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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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This is not a Quality Contribution.

This is a Quality Contribution. You really ought to just read the whole thing and maybe not even bother reading my comment.

Patrick McKenzie, if you don't know, knows a lot about financial infrastructure and its interaction with tech, regulatory, and human systems. He routinely shares his knowledge in mostly accessible form online. He is also one of the few authors where I would be shocked if I learned that he used LLMs in his written work. When I read him, he often plays incredibly subtly, almost understating his point, often making me have to think again to see if think he's making the implication I think he might be making. His writing is quite unique in my mind. The linked post is his sizable contribution to the conversation about the SLPC indictment.

When the indictment came out, I didn't really say much. I didn't have a lot of specific expertise on the legal case. I was generally suspicious of how one could draw proper lines around the idea of 'donor fraud', where non-profits are defrauding donors who usually give money to non-profits without any strings attached.1 I upvoted @Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right. However, I now (only with the benefit of hindsight of McKenzie's post) think it may have taken a bit too much of a gloss over the bank fraud charge.

McKenzie is very serious about the bank fraud charge. He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government. He recounts how incredibly easy it seems to be for the government to routinely win on these cases. I don't know that I have a good summary of this; again, you kind of should just read it. He seems to think that basically any lie to a bank will do (a single piece of paper or a single word, he says), and he goes on at length about the extensive record-keeping done by banks and how these systems allow both internal-to-banks investigators and external regulators to easily find the documents or communications to make such charges a done deal. He gives a plethora of examples of actual people going to prison for these exact charges to make his case.

He then turns to what may be more important for the broader Culture War. Sure, lots of conservatives are vaguely annoyed with the SPLC, but even if they get brought up on charges, how much does that really change in the world? He lays out the technical means by which banks evaluate their customers and their transactions. Some of this might be known to people who were already steeped in this portion of the Culture War, but I hadn't really realized until he laid it all out. Sure, I knew of stuff like OFAC, where the Treasury will give a list of foreigners/entities that US banks are prohibited from dealing with, and sure, they pay close attention to that list and scrutinize their customers/transactions accordingly. But they also use all sorts of other 'data products' to screen out potentially 'problematic' customers/transactions. One of the most widely used was developed by the SPLC, which if you're one of those conservatives who were vaguely annoyed by the SPLC but didn't know this already, get ready for your blood to boil.

Admittedly, as he points out, much of this was actually public information. I just never had it laid out in one place, in a way that really made it sink in what was going on.

Not just banks, but all kind of other tech/finance companies, including regular companies who have employer matching contributions to non-profits, use lists like those generated by SPLC, to filter who they transact with. They want to tell regulators that they take steps not to transact with The Bad People, and how else can they feasibly do that other than to just use the SPLC list? In one of those 'public, but I didn't really know about it/internalize it' moments, he talks about how Amazon used the SPLC list, and how Jeff Bezos talked about it in public Congressional testimony:

Jeff Bezos, in Congressional testimony, describing Amazon's reliance on the SPLC data product for AmazonSmiles, a now-discontinued charitable product they offered:

"We use the Southern Poverty Law Center data to say which charities are extremist organizations. We also use the U.S. Foreign Asset Office [sic] to do the same thing.”

Bezos was interrupted before he could finish his next thought; you're welcome to read the testimony for full context. He is clearly referring to the OFAC SDN list.

Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)

Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.

Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.

Why? We’ll return to it in a minute.

[Me here: returning to it after a minute]

Well, remember, when you bought the data product, you were also buying someone anticipating your concerns before you even voice them and preparing options before you ask. Jeff Bezos’ words echo in San Francisco today: Does anyone know another option?

[Me here: returning to it after another minute]

About a month later 15 Republican lawmakers wrote Bezos a letter, saying:

Amazon’s ongoing reliance on the SPLC, with its documented anti-conservative track record, reinforces allegations that Big Tech is biased against conservatives and censors conservative views.

The letter did not contain a recommendation for an alternative data product.

What's next is what may be the biggest impact of the SPLC indictment. Not some guys from some non-profit, no matter how influential, going to prison. Instead:

Now, a quiz: do you think Compliance at a bank is neutral on “Can the bank delegate transaction-level decisioning authority, in any part of the business, however small, to an entity under federal indictment for bank fraud? Does the answer change if they are convicted of bank fraud?”

No! Compliance will not let you do that! Not because they are worried about the integrity of the blacklist. An accused bank fraudster has the final say to approve money movement out of a regulated financial institution. That is very likely intolerable to Compliance.

That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.

His post goes on.

He describes an alliance of non-profits, organized by SPLC, that he describes as having engaged in an extremely lengthy campaign to pressure companies. He describes the mechanics of how their pressure campaign worked, how they burrowed themselves into the policies and workings of many companies. Again, I find it hard to summarize, and you should read, but his persistent theme is to imply that these folks were claiming to be non-partisan in this non-profit work, but building an extensive case that they were clearly targeting partisan targets, and their entire operation dried up after their partisan targets seemed to be no longer a target.

