The Department of Justice alleges that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) funneled millions of dollars to members and associates of the Ku Klux Klan and other such outfits through fictitious groups and by relying on prepaid gift cards to hide the money.
It all recalls revelations that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) euthanized thousands of dogs and cats housed in its shelters.
The SPLC rationalized the payments as a way of infiltrating hate groups. The Justice Department alleges that one of the SPLC’s paid haters helped organize the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in a death. The fraud indictment alleges that the SPLC manufactured the extremism that they purport to fight.
The scheme that relied on covert operatives resembles one used by the Anti-Defamation League against the John Birch Society during the 1960s. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accuses the SPLC of “not dismantling extremism but funding it.”
Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, serves as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution for the 2024-2025 academic year. His books include Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004). In 2025, he releases his magnum opus, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. He splits time between city Massachusetts and cabin Vermont.
