The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been a favorite elitist media source for decades to warn constantly of a dangerous “far right” threat to America, from neo-Nazis to the Ku Klux Klan. They wanted you to believe that 23 skinheads meeting at a state park in had national significance. Â All that fell apart this week.
A 2018 Anti-Defamation League report on the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan reported it “is the largest and the most active Klan group in the country with approximately 100 members.” But this somehow defines America with 340 million people as deeply racist.
On April 21, the indicted the SPLC for financial fraud, taking money from leftist donors and paying informants inside racist and extremist groups and trying to hide the money trail. Naturally, the same media that has promoted SPLC’s narrative of an America gripped by White supremacy doesn’t want to get into the ugly specifics of the indictment underlining that alleged scam.
Even the “paper of record,” ran a front-page story that laid out all the conservative complaints about the group in recent years, but didnt get into their allegedly fraudulent payoffs.
The Democrats came out and said, this is just paying informants like the or the cops. Â But the informants are often not just keeping tabs, they’re pushing these groups into action. So, in this case, if the SPLC informant is helping push a far-right rally in Charlottesville that becomes a huge national news story, which leads to a massive influx of donations to SPLC, isn’t that an obvious scam?
On the evening after the indictment, only the “PBS News Hour” reported the story, and only for 69 seconds. Anchor Amna Nawaz was fairly straightforward. While there was no soundbite from , they did have a soundbite of SPLC leader Bryan Fair claiming that they used informants to “save lives” in the 1970s.
Nawaz concluded: “The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 and has long been criticized by who say it unfairly targets conservative groups and individuals. Last year, FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency was severing its ties with the center, which for years had provided law enforcement with research on domestic extremism.”
The network newscasts think “domestic extremism” is only a right-wing phenomenon. There are no left-wing extremists in America.
A few weeks after President won re-election in 2024, PBS put on the SPLC to suggest Trump would cause a big uptick in bigotry. Their online headline: “Is the political climate influencing a spike in racist incidents?”
On April 22, ABCs “Good Morning America” gave just 31 seconds to the SPLC indictment, with anchor Robin Roberts polishing it up as a “prominent civil rights organization.” Under the words on screen “Civil Rights Group Indicted on Fraud Charges,” reporter Aaron Katersky relayed the SPLC was accused “of defrauding donors by secretly paying informants inside the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups that it long investigated. The Southern Poverty Law Center said, we are outraged by the false allegations and accused the Trump administration of targeting it for political reasons, guys.”
The “CBS Evening News” was much more even-handed in a report that night. Reporter Jan Crawford aired clips of Blanche and Fair, and concluded by noting the SPLC :Â “In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for articles alleging that the center was misleading donors and wasting their money, and more recently, critics say that its Hatewatch list of extremists includes many mainstream conservatives.”
No one recalled Floyd Corkins, who brought his SPLC “hate map” to a violent attack on the headquarters of the Christian conservative Family Research Council in Washington,