In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan. Of course, non-profit law is not McKenzie's specialty, so others closer to that world will have to chime in. But it seems to me that he's clearly indicating that he thinks it's plausible, perhaps likely, and if The Powers That Be haven't thought of it yet they probably should, for the gov't to continue going after various folks who were involved in this.

1 - For, uh, reasons, I am aware that people can and do attach strings to donations plenty of times. Moreover, I'm aware that from the non-profit's perspective, this can be quite annoying unless they've already chosen to build boxes for those particular strings (e.g., "We have a 'X Fund', and donations marked as going to the X Fund will be used in the X Fund"). In fact, my sense is that plenty of non-profits will simply refuse donations that try to attach additional strings that they don't already have boxes for.

Thanks for the link, this is enlightening in a not very joyful way.

Frankly, this reads like a description from an industry insider who tries to be neutral and cover the viewpoints of many sides. I will provisionally update on it, it seems unlikely that someone would spend that amount of time on spinning a counterfactual narrative with that little potential for mass attention. It also feels plausible given what little I know from the finance industry and what my guess of SJ aims and methods are.

Nor is it AI, not with:

The statement explained its concern was that failing to censor Trump, in a non-partisan manner of course, would result in voter suppression, via a causational pathway that the margin of the statement may have been too small to contain.

Color of Change’s Robinson was interviewed by Hillary Clinton on her podcast You and Me Both in March 2021. You and Me Both is available on major podcast platforms through iHeartRadio. Readers may recognize Clinton from other work.

Believing the 2016 election had been tainted due to Russian interference was a left-coalition signifier—much as believing Trump actually won 2020 became a right-coalition signifier later. Neither of these views has the evidentiary strength the coalitions claim for them. But they aren’t claims advanced to achieve understanding; they are advanced to achieve alignment and, through it, power.

Amen.

More of McKenzie's dry, subtle humor:

The term of art in industry for the person responsible for the interpretation of a document is the “owner” of that document. Accepting this term of art, many professionals in the industry would agree that if the coalition doesn’t understand themselves to own the policies, it’s tough to guess where they think they should be on the stakeholder-analysis form. “Consulted” doesn’t get to say the owner has blood on their hands after a decision.

On the SPLC ironically lobbying for laws forcing banks to report on NGOs:

Given that this reporting regime is mandatory, on the face of it, if a respected civil rights organization makes a payment to an individual responsible for violence, harassment, and/or terrorism, facilitators would have an immediate reporting requirement. That seems to carry the risk of reporting on the actions of an NGO to a potentially hostile government. That government could be the current one or a future one, because governments have been known to keep written records and employ personnel who serve across generations.

Personally, I hate pretty much everything about the system he describes.

Allowing private businesses discretion over whom to conduct business with is good only if the market is working well enough to compensate individual decisions, and there is no systemic force which provides incentives not to work with some groups. If you have (for whatever reason) a monopoly on some good people need, like shoes or air transport or internet access, then I prefer if the state mitigates the impact of that monopoly by limiting your discretion in choosing customers.

Of course, the banking system is even worse than that, because it is tightly regulated by the USG, and the regulators have a lot of leeway:

If “get on their good side” converges with “not get one’s license to do business revoked” then there is not much daylight between that model and tech’s own.

Basically, if someone were to found a bank specifically for debanked people (excepting the OFAC list), like Nazi orgs or porn producers (though I think there the problem is more credit cards, specifically), they would not get rich by filling a niche left open by the system. Instead, the regulator would crack down on them hard at the first opportunity, and the executives would be lucky to escape with their freedom. "How could I have known that this porn producer would pay an underage porn actor with a fake ID from the bank account" -- "You could just have refused their account proactively, like the rest of the industry".

In a free society, it should be possible for the CEO of a non-criminal business to insult the president without the president shutting down their business in retaliation.

Of course, the potential for selective enforcement is not just to retaliate against banks which allow outgroups to have accounts. Consider:

“By the way, lying to a bank is a crime. It doesn’t matter what you think while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter why you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sinner or a saint. It doesn’t matter if it is a big lie or a little lie. It doesn’t matter if the bank believes you. Lying to a bank is a crime. And everything you say to a bank will be recorded for decades. It will be routinely forwarded directly to law enforcement if the forward-deployed intelligence analysts we force the bank to hire believe there is even a tiny chance law enforcement will find it useful.”

This seems completely fucked up. If your lie is material in gaining a loan from a bank which you then default on, then I agree that it is reasonable to criminally prosecute you for defrauding the bank. In most cases, this will probably involve forged documents (so you are on the hook for that, which should carry a higher penalty), because when you e.g. apply for a mortgage, the bank is hardly going to take your word when you claim you own some property.

