit donations on the basis do they really get to just turn around and give him $70k? That seems to be the exact opposite of opposing him, no?

Or to ask in terms of your Allegheny Trails Alliance example - if ATA had instead secretly donated that $10,000 to "Mr. No Trail Maintenance Ever" would your answer to "is this wire fraud" still be no? Even when the ATA explicitly told its donors "Donate to us to stop Mr. No Trail Maintenance Ever", who then went on to oppose trail maintenance according to the ATA? Because that seems to me to be closer to the story in the case of F-30, like this was not simply doing something slightly outside of their scope as in your example.

I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups? Or do you think this was all part of a weird, hare-brained scheme to achieve some ostensibly left wing goal? If you seriously believe that it's the former, and the government can prove that it's the former, then yes, I will agree with you and say that there is at least a decent case for fraud here. But if it's the latter, then it's just a group of people who used questionable tactics and bad judgment,

I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups?

I think they correctly assessed that the various white supremacist orgs posed little to no actual threat, but that their activity directly benefited SPLC through driving donations and strengthened political advocacy for the policies SPLC preferred.

I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups?

No, they're straight-up grifters who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and spending it both to create a problem and fight it.

If that's what you think, fine, but it means that the government's case requires them to prove that hate groups aren't a problem. To an Alabama jury that's likely to have more than a few black people on it.

I'm confused. "led the National Socialist Party of America" is a direct quote from the indictment, but Wiki claims that literally describes only two guys, neither of whom seems to fit the rest of the description. Did some other organization take the same name after (or before) the first one disbanded? Is this a People's Front of Anti-Judea vs Anti-Judean People's Front thing?

For any present "director of a faction" of some hate group or other, I'd have said opsec might be a mitigating factor here. If the SPLC lists in its "Extremist Files" the leaders of factions A, B, C, and E, then they pretty much have to list their mole in faction D too, or they risk having to list his successor after an untimely murder later. But these indictment entries are saying things like "led", "the Imperial Wizard", and "National President", and they distinguish those from cases like "the former chairman" and "the former director of a faction", which suggests that these were singular-leader roles during the period of the SPLC payments. Even if they've found themselves stuck metaphorically riding a tiger they can't safely dismount, it seems pretty damning to pay someone who's in that position as a mere "field source". "What is your hate group doing tomorrow?" "Same old: whatever I tell them to." At that point at least feed the poor bastard some de-escalatory suggestions.

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