The Southern Poverty Law Center scandal is reverberating everywhere today. We always knew the SPLC was a fraud perpetrated for the benefit of the Democratic Party, but I, for one, never imagined that it was actually funding the organizations that it excoriated. But with hindsight, it makes sense: the SPLC needed to keep alive absurd groups like the Ku Klux Klan to keep the money coming in, so that it could smear completely innocent organizations like Turning Point USA, Coral Ridge Ministries, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Family Research Council, which was its true purpose.
This is what makes the claim of SPLC’s defenders that it was paying “informants,” just like the FBI does, so ridiculous. Robert Spencer makes a good point:
[T]here is another striking aspect of the recent revelations about the SPLC secretly funding “right-wing extremist” groups and providing a bogus foundation for the Biden regime’s ridiculous claim that “white supremacists” constituted the biggest terror threat the nation faced. And that is that neither I nor others that the SPLC included on its spurious and defamatory “hate list” for years ever received a penny. The payouts were apparently reserved for the real hate groups, not for the patriotic groups the SPLC was trying to destroy by including them on its list.
Right. It didn’t take an “informant” to know that the Ku Klux Klan was bad. (It would be fun to know what “information” the SPLC claims to have gotten from the Klan’s Grand Wizard in exchange for their funding!) Likewise with the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, which the SPLC supported. But the SPLC never paid anyone to “inform” on Turning Point, or Coral Ridge Ministries, or the Horowitz Freedom Center. Why? Because it knew perfectly well that there was no adverse information to be gained on those innocent conservative groups. They simply disagreed with the SPLC, and the Democratic Party, politically.
A final point: the SPLC is all about “white supremacy.” I know hundreds of conservatives, but I have never met a white supremacist. In fact, I am not entirely sure what that term means. But its use has exploded, not because white supremacists have suddenly burst onto the scene–they haven’t–but because the Democratic Party found the term to be politically useful as a distraction from its own failed policies:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/04/the-invention-of-white-supremacy.php