I do not particularly like money laundering, and agree that it is useful to have laws on the books against it to make it harder for criminals to spend their ill-gotten gains. However, McKenzie certainly makes it sound like 18 USC 1344 also applies to people using banking services normally while lying to a bank:

They incorporated North Dimension, a shell entity. Some shells have legitimate business purposes; this one existed only to deceive. North Dimension filled out a due diligence questionnaire. SBF signed it. It said North Dimension traded on its own account and did not handle customer funds.

You need two bits of evidence to convict SBF of bank fraud. The first fits on one page of paper held by one bank. The second is the answer to a single question: “Did at least one dollar of customer funds flow into the North Dimension account?”

Crazy if true (which I have little reason to doubt). Reading the statue, it seems very plain that a dealer who parks his ill-gotten gains in a bank account (after having affirmed to the bank that it is not illegal funds) and later withdraws them again was not what the legislature had in mind when they wrote it. Heck, I would rather argue for either "2A only applies to its era's firearms" or "2A applies to nukes" than "1344 includes victimless fraud", because either of the first two seems much more solid than the last one.

The overall gist I get is the old 'everyone commits five felonies a day', and the USG gets to pick whom they prosecute.

Also, it seems like for the SPLC, they die by the very same sword they lived by.

Patrick McKenzie, if you don't know, knows a lot about financial infrastructure and its interaction with tech, regulatory, and human systems.

I know him mostly as the guy who sanewashes debanking, explaining how various obviously political moves are clearly required by the nonpartisan and impartial rules of the banking system. And in the very same article notes how the government had used those rules for barely-plausibly-deniable political action before. So I think he's not a reliable source.

Especially since it seems now he's Noticing that debanking didn't ever work that way.

The SPLC case is clearly political. Everything about the SPLC case is political. It's quite possible, even likely, that they committed various violations; we are in the situation where everyone relevant is a violator and the only question is who is to be prosecuted. The details of the crimes don't matter much either; the outcome of the case will be decided by politically motivated judges and prosecutors. And unless a miracle occurs, either the SPLC will be back in the drivers seat or its principals will simply spin up an SPLD which will magically inherit all the resources and goodwill of the SPLC but none of the crimes.

And unless a miracle occurs, either the SPLC will be back in the drivers seat or its principals will simply spin up an SPLD which will magically inherit all the resources and goodwill of the SPLC but none of the crimes.

I don't think this is likely. The SPLC had a long history of goodwill, running back to the legitimate civil rights era sainted by so many in the American mainstream. A new organization will not have that long anchor of sanity, it will be a woke organization from the opening shot.

Moreover, I don't really have a valuable opinion on the charges themselves as law, I have a simple layman's opinion on them: they're weird. If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

Based on my experiences elsewhere, I do not think our intuitions match that of the kinds of people that actually donate to the SPLC, or at least there's a vocal contingent of indeterminate number that will happily pay for them to do whatever crazy thing they want.

The SPLC's actions were already political. Live by the sword, die by the sword. This is not like the debanking cases where the people being debanked only interacted with the financial system because they have no choice; the SPLC abused the financial system for political purposes, so being the recipient of some of that is just karma.

The bank fraud section sounds a lot like Matt Levine when Levine claims everything is Securities Fraud. Maybe patio11 is going to become the everything is Bank Fraud guy.

"Everything is bank fraud" is a lot less troublesome than "everything is securities fraud" in that bank fraud still requires the same specific steps (a false statement of fact, made to a bank, under circumstances where you can convince a jury that it was intentional) that it always did. People don't usually do that unless either they are committing fraud or there is some other underlying wrongdoing they are trying to conceal.* Whereas securities fraud lawsuits have been brought based on innocent behaviour including true-but-potentially-misleading public statements, omissions, and honest managerial incompetence. On the other hand, "everything is bank fraud" is more dangerous because bank fraud is a crime whereas securities fraud is civil.

So the real argument about "everything is bank fraud" is

  • On the plus side, it makes complex white-collar cases easier to bring and therefore allows serious criminals who would otherwise skate on Chewbacca defenses to be convicted.
  • On the minus side, it turns a lot of non-criminal (like paying hush money to a hooker) or less-criminal (like small-time tax evasion) wrongdoing into federal crimes with a 30-year statutory maximum sentence because you lie to the bank about it.

There are two other practices which make this worse in practice:

  • Prosecutors pushing cases (both to poorly represented defendants and to the media and public) based on cumulating statutory maximum sentences across multiple counts, when the actual sentence will be a single sentence in line with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (and the guideline sentence for a first offence of bank fraud is probation unless the loss to the bank exceeds $15k).
  • The fact that "fraud-for-housing" (lying on a loan application to get a loan you wouldn't otherwise qualify for, but do make a good-faith effort to repay) is almost never prosecuted unless there is a quick default (in which case it looks much more like "fraud-for-profit" where someone is planning to abscond with the loan money) - even if there is an eventual default with a crystallised loss to the bank. So some types of fraud-for-housing (like the occupancy misrepresentation Letitia James was charged with) become common behaviour and are magnets for selective prosecution.

