When you run out of enemies

Its been obvious to anyone paying attention the last 30-plus years that the once-vaunted Southern Poverty Law Center had become a quasi-Marxist money-laundering pyramid scheme. It is nice to have your intuition confirmed by a sweeping round of federal indictments.

The SPLC began work in the 1970s. They were instrumental in the fight against the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and other tangential hate groups that still wielded WAY too much influence in the United States.

For about a decade or more they provided legal and logistical support to help marginalize these hate groups to the point where they quickly became laughable shells of their former selves. They were mocked and ridiculed into a well-deserved obsolescence.

Sometimes the worst thing to happen to noble causes is success. Once the law and everything else is on your side, what’s next? There are no more impressive dragons left to slay.

What often happens is that, in order to stay relevant, the cause will create NEW dragons. They will take what in the past was considered a nuisance and play it up to the point where they are still needed to offer their righteous dragon-slaying services. For a price.

In the mid-1980’s, the SPLC quickly morphed into a cause looking for a problem. With dwindling numbers of actual hateful groups they had to move the threshold of the definition. Very quickly, “hate groups” now included far-right western land rights activists who had nothing to do with hate and everything to do with libertarian views on property ownership.

But that wasn’t enough to pay the bills for the SPLC. In order to keep raking in donations, they needed bad guys. And if none were readily available, they must be created.

The SPLC employed a business model that should be familiar to you if you are a fan of The Godfather, The Sopranos or any of the other great artistic depictions of the Mafia. Outside of cinema, it is called “extortion.”

A close friend of mine was the Regional HR manager for a large office supply company in 1998. Two employees had filed a civil rights suit against the firm. I will be charitable and call the claims, “implausible.”

My friend got a call from the SPLC. The caller assured them the suits would magically disappear if they made a generous tax-deductible contribution. My friend told them to pound sand, and the suits were later laughed out of court.

As the years went by and actual racism became more difficult to find, the SPLC dropped all pretense of being an impartial source of information. The people and groups they added to their much-ballyhooed “hate map” were comical.

I wrote this in 2016 about the SPLC:

• “In 2015, for example. the group caught well-deserved criticism after it put Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on its “extremist watch list,” citing the one-time presidential candidate’s “anti-LGBT views.” Later, in 2016, the SPLC labeled women’s rights activist, female genital mutilation victim, atheist, and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali an “anti-Muslim extremist” because she opposes Islamic extremism. The British activist and extremist-turned-counter-extremist Maajid Nawaz was placed in the same category.”

• “The left-wing advocacy group lumps pro-family and pro-Israel organizations with actual neo-Nazis. The SPLC will slap the word “extremist” on just about anything so long as it’s right-tilting.”

• “And the Mainstream Media will gleefully cite the SPLC’s stamp of disapproval as irrefutable truth. “[Right-Wing Organization], which has been named a “hate group” by the SPLC, blah blah blah” has been a far-too-frequent result of this incestuous relationship.”

With the supply of hate continually falling well short of the SPLC’s insatiable demand, they upped the ante. Financial records show them actively funding the very hate groups that they targeted. The fact that they used chicanery to try and conceal these dealings shows that they knew exactly what they were doing.

Simply put, the SPLC secretly paid racists to do racist things in their racists groups while the SPLC conducted in fundraising drives based on that racism.

This is akin to Norton creating computer viruses in order to sell more software.

We will hopefully find out during the trial the extent to which the SPLC enabled high-profile events like the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

Of course the ultimate victims in all this are those who want to eliminate the remaining legitimately racist persons and institutions that plague us. The SPLC has made this infinitely more difficult by fueling distrust and doubt.