It would be funny if it weren’t so destructive. Modern Democrats attack Republicans and conservatives more generally for being “divisive,” but their entire political strategy for decades has been to divide and pit Americans against each other for fun and profit.
For that reason, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising to see the Department of Justice claiming in their indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that the organization supposedly dedicated to fighting racism was really paying extremist organizations, including “the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance” to help organize and instigate events upon which the SPLC could then raise money.
While the SPLC defense is that they were just “paying informants” to help expose such organizations, this claim has about the same plausibility as Senator Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren’s claim that she is a Cherokee. (Her DNA test that revealed she might be, ahem, between 1/1024 and 1/64 Native American.)
Of course, every good scam requires plausibility. The indictment notes that the SPLC had really been paying informants or individuals who had infiltrated various groups since the 1980s. But, starting in the late 2000s, the organization started to deposit money in various bank accounts in the name of fictitious entities such as “Imagery Ink,” “Kelly’s Marine,” and “Northwest Technologies.” These entities were not incorporated and had no employees. They had no legitimate business purposes either.
By 2014, the SPLC had begun to pay their “field sources,” or “Fs,” from these accounts. Over a nine-year period, the indictment alleges that at least $3 million was paid out to these Fs in various groups. If the organization had simply been paying for information, the operation might well be seen as legitimate. After all, the organization’s stated purpose is to “dismantle” white supremacy.
That’s not exactly what they did. The indictment alleges that the SPLC was paying many of these Fs for action. F-9, who made a cool million dollars over the years, did in fact steal documents from the National Alliance group, but was also a fundraiser for them.
Multiple Fs were actually in the leadership of extremist groups. “F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of the Aryan Nations, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.” That’s a hell (literally intended) of a resumé!
Others were officers in the National Socialist Movement, the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and various other groups. One was reportedly a National President of American Front. Another was a KKK member married to an Exalted Cyclops.
Yet another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, which the SPLC hawked in an article as “a millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat… responsible for, among other things, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., which resulted in the deaths of four little girls in 1963.” Given that the Imperial Wizard was on SPLC’s payroll, it is fair to ask who exactly was “rebooting” this organization.
The most disturbing figure, however, is F-37, who was paid $270,000 over eight years. F-37 was “a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia.” F-37 made racist posts “under the supervision of the SPLC,” attended the event and “helped coordinate transportation” for others.
The Unite the Right rally, which came about after local political leaders decided to remove statues of Robert E. Lee, has been the ultimate go-to slander for Democrats trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are really racists.
Joe Biden claimed that this event was the reason he ran for president. Many ordinary liberals still believe the “very fine people on both sides” hoax, a pernicious lie that the media has used to suggest that President Trump was praising white supremacists at the rally. (Trump actually said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”)
Three people died at that event – two Virginia state troopers, whose helicopter crashed while they were monitoring the event, and Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who died when a man drove his car into a crowd.
Over the years since that event, many people have doubted the reality of a large white supremacist contingent in America. In fact, they have doubted the prevailing narrative of the Charlottesville event. As cartoonist and commentator Scott Adams asked in 2023, “What are the odds those tiki torch carrying neo-Nazis from Charlottesville would only rally once?” His gut feeling and “working assumption” was that “it was an American intel op against Trump.”
After Charlottesville, the SPLC racked up massive donations. They also successfully pushed for more Big Tech censorship. The supposed “white supremacist” demonstrations since then, all much smaller than Charlottesville, have all had a weirdly scripted and fake quality.
As counterterrorism expert Kyle Shideler wrote in 2023 of one such group, “given that Patriot Front dresses like cannon fodder for COBRA – the eternal (and always incompetent) enemy in the cartoon TV series G.I. Joe – the group is regarded as an FBI office costume party.” Shideler’s article detailed how it was more likely that such groups and their operations were being orchestrated by left-wing groups, including Antifa, on behalf of the government.
The revelations about SPLC confirm that Shideler’s analysis had a great deal of plausibility.
What is sad and disgusting is that, if true, it means cartoon racist villains do not ultimately carry the guilt for the blood of Heather Heyer and the two state troopers. A large and powerful left-wing operation that thrives on smearing Americans does.
Does white racism still exist? Sure, and it should be called out and condemned wherever it rears its ugly head. But, do we live in a perpetual Jim Crow South in which the Grand Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops spread terror throughout the land? Certainly not.
David Shafer, the Georgia politician who was wrongfully prosecuted and then exonerated for his actions in challenging the 2020 elections, recently wrote on X that in his 60 years of living almost entirely in the American South, “I have never to my knowledge met a single member of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Shafer called the KKK and other extremist groups what the indictment indicates they are: “a ghost kept alive by millions of dollars in funding by the Southern Poverty Law Center to keep us divided.”
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.