* I don't know why Trump systematically and spectacularly lied about the value (and even the square footage) of his personally-owned real estate in the case that led to the Letitia James lawsuit given that both the Trump Org and the banks insist that it didn't affect the credit decision, but normal businesses absolutely do not do this - partly because it is a crime.

Reading that it surprised me how much SPLC had by getting themselves attached to some financial plumbing. It almost feels like a true dictatorship had stepped in. If you control funding and access to the online world then perhaps that is absolute power today. We don’t have church groups or the neighborhood pub anymore. If it’s banned online then maybe that’s game over. I always thought SPLC (and the ADL) were just bloggers. I didn’t know they essentially had the fingers in the piping.

Did Trump and Musks save the world? Trump for being insane and getting sued a gazillion times and then getting shot in his head and he kept coming. Musks because he bought Twitter and freed one of the algos.

To me it’s not surprising guys like Catturd popped up now. You had to be an old stubborn bastard to have survived the days and probably unemployable. For the rest of my days I think I’m just going to be a stubborn bastard because there are some unknown powers moving the string.

If the Trump/Musks axis didn’t form I am not sure what saves us. The right didn’t know how to play these games. Now the right has some unbreakable institutional control. Larry Ellison has begun making his own machine. The left turning on Israel if they had still occurred is the only block that may have been able to build a media ecosystem. Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished. It’s quite possible though that internal enough people were getting pissed off at the SPLC game that it was bound to collapse under its own weight. Zuck never struck me as someone big on censorship.

Did we need great men or was this all going to collapse on itself due to being deeply against our notions of American culture.

I trust McKenzies tone because he vibes as a lefty. So if they pissed him off and the whole censorship state then I’m guessing many on the left were looking to get off that ship.

I guess I feel safe for the rest of my life. Musks seems to have his own values and plenty of no-fucks given. I think the average mind is based when exposed to it. So as long as Twitter is free we are safe.

Also never ever talk to the FBI. Lying to a fed is the easiest way for them to nab you.

Why do you say Musks instead of Musk?

Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished.

Remember that about half of the Patrick McKenzie article is about an attempt by the SPLC and allies to debank conservatives which failed. See for example this post where he points out that you can tell that there have not been large-scale debankings for conservative political speech because rich Republicans still pay for their lunches in DC using Chase Sapphire Preferred.

There were three sets of contacts between the SPLC and the banks discussed in the article:

  1. Maintenance of a blacklist of extremist nonprofits that various donation platforms used to deny service. McKenzie points out that this blacklist was not widely used to deny basic banking services, because the culture that it is banking does not (and to a first approximation never did) outsource its conscience to the SPLC in the same way that the culture that is nonprofit fundraising did (and probably still does). In so far as the article contains criticism of how SPLC maintained the list, it is that it was underinclusive of extremist organisations that the SPLC found sympathetic (like left-coded terrorist orgs), not that it was overinclusive of mainstream right-wing voices.
  2. Fraudulently opening bank accounts in the names of straw orgs in order to pay off the informants used to maintain (1)
  3. Mostly after the foundation of Change the Terms in 2018, an explicit pressure campaign to kick specific MAGA voices (including the Trump campaign) off the internet, including pressure to debank them. This wasn't done using an electronic blacklist, it involved a series of FTF meetings between activists and bank employees. What was said at those meetings was a combination of "if you don't do what we say, you are a bad person and should feel bad, in particular because you personally will have contributed to black people being murdered by extremists" and "if you don't do what we say, we will call you racist on the internet".

McKenzie is carefully vague about the extent to which (3) succeeded - even more so re. banks than re. big social media platforms. But if there had been widespread debankings after January 6th in response to SPLC pressure, or even with no need for SPLC pressure in the climate that existed in early January 2021, he could have said so. What he says is that there were widespread social media bans, and that some bank accounts that were set up specifically to fundraise for the insurrectionists were closed. If you compare what he says about the post-Jan 6th environment in the US to what he says about the debankings in response to the Canadian trucker convoy, the logical reading is that McKenzie does not think there was a Canada-style debanking of conservatives after Jan 6th, but is not willing to explicitly claim it didn't happen because of the difficulty in verifying a negative.

I'm not going to claim that this was a storm in a teacup. Some bad things happened, and some similar bad things did not happened. Everything in the latest SPLC expose is consistent with the picture in McKenzie's first debanking post, which is that "Americans were denied access to core banking services based on right-wing political speech" is one of the things that didn't.

