The Beginning of the End for Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

It’s being called the federal government’s brazen attack on an esteemed civil rights organization. Of course, I’m describing the indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) handed down this past week by Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Interestingly, the indictments say that SPLC was funding extremist groups rather than protecting us from them. The 11 indictments show that for nearly a decade (2014-2023), SPLC funneled more than $3 million in donations to people associated with various violent groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations (a neo-Nazi group), and the National Socialist Party of America.

A “Civil Rights” Organization

Before we delve further into the mess SPLC has created for itself, let’s look at the history. The organization was founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971 by two civil rights attorneys, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr., a Christian and a Jew, respectively. (Interestingly, SPLC fired Dees in 2019 for hitting on young women, and black employees internally accused Dees of racism.) Wow.

Its purpose was to legally represent (for free) poor people in the south, and to ensure that the new civil rights laws were enforced. The organization has brought many lawsuits against segregation and discrimination, and they continue an expanded mission today. Per their own website, they call themselves a beacon of hope for 55 years, by expanded focus on voting rights, children’s rights, economic justice, immigrant justice, LGBTQ rights, and mass incarceration.

What About The Money Laundering?

On the surface, the mission sounds right and just, so where does the money laundering come into the picture? SPLC is charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, concealing money laundering, and making false statements to a federally insured bank. The US Attorney’s Office in Alabama, the FBI and the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit all investigated SPLC thoroughly, and that investigation led to the double-digit indictments.

Either SPLC is a civil rights organization or it’s not and has another covert purpose. Which is it?

You can always tell quite a bit about an organization by who rallies around it when it is in trouble, and to no surprise, some very radical left-wing organizations immediately circled the wagons around SPLC.
Read the list for yourself. They’re screaming to the rooftops that the indictments are politically motivated by Trump’s DOJ and administration.

On the other hand, though, 11 indictments are nothing to sneeze at. Blanche says that the SPLC is “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Kash Patel says they are engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.  This is not an unfamiliar concept these days, given the Somali fraud in Minnesota and SO much more. Patel says they lied to their donors by saying they would dismantle violent extremist groups, but that SPLC actually paid the leaders of these very extremist groups to not only foment racism and chaos but to also use the funds to commit state and federal crimes. If that’s true, SPLC is in deep, deep trouble.

The SPLC website says they are deeply engaged in dismantling White Supremacy, and their primary mechanism is an effort called Hatewatch. Every year since 1990, the SPLC has published a “hate map” to identify groups that malign an entire class of people. In SPLC’s targets are a conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The organization even has a podcast called Sounds Like Hate.

Hatewatch sounds eerily like the CCDH, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a group that attacked 12 truth-tellers during COVID; CCDH called the group the Disinformation Dozen, and Dr. Tenpenny is one of them. In 2021, the British activist group published a fraudulent report accusing twelve individuals of being responsible for “up to 65%” of vaccine misinformation online. Members of The Disinformation Dozen are suing in defense of their First Amendment rights, with lawyer Jeff Childers at the helm. So far, they are –and winning. (Support their cause here.)

In the SPLC indictments, the evidence is pretty clear. For example, let’s take the Charlottesville 2017 Unite the Right rally which turned deadly and tarred Trump’s reputation although he had nothing to do with it. But it was guilt by association, and greatly fueled by the mainstream media which painted Trump as emboldening Nazis. They even accused Trump himself of being a Nazi.

But who was funding the violent groups? Was it Trump? No. Was it SPLC? Yes. The indictments show a money trail from SPLC to the organizers/leaders of the Charlottesville rally.

After the incident, SPLC raised a great deal of money  “dismantling White Supremacy.” For example, Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to the SPLC and matched employee contributions two-to-one. Cook also placed an SPLC donation button in its iTunes store.

A Long Money Trail

The indictment shows a money trail back to the 1980s when the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan. SPLC even directed covert individuals to infiltrate violent extremist groups. SPLC donors certainly didn’t know; they were good people who thought they were funding civil rights efforts. The indictment shows that SPLC diverted a portion of those donations to benefit groups they publicly claimed to oppose. It is a deep deception that has been going on for decades.

Like any entity operating a fraud scheme, SPLC opened bank accounts in the names of fictitious organizations (think Somali daycares and Ilhan Omar’s winery.) SPLC used the accounts to disguise the true nature of how the money was going to be used. “It’s like investing in a drug to treat diabetes and in a firm producing high fructose corn syrup.”

In one example, SPLC made a $1 million payment to a leader of the National Alliance. The FBI traced the money through a series of shell companies authorized by SPLC’s chief financial officer and director of their Intelligence Project. Now here is the kicker: look at SPLC’s own webpage fighting against the National Alliance, which they deem a neo-Nazi group.

Should SPLC be convicted (and they most certainly will), they will have to forfeit any financial gains from the alleged illegal activities. In short, they’ll be out of business.

And $3 million pales in comparison to the true value of SPLC investments truly owns. At the end of 2024, they controlled a staggering $800 million in assets. SPLC relies heavily on foreign investments. Why? Why are foreigners so concerned with US civil rights? In fact, SPLC’s foreign holdings have exceeded its domestic holdings for the last TEN YEARS—assets which have increased by 430 percent. Their non-US holdings have declined in the last couple of years, likely because they were aware of the pending DOJ investigations. Before that, holdings grew from $44 million in 203 to $233 million in 2021. Those offshore holdings are in offshore accounts in the Caribbean. If they’re a legit organization, why do they need offshore bank accounts?

The Washington Free Beacon has reported that SPLC transferred millions of dollars to offshore entities, including tax havens the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda, while paying top executives six-figure salaries. The money went to sketchy entities Tiger Global Private Investment Partners, BPV-III Cayman X Limited, and XI Limited.

SPLC has now been indicted, and really, the $3 million mentioned in the 11 indictments must be the tip of the iceberg. Watchdog groups have said that SPLC ceased as a charity and really became a venture capital firm years ago. The indictment is in line with those claims. It’s interesting how criminals like Al Capone and Sam Bankman-Fried are first taken down with charges like wire fraud and tax evasion and then comes the tsunami comes.

Is SPLC the lone organization guilty of such crimes, or are they the canary in the coal mine — the tip of the iceberg — and will there be other organizations that meet the same fate?