This week, the Department of Justice dropped a bombshell indictment alleging not just that the “anti-racism” organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been running a spy ring, but that it has actually paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very White supremacist groups it claims to be fighting.
It truly could be a Dave Chappelle sketch, right down to the fact that the SPLC funded, in part, the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which the lie that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” was born.
Trump never called the White supremacists “very fine people,” but it turns out the SPLC was handing them bags of cash.
The biggest takeaway from this scandal is that actual racism is so scant in our society that the SPLC has to fund it to find it.
But even without the payouts, they have been little more than an ideological vigilante group for decades.
There may have been a time in the 1970s when the SPLC did important work infiltrating and exposing racist organizations, but since at least the turn of the century, the group’s main purpose has been to get conservatives canceled — often through dubious connections.
The way this works is that the SPLC keeps a watchlist of individuals or organizations that they say are hateful. Mind you, no real definition of what is and is not a hate group is actually offered; it’s just whatever they say it is. And it’s almost always conservative.
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Once a person or group finds themselves on this blacklist, if you will, the consequences have been grave. In some professions, like academia or publishing, being labeled as hateful by the SPLC is a clear barrier to employment.
Likewise, any organization — even one as harmless as Moms for Liberty — that gets a hate group designation is always introduced or mentioned in the media with the grave warning, “… has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
What makes this ideological vigilantism is that while the First Amendment protects Americans from the state punishing our free speech, the SPLC, through the myriad institutions it has captured, metes out punishment for speech on a regular basis.
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For more than 25 years, this group has operated as a kind of private thought police — the rent-a-cops of American discourse — who ban conservatives from the conversation by smearing them, while progressives like Hasan Piker talk about killing the rich on podcasts.
Calling somebody a bigot, hateful or a White supremacist is a social scarlet letter in our culture. It doesn’t just mean that the person shouldn’t get a job or publish a book; it means they should be shunned in their personal and professional lives.
At its worst, the SPLC’s defamation of everyday conservatives as racists may even contribute to violence. After all, the organization absurdly labeled Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA as hateful before a gunman silenced Charlie forever.
You see, the SPLC’s mission was once to protect those who were dehumanized in our society, but today, they do the dehumanizing. Showing up on their watchlists doesn’t just put a black mark on one’s resume. It puts a target on one’s back.
Whether the SPLC’s shenanigans turn out to be criminal or not, the organization has been exposed as a fraud shop. The SPLC isn’t cracking open cases against criminal organizations. It’s just censoring ideas.
Outside of prisons, there is no massive network of White supremacists that the SPLC needs to infiltrate and investigate. It’s all stuff and nonsense.
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The SPLC has been trading on its once excellent reputation for decades now. Experts pretend it is nonpartisan, when, in fact, today, it only exists to silence conservative voices.
Sadly, the organization no longer deserves the trust that our institutions have put in it to be a fair arbiter of racism and bigotry. In fact, it may be responsible for more racism than it actually fights.
It is time for the SPLC and all of its malicious smears to take their place in the dustbin of history and for Americans of good will to have free conversations without facing punishment from a fake civil rights organization.
And honestly, it really does show just how far our nation has come in conquering bigotry.