The world where a coalition of anti-freeze peach leftists controlled bank compliance departments in the way they controlled Silicon Valley Trust & Safety departments looks very different to the one we lived in.

He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government.

The root issue here seems to be too much government power; give me six lines written by an honest man etc. It always starts out unobjectionable: of course we want to be able to battle terrorists/drug cartels/child pornography rings. But once the tool is established, its scope of use expands to things that I find unobjectionable (in this case, I have no deep objection to private organizations investigating other private organizations).

And ultimately it ends in endless lawfare, with whoever is in power deploying those tools against their enemies: and everyone is guilty of something, so any complaints can be met with "the law is the law," and defendants can only respond with weak arguments and accusations of hypocrisy. It is, of course, rich for Democrats to complain about this, but it's nevertheless an unfortunate situation.

Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)

Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.

Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.

If we assume that the situation is as the author describes it, do you consider this an acceptable state of affairs?

It is clearly objectionable that the NGO Blob got to decide who gets deplatformed and debanked. But ultimately it's just another form of the old cancel culture debate. The Blob could not deploy real legal consequences on tech/financial infrastructure companies; its weapon was naming and shaming. Thus its power derived from cultural cachet, from when the SPLC successfully destroyed various actual honest to god KKK groups. The general cultural backlash has sapped its power; presumably that's why their activities in this vein appear to have stopped several years ago and haven't restarted even with Trump 2.

The Blob could not deploy real legal consequences on tech/financial infrastructure companies; its weapon was naming and shaming.

I'm very far from certain that's actually the case. I... don't get fintech, but Patio11 regularly points to the regulatory compliance importance of "reasonable controls" as something that an actual hard mandate that has serious actual legal ramifications. "Reputational risk" was an example of that ramification, and so was Operation Choke Point, and so were certain bank pause letters and NCOSE, and it's a hard pattern to unsee.

There's not a law in the legal formalist sense that you could point to a specific statute, but there is one in the sense that the FDIC's personnel might point at a line and shake their heads in a closed-door meeting.

If you take that Straussian reading, it explains a lot of the gaps in the story - both why random banker bigwigs would take meetings from nobodies with big mouths from the SLPC, and more importantly why SLPC advocates would even want them rather than see them as getting gladhandled; why the data product was specifically something for sale and not just a nice website; why so much of the naming-and-shaming gets massive fanfare for audiences that are double- or single-digits scale.

The trouble's that it's nearly-unprovable and entirely-nonfalsifiable.

It is clearly objectionable that the NGO Blob got to decide who gets deplatformed and debanked. But ultimately it's just another form of the old cancel culture debate.

I agree, but I think there's another factor in play, which is that there is a tendency for concentrations of social/financial capital to get captured by the Left. Whether it's universities, advocacy organizations, charitable foundations, news organizations, media conglomerates, churches, etc. there's this Leftist meme-virus-like thing which keeps trying (often successfully) to invade and subvert/divert the organization's resources into promoting the Left.

I'm not sure this phenomenon applies exactly to the SPLC, since it was always kind of a Leftist organization, but I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.

I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.

Their hatewatch list includes such threatening and violent organizations as the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and a bunch of immigration reform think-tanks in DC.

They are entirely generic progressive Omnicause organization. As it has been for a while, the demand for anti-black racism outstrips supply, so they have to generate their own and expand "hate."

As well as a large number of ‘hate groups’ which are not groups, or which haven’t been active in 20 years, etc.

It’s worth noting that this is not new for the $PLC- they listed thé family research council back when gay marriage was not even particularly popular, let alone the law of the land, to say nothing of groups whose positions they couldn’t even point to.

Yes; or, at least, a situation that's to be remedied with other means than government action. It's within the rights of a private organization to want to outsource a blacklist to a third party, and the motivation is sympathetic in many cases. If I run a company, I don't want to be on the news for matching an employee donation to NAMBLA (nor do I want to fund it), but I don't want to spend time or resources collecting a comprehensive list of objectionable organizations.

There's something of a wrinkle here: the kind of progressive blob that the SPLC inhabits and thrives in is itself a creation of the state, and in a world with spherical cows, we wouldn't have that. But that's not going away anytime soon, so its outsized (and overall pernicious) influence is a bullet I'm willing to bite.

I mean the answer to that news story is ‘we run an employee donation matching service and do not know what NAMBLA is’, because normal people generally don’t.

In any case thé knights of Columbus also runs a ‘hateful charities blacklist’, you could probably borrow theirs that lists Aryan nations but not the family research council.

I'm kind of surprised the Knights of Columbus aren't themselves on a "hateful blacklist".

The knights of Columbus are a Fortune 500 company with no reliance on external funding and strong ties to the powers that be, because practicing Catholics are overrepresented in the elites and functionally all male practicing Catholics are members. This makes labeling them a hate group both A) pointless and B) risky.

