In today’s legacy media newsroom, there are two sides to every story: the one they want the public to see, and the one they’re trying to hide. As often as not, the one they want the public to see is untrue, and the one they are trying to hide is true.
The news coverage of the mess the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has gotten itself into this week provides a perfect opportunity to compare and contrast the way something like this manifests itself.
To set the stage, you have to know the actual facts, which are:
- A grand jury in Montgomery, Al., indicted the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
- A U.S. Attorney’s Office filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme.
- The counts center on allegations from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America.
- The DOJ claims that the SPLC’s donors weren’t told of this, and that since the SPLC publicly said it was working to dismantle the same groups it was allegedly funding, they likely never would have donated in the first place.
- The DOJ and multiple news reports have indicated that front groups were allegedly created to launder the payments to those whose organizations the SPLC was publicly demonizing.
Now, in terms of the battle for the truth, the reality seems to be that when the SPLC paid certain operatives in these “hate groups,” the purpose was not to pay an informant to aid the SPLC in taking the group down, even though that’s not the SPLC’s job anyway. Rather, it was to pay the operative to help advance the cause of the targeted “hate group” through certain actions, and even under certain direction from the SPLC.
The net effect of the SPLC’s support, by design was to bolster the organizations the SPLC portrayed as public enemies, thus keeping the hate alive. Millions of dollars over many years may have been involved.
Why would the SPLC do such a thing? I don’t know for sure, but according to reports, after the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, which received funding from the SPLC, the SPLC saw an increase in its own funding to the tune of over $80 million. This is a video the SPLC produced in 2024 that sends a completely different message now that you know it allegedly funded the group behind the event.
Hellbound and Down 