The Southern Poverty Law Center, which makes its money by exaggerating “hate” to scare donors and by comparing conservatives to the Ku Klux Klan, was itself funding Klan members—and now major Democrats are beclowning themselves by defending it.
Like a dog returns to its vomit, so Democrats return to the ridiculous claim that the SPLC is some sort of noble civil rights group and that to attack it is to attack America’s soul.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., claimed that the Justice Department’s indictment against the SPLC is “turning what America’s all about inside out.”
He noted that “in 1983, the Ku Klux Klan tried to burn down the Southern Poverty Law Center for daring to oppose its hatred.”
“More than four decades later, the Trump administration is trying to do the same thing in the courtroom,” Schumer said.
That’s a powerful line, but is it true?
Schumer didn’t address the specific charges in the indictment—six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to conceal money laundering. Nor did he address the allegations that the SPLC didn’t just pay $3 million to a set of “informants” in white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, but actually directed racist social media posts and helped bring more people to the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, paying the very same extremists it highlighted on its website.
The Democrat merely dismissed the idea as laughable.
“It has nothing to do with alleged wire fraud, with the Southern Poverty Law Center somehow working in coordination with the KKK,” Schumer said. “That’s ridiculous on its face! It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
If the good senator has any evidence the SPLC did not fund KKK members, I’d love to see it. The claim is extraordinary, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The SPLC hasn’t denied it—the group has merely argued that it was funding “informants” in order to protect victims from potential violence.
Hellbound and Down 