The $PLC’s ‘radical traditional Catholic’ hate category is indeed full of groups which are not hateful, and those which are not groups, alongside a small number of deranged conspiracy theorists like the dimond brothers’ monastery. But it doesn’t address the knights of Columbus.

This is not a Quality Contribution.

This is a Quality Contribution. You really ought to just read the whole thing and maybe not even bother reading my comment.

Rov actually posted to this website and argues on this website. Patrick does not.

Also, complaining that someone's post was recognized as a QC when you don't think it deserved to be is churlish. Disagree privately and move on. I certainly don't think every QC is quality, but you don't see me complaining about them.

ControlsFreak specifically recognizes RovScam's argument and post as a QC:

I upvoted Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right.

I think the introduction is meant to be self-deprecating: ControlsFreak does not feel his own post is a QC, and that ControlsFreak is only linking to a QC-grade comment that happened offsite.

This is correct. My comment is mostly trash; it's a pointer to something interesting with just enough summary to put it in context and get over the top-level comment barrier. Rov_Scam's is good. McKenzie's is good.

That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.

I'm not sure that's the high note, either. Patio11's famously Straussian, and there's a lot of his writing that's focused on stuff after that fact or separate from it. Sometimes that's just him being what he calls a 'dangerous professional' (fintech guy, not Bond villain), but other times it's so he can plant seeds to say 'I told you so' without risking defamation or being clearly wrong.

(I don't trust him, even if I appreciate his expertise.)

The question is where that goes. He's talking compliance rules as if they're something written down in steel, but Itch.io (a company using MacKenzie's own Stripe) still owes Vintage Story 300k+. These aren't rules written in steel even well outside of culture war. There's some clear 'oh, you all do a bunch of the illegal stuff', but at this point it's not even clear that the ultra-clear-cut 'you lied on this form with real clear evidence strict liability' will get anywhere, or that if it does go anywhere, will even get the guy who did it in jail.

Will anyone be able to tell if every compliance officer on the planet decides to just make an exception?

(caveat: I did ask an LLM, though I don't think it gave any useful answers and did not use it to write out this post.)

In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan.

Which is weird, because non-profit law doesn't require you to be non-partisan in the colloquial sense: as he spells out, the rule is against acting "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office". The second shoe here drops when the IRS joins the ring with a steel chair and pulls charitable org status.

... does that happen? Enforcement of the Johnson amendment has long been more in the than in the breach, and both the Trump 1 and Biden admin's loosened it. The IRS has not, historically, been very happy to beckon to a conservative's call, and that's only been augmented by the Obama-era cuts trying to hammer them for bad past actions. What makes it change, here?

Reminded me of Scott's "Freedom on the Centralized Web". It's easy to say that private companies are under no obligation to host your conservative blog and can kick you off whenever they please. But if there isn't a robust ecosystem of competing firms, Amazon refusing to host certain kinds of political content (or payment processors refusing to process transactions for certain kinds of organisation) amounts to de facto total censorship.

Ok, but what’s to stop thé SPLC from handing it’s list off to some other foundation?

The list itself is not as important as the SPLC's stamp of approval on it. The SPLC had a positive reputation on the political spectrum from all but the most extreme leftists down to the center right, covering most people who are within the Overton window, and certainly a majority of decision makers in the tech and financial sectors. To these people, they were credible as a non-partisan subject matter expert on what is a hate group or related. Of course, to people deeply aware of the culture war they were obviously a player in it, but there's still a shocking amount of people unaware of the culture war. Or who don't recognize it as a war between two sides with legit grievances, but only as a one-sided "my side who is obviously right" vs "uninformed, stupid and/or evil people". Using their data product for automated checks made sense. Anyone else, or the SPLC itself going forward if it survives this, is going to have a harder time laundering political interference as a non-partisan service. Certainly they'll face more scrutiny.

The reputation of the SPLC does not matter. The left can and does spin up new organizations all the time which are treated by the media and thus by all concerned as if they were absolutely credible experts. If the SPLC falls, they will simply spin up a new organization with some generic sounding name that will have the same reputation as the SPLC but none of its legal liabilities.

The list itself isn't very useful; not only is it public information, the vast majority of organizations are defunct, meaninglessly small, or so-clearly-legitimate than the SPLC couldn't meaningfully use it against them. There's some Schelling point value in having the list, but as Journolist demonstrated, you can build Schelling points fast.

I think Patio11's trying to motion around where this list itself is a legal risk, at least to the organizations involved here. I just can't tell whether that's actually the case, or him wishcasting.

50-odd years of legitimacy are difficult to hand off.

Whether or not that matters in practice probably varies by industry.

Its detailed in the linked article, but what the SPLC actually "sells" to its donors is the ability to do a massive, coordinated pressure/harrassment (depending on your outlook) campaign against noncompliant institutions that results in reputational damage that can be priced very highly.

