Fine Them, Jail Crooked Bosses, Revoke Their Nonprofit Status |
What the Southern Poverty Law Center has done to America’s racial and cultural cohesion is just the tip of the spear. Environmental groups and their enablers have inflicted equivalent damage.
“Progressive” politicians, activists and journalists have long extolled the SPLC as the epitome of virtue and justice, “a vigilant voice in civil society against radical white nationalist violence and extremism, neo-Nazism, and other forces.”
They’ve joined the SPLC in falsely accusing President Trump of seeking to “undermine civil society organizations” and “reduce our ability to defend ourselves against the virus of racial violence.” They’ve smeared other people and organizations with equally baseless and inflammatory allegations.
The Center’s shiny veneer has now been scraped off, revealing a wealthy, vicious, politicized, corrupt institution whose stock-in-trade is defamation and race-baiting. In 2019, it fired co-founder Morris Dees for his alleged complicity in racial discrimination, sexual harassment and a toxic workplace environment.
Now a Department of Justice investigation and 11-count grand jury indictment alleges that the SPLC has been engaging in fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and other high crimes, misdemeanors and hateful actions.
It appears the Montgomery, Alabama-based Center was funding the very hatred it repeatedly denounced. According to the indictment and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist and extremist groups.” It even gave money to a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the DOJ says.
It created bank accounts in the names of “at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose.” The money was passed from SPLC “to one sham account, to a second sham account, and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to members of extremist groups,” including people who planned the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, VA.
In effect, the SPLC lit........