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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28177 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,

  • -12

I believe the SPLC leadership are hardcore anti-white racists funding anti-black/jewish racists to fundraise off that perceived threat, who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money to put on a racist kabuki theater while enriching themselves.

Of course, anti-white racism requires enough cognitive dissonance and luxury beliefs that it usually involves a fair bit of anti-black racism too, but that's generally subconscious.

I'd say the latter but it still feels pretty iffy if a group that's ostensibly trying to resolve issue A is funding issue A to make it look bigger than it actually is. If a firefighting charity is running around throwing petrol on things I think it's reasonable to ask questions

This does seems more like the defense that the SPLC will offer, than an accurate representation of the 'material misrepresentation' prong of the federal wire fraud law.

Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists

Do you believe that Jussie Smollet is actually a hard right racist who wants black people to be lynched on the street? Can you think of other reasons he may have paid some people to attack a black man on the street and put a noose on his neck?

Do you believe that Jussie Smollet is actually a hard right racist who wants black people to be lynched on the street? Can you think of other reasons he may have paid some people to attack a black man on the street and put a noose on his neck?

Yeah, I made a similar point to @Rov_Scam. The most likely motive, of course, is self-aggrandizement. So that there are (at least) three possibilities:

  1. SPLC is secretly a racist organization and it gave money to those various individuals to promote racism.

  2. SPLC is, as it says, against racism and decided in good faith that the best way to oppose racism was to put some prominent racists on its payroll.

  3. SPLC is primarily about making money and realized that it could improve its fundraising by secretly supporting the organizations it nominally opposes.

I think everyone would agree that (1) is not a realistic possibility. So the real question is whether it's (2) or (3). I think it's too early to tell for sure, but there does seem to be some indication that SPLC's motivations fall under (3).

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.

  • -11

It requires the government to prove that the SPLC created hate groups(which it kinda sounds like they did?) to pretend to fight. To a jury full of black people.

No. All it requires them to prove is that they paid these bad guys to make sure they were visible so that they could make money “fighting” them.

So you're saying that even if they did exactly what I said, they'll get away with it because black people will never believe this?

No, I'm saying that you aren't aware of the burden of proof your argument requires to stand up in court. The SPLC lists over 1300 hate groups on its website. For your theory to hold up you would have to be prepared to present evidence that somewhere between an overwhelming majority and all of them are figments of the SPLC's imagination and/or filled with SPLC plants, that the SPLC knew these were all fake, and that the SPLC deliberately sounded the alarm about this fake problem anyway because they wanted the money. It's not that black people would never believe this, it's that the only people stupid enough to actually believe this are whites who want to believe it for self-serving reasons.

  • -11

The SPLC lists over 1300 hate groups on its website.

Immigration Reform Law Institute

Federation for American Immigration Reform

Center for Family and Human Rights

Parents Defending Education

Constitutional Rights PAC

The Family Foundation

Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine

American Police Officer's Alliance

Eight is only a small fraction of 1300 but I don't want to get too gish-gallopy. I note that some fraction of what SPLC lists as hate groups are... similar organizations to the SPLC that they happen to disagree with! Funny how that works. Wish I could get paid to name all my enemies as hate groups, that's a helluva racket.

Now, that's not to deny groups like The Blood Tribe exist and are also listed (wonder if they got paid). They seem to be the kind of "hate group" and probably skinheads people actually think of, not just some lobby group that the SPLC disagrees with. But I had to go through multiple states to find them.

But that begs the question: what percent of the 1300 are "real" hate groups, and what percent are the SPLC doing this scumbag "we disagree so they're hateful" routine?

I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt after this little experiment.

edit:

looking at the site again they list

1,371 active hate and antigovernment groups

118 white nationalist groups

I would not be surprised if less than 150 of the groups they call "hate groups" total fit the colloquial definition of "hate group," and of that number it would be a smaller fraction that are actual problems.

Last time I checked the $PLC list of hate groups, a bunch of them turned out to be defunct, and a bunch of the ones that existed were random cranks with nothing to do with the issue they were supposedly beyond the pale on, they’re just weird about something tangentially related.

Uh, how many of those 'hate groups' are about race, vs completely unrelated issues that nobody really cares about because they're fringe? There's a lot of groups on the SPLC hate list which are, yes, real, but don't seem to hate anyone, including blacks(and blacks agree when they know these groups exist).

Ah, so if the SPLC only faked/supported ~700 of the hate groups, they're off the hook? That seems like a problem with the law.

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. You can say that they faked 700 groups, fine, but making up a fake hate group isn't a crime. The crime is that they made up the groups to convince people that hate groups were a problem when they weren't. What you now have to prove is that 300+ hate groups is effectively nothing.

I could label you a hate group. But if no one knows you, who cares. The argument is that the SPLC paid people to make sure the “hate” was visible. The openness is key for fundraising.

How much of their fundraising materials addressed hate groups they funded? At what percentage would you say “there’s a problem?”

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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