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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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