So in some sense, it doesnt even matter if the SPLC is convicted, the mere fact that they now have the "potentially fraudulent" label hanging on them means compliance departments not only do not have to, but are arguable legally barred from, having contact with them in the way they used to operate. So the SPLC as a political operative NGO is basically dead in the water.

Also, not sure how they are going to weasel out of their CEO directly admitting to bank fraud in official communications, so as a going concern as well they seem to be in a lot of trouble.

So they basically ran the same playbook as AIPAC? Neither has crazy high funding - though SPLC more than I knew - but they were extremely good at targeting a few firms. AIPAC would chop off anyone who didn’t fund Israel.

If Mackenzie is right then the facts will scare the hoes Compliance enough to never again directly inject the SPLC agenda into the system, but there's got to be more than one way for the SPLC and friends to skin the cat. There's at least $700m reasons why the dangers of racism aren't going anywhere.

What are the chances this is wrapped up with a bow before a January 2029 inauguration? Even if the DOJ's prosecution wanted to move fast it seems possible this case remains in pre-trial come a Democrat's potential inauguration. Withdraw the prosecution at that point without a viable alternative for anti-racist quasi-regulator -- which Jeff Bezos keeps nervously asking about -- and it's probably back to business. What does MacKenzie think is going to happen when Joe "Thousand Year Reich" Smith makes the headlines in 2030? The regulators, politicians, and financial organs are not going to determine the money must flow simply because there's no more credible SPLC.

Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.

A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

To the extent I personally have policy preferences, I prefer the orderly administration of law. Any law we would not be willing to enforce against a sympathetic lawbreaker, a friend, or an ally is a bad law. Until a bad law is changed, it is the law. I reject a legal realism, or legal cynicism, that says that power is the only law.

The Declaration of Independence and D.C. billboards agree: No one is above the rules. We have no kings in this country.

Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?

Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.

I don’t think anyone else can run this playbook again. It worked because most firms were looking to play ball so they would only need to get a few renegade scalps. Without everyone else playing ball then there are too many renegades to target at one time.

And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.

That they had the guts to use the name "Center Investigative Agency" for one of their alleged shell cracks me up.

I wonder if that's deliberate for the purposes of paying people to rat - confusing/frightening them into thinking it's a legitimate government op.

Never mind that I'm pretty sure internal is supposed to be FBI's territory, but I doubt any of the people they were going after were the sort to be familiar with three-letter-agency jurisdictional conflicts.

It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

One of the major issues for aware independents/neutrals is that while Blues are doing this while they are in power, can Reds offer any evidence that they wouldn't do the same? The Reds clearly had the power in the 1980s and used it to do pretty much the same thing the Blues are doing now. They used the federal government to write laws to ban behaviors that they felt were morally incorrect, to punish organizations in the outgroup. Is there any evidence that the Red tribe has learn the bitter lesson? Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class of authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

What did the Reds do in the 1980’s? Is this the war on drugs or banning some swearing? I guess we had LATAM commie death squads but that seemed like both sides were down.

Moral Majority. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the anti-conservative/anti-religious reaction today by the progressives is due to generational trauma inflicted by overzealous authoritarianism by the moral majority. Notice how most of it is not economic leftism but cultural leftism, the moral majority was authoritarian cultural rightism.

The moral majority also made a lot of people from Boomers to Millennials, incapable of even conceiving of the left as authoritarian. Gen Z having never experienced it seems a lot more comfortable pushing back against woke excess.

I wonder if its incapability or if has just created such a psychological scar that they perpetually view themselves as the underdog. A lot of ink has been spilled on the weird prog belief, that even as they control much of the establishment, they still genuinely see themselves as the underdog fighting the system. Part of that is undoubtedly the revolutionary marxism, but I wonder how much of it is scarring from the moral majority?

Yeah I predict Gen Z having experienced a decade+ of Leftwing Authoritarianism will swing rightward in the cultural direction while also being leftwing/populist in the economic direction as a direct consequence of their upbringing.

I guess I agree with the policies they want. But do you actually think they are the same as what we saw 2014-2024? Sure they did politics. And I could see how someone would find them annoying. But SPLC would basically ban you from the internet, maybe take away your job. Annoying family value rallies just doesn’t seem like the same thing.

I mean the internet didn't exist in the 70s and 80s. Considering the Moral Majority engaged in cancel culture at a similar levels as the Woke/SJW, I imagine, if it did exist the Moral Majority would have wasted no time in cancelling you on the internet. The Moral Majority did try to take away your job...

The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.

There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

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Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

Obviously, which is why the most liberal times in American history come when either Blue is busy destroying Red institutions, or vice versa (or there's an economic boom which distracts everyone; you can't deploy cancel culture lists when people [and in particular cities] are so desperate for workers it doesn't matter at all what their political persuasion is).

