Caught up in multiple indictments, the execrable Southern Poverty Law Center admits it did pay members of various racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, but it paid them because they were informants providing invaluable intelligence on those organizations.
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Intelligence. About what, pray tell? That they were racists? And what did the SPLC do with that intelligence? According to the indictments, they used it to trick donors into giving them tens of millions to fight the racism they funded. They invested a little and reaped a lot, reportedly around $800 million.
There is no indication the SPLC used that intelligence to disrupt racist plots. They apparently never shared that information with law enforcement agencies, local or federal, to combat racism or prevent harm to the people they supposedly defended.
A large part of what the SPLC did was to brand innocuous organizations like Turning Point USA or the Family Research Council as “hate” groups. The evidence of that “hate” was that they opposed Democrats and organizations like BLM and Antifa, which somehow were never so SPLC-branded. Telling the truth about those leftist organizations, usually by doing nothing more outrageous than repeating their own words, exposing their publications, and informing the public of their actions when the Democrat media wouldn’t, was more than enough to be defamed for ‘hate” and “fascism.”
What appears to be certain is that the SPLC paid members of actual racist organizations, some contacting them because they wanted to get out of those organizations. They paid for supplies, publications, and symbols such as fuel and wood for cross-burnings. And perhaps the greatest irony is their money propped up organizations that were falling apart. The SPLC kept them in business.
Among the bizarre realities of the Democrat Party is that Democrat demand for racism far exceeds the supply. It has been so for decades, so virtually every race hoax on campus and elsewhere has been perpetrated by black people who, when caught, lamely proclaimed they were trying to “raise awareness’ about racism, or were trying to “start a conversation” about it. The SPLC just did that on a grander and far more expensive scale.
At Powerline, John Hinderaker provides an update on a particularly corrupt SPLC scam.
We now know that Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s former “director of intelligence,” demonstrated little. She is accused of bedding a leading figure in the National Alliance, a white supremacist group, funneling some $1.2 million to him—and her. They were allegedly lovers, shared a home, maintained joint bank accounts, and spent much of the money on their personal expenses.
What was the National Alliance and why has virtually no one heard of it?
By 2013, the National Alliance had effectively ceased to exist. That year, group chairman Erich Gliebe — a former boxer nicknamed the Aryan Barbarian — had sent a letter to followers saying the group was ending its membership program that September, writing they were abandoning dues-paying chapters in favor of a “supporter-based” structure. Membership had collapsed from 1,400 to around 20 in less than a decade.
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It’s that whole demand/supply thing. No one was buying what the National Alliance was selling. Left to its own devices, the organization would have quickly vanished, but the SPLC apparently saw an opportunity to spend relatively little for a far greater return.
Despite the internal chaos and decline, the following year the SPLC began bolstering the group’s public profile, writing nearly a dozen articles about the organization.
About an organization that, without the SPLC’s help, would have disappeared because Americans aren’t racists or white supremacists. That virtually no one has heard of the National Alliance, despite the worst efforts of the SPLC, indicates how fringe and feckless that organization was. It’s a reflection on the ultimate success of the Civil Rights movement, not only through legislation, but by changing the minds and hearts of generations of Americans.
That’s the kind of success the SPLC could not countenance, not if it wanted to remain in business, serving the needs of the Democrat Party and providing lavish salaries and lifestyles for its leaders, benefits they couldn’t hope to get in a labor market that requires honesty, experience, ability, and productivity.
It’s hard to imagine an organization and people more depraved. Should the allegations be proved, and it seems likely they will be, the SPLC defamed innocent, decent Americans, enriched and helped small groups of evil but largely ineffective people, and badly damaged America by stirring up racial hatred that wouldn’t have existed without their behind-the-scenes manipulations. They knew what buttons to push among black Americans and played on white guilt like harps from Hell, and we’re all the worse for it.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.