The Southern Poverty Law Center — the outfit that has spent decades labeling soccer moms, churches, and anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as dangerous "extremists" — has officially cancelled its informant program. The same organization now facing 11 federal counts including wire fraud, false statements, and money laundering has decided that maybe running a network of snitches isn't the best look anymore. We are witnessing the slow, beautiful collapse of America's most dishonest "civil rights" organization.
SPLC Interim CEO Bryan Fair tried to spin the shutdown as some kind of strategic pivot. "We stopped the program because we believe hate and extremism has migrated significantly online and into government agencies," Fair said. Read that again. The SPLC's official position is that "hate" has migrated into government agencies — meaning the Trump administration. They're not retreating. They're just repositioning their smear machine.
But House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan wasn't buying it. At a June 16 hearing, Jordan responded to Fair's explanation with a blunt assessment: "That makes no sense." No, Congressman, it doesn't. Because the real reason they shut down the informant program is that the walls are closing in, and every active operation is another potential count in a federal indictment.
Let's talk about what the SPLC was actually doing with that informant program. As reported by Liberty Nation's national correspondent Kelli Ballard, the SPLC funneled money to groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America — actual hate groups — through its network of paid informants. They were literally funding the monsters they claimed to be fighting. You cannot make this stuff up.
And while they were bankrolling actual neo-Nazis, they were busy slapping the "hate group" label on Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The organization whose founder Charlie Kirk was recently assassinated got the same designation as the Klan. Let that sink in for a moment.
The SPLC also dropped its latest "Year in Hate and Extremism" report — subtitled "From Extreme to Establishment" — which claims to have identified 1,263 active extremist groups in America, including 556 designated "hate groups" and 707 "antigovernment extremist" groups. Rachel Carroll Rivas, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, said the quiet part out loud: "Both the federal government and the private tech sector embraced the ideas of the hard right and advanced its agenda." Translation — everyone who disagrees with us is an extremist, including the duly elected government of the United States.
Meanwhile, the SPLC's own legal troubles make their moral authority look like a bad joke. The organization is staring down 11 federal counts. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel have the receipts. The $14 million judgment the SPLC once won against neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer over the harassment of Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh looks a lot less impressive when you realize the organization securing that judgment was simultaneously funding Klan-affiliated informants with donor money.
The SPLC had a good racket going for a long time. Label conservatives as extremists. Scare corporate donors into writing checks. Use the money to fund informants inside actual hate groups. Launder the intelligence into scary reports that media outlets cite without question. Rinse, repeat, get rich.
That racket is over. The informant program is dead. The federal indictment is alive. And every parent group, church, and conservative organization that ever got smeared by these frauds is watching the implosion with well-earned satisfaction.