Once one side starts consolidating things get bad, which is why 2014-2024 in particular were especially fucked.

This is why independents are the way they are: it's more about Noticing when one side is starting to accumulate enough power to pull this off, and [trying their best] to deal with them. And whether that best is good enough or not generally depends more on economic factors than anything else.

I think this is an interesting thought. Like a trace that economic need/prosperity requires cooperation among a larger subsection of the populace, but once a threshold is achieved, the luxury beliefs of intra-tribal warfare resurges until at which point all the economic surplus is consumed starting the cycle over again.

Of course we would, there's no constituency for classical liberalism. But ask yourself- do you prefer school prayer, or school secret gender transitions?

I view them as equal levels of bullshit. The fact that you think one is worse than the other is the point. You think the Red's way is the lesser of two evils.

You don't think one is worse than the other?

I understand you aren't a big fan of prayer in public schools, and probably not Christianity more generally. But if one is an atheist, then following along politely with the Our Father once per day is not a big ask, not in the way that 'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

The difference is that underage gender transition will only affect a vanishingly small proportion of the underage population, while school prayer affects everyone. There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

and what your own kids are forced to do

Ah, but [my kids] are forced to affirm a lie (as in, that a man magically becomes a woman because he donned fake breasts and cut his penis off), in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as it is for State religions. The school will punish them for blasphemy misgendering if they do not.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

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There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.

Much of the worry about the school gender crap is precisely worry about what your own kids are being groomed to do.

To be clear you are clearly biasing the framing towards your viewpoint.

To me you asked me:

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to give a little Sig Heil in the morning and have the school teach them why being gay, crippled, jewish, romani, black, not white and straight is evil and should be killed for the betterment of the community

Or

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to recite the communist manifesto and have the school teach them why being a dirty selfish capitalist is the root of all evil in the world, and if they don't share everything or report on people, including their parents, to the state then they are anti-revolutionary and thus evil.

long politely with the Our Father once per day

Yes a polite Sig Heil is not a big ask.

'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

Have you tried not oppressively forcing your child to adhere to evil capitalist notions that people are not all inherently created equally?

Your conception of the prayer vs gender pronouns is hysterically biased. It's never just a polite "oh father" just like its never just a polite "please use they/them". Give an inch and everyone takes a mile.

In practice we kinda do know what religion in schools looks like(and it’s not the handmaid’s tale)Christian schools are a dime a dozen.

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Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.

It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history.

Which is why we must never rest on our laurels and assume that liberalism has decisively won. We must always be on the lookout for those who seek to turn this world into a penitentiary and themselves into warders. We must maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!

Damn why does this sound so much like revolutionary Marxism... Yes! Comrade the subversive illiberals must be rooted out before they poison the discourse! Vigilance must be maintainted!

Sure, but is not history evidence that WEIRD Anglo's enforced a classical liberalism morality that strongly emphasized a "fuck you stop bothering me" morality. Seems to me that it won so hard that people are like fish: they aren't even aware they have it until its gone. People are slowly waking up to that fact, and currently are re-inventing all the sectarian conflicts that lead to that morality even emerging.

Maybe people should stop being barely evolved apes and actually just grow up.

I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.

I think giving Anglo's the credit/blame for inventing the idea of conquest to be a bit nonsensical. And I'd say classical liberalism and democracy are two separate things. I'd go further and argue that democracy actually exacerbates that weakness/failure of classical liberalism. The crowd is always dumb, and there is nothing dumb people like more than dopamine triggering behaviors. The failure of democracy is that it provides a means to allow such easy thrills to be indulged, provided by the state. And what thrill is more primal, more intrinsic to human nature, and more destructive to communities than intra-tribal warfare.

Universal Suffrage has pretty much fucked us.

As moderate evidence, the fact that the Reds tolerated this behavior from people who were often open insurrectionists acting in accord with a hostile foreign power. Just saying, we live in a world where a third of academics refuse to tolerate the hiring of colleagues they consider to be right-wing, no matter how qualified. If Reds were willing to act the same, Bill Ayers would still be rotting in a prison instead of teaching Education at Columbia and communist sympathies would be as much of a hiring black mark as Nazi sympathies.

See I am increasingly cynical that this is not a Red vs Blue split but an Elites vs Proles split. While a case could be made on the sanctity of freedom of speech, to me this looks like the Red Elites not punishing the Blue Elites so that they won't be punished in return. The common man still gets fucked by the laws. The common gay/lesbian was still barred from marriage, Abortion was still banned, Porn is still trying to be banned, DnD was still shunned as devil worship. The rich/elites didn't have to worry about any of these "laws" because they were rich/elite. Evidence of them being exempt is about as convincing as rich blues being exempt from DEI and woke-shit.

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