Southern Poverty Law Center Paid for KKK Hoods and Cross Burnings

Greatest hate scam on earth

For generations, millions of Southern Poverty Law Center fundraising letters circulated around the country with pictures of Klansmen burning crosses on the envelope and begged donors for help in fighting the Klan. As it turns out those donors who contributed to the SPLC were paying for the crosses and the hoods as the Justice Department indictment of the organization reveals.

When the Justice Department first secured its case against the leftist organization, the SPLC contended that it had only been paying off informants as part of its effort to monitor hate groups, but the new superseding indictment now reveals that the money paid out had been used to fund rallies, open new chapters, create racist materials and even “purchase materials for cross burnings” and “purchase materials to make Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods”.

Incredibly, the SPLC reimbursed KKK members for “all expenses they incurred for cross-burning events to include the wood and fuel used.”

Rather than fighting the KKK, donor money had been used to commit hate crimes.

According to the indictment, those on the SPLC’s payroll included the head of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America who headed an Aryan Nations group with chapters in 17 states while getting a $2,500 monthly salary through a secret SPLC account. While the SPLC aggressively pursued patriotic organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, it collaborated with the Nazi leader, and in an incredible moment, the Nazi leader “asked an SPLC employee to soften the language about him… so that it would scare off new members from joining his extremist organization. The SPLC employee agreed and changed the language.”

Even while fundraising off fighting Nazis, the SPLC provided the Nazi leader with $70,000.

That’s the same organization which had listed my blog along with a bar sign as hate groups.

Contrary to its claims of fighting hate, the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t trying to shut down hate groups, it was paying money to keep them going, funding their recruitment and even watering down descriptions of them to encourage new members to join their hate groups.

The SPLC fundraised off fighting another Neo-Nazi leader, the former chairman of the National Alliance, even while paying him $155,000. Other hate group leaders on the SPLC payroll included the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the National President of the American Front, and an officer of the National Socialist Movement.

While the SPLC claimed to be doing all this to fight hate groups, the indictment documents repeated instances when Nazi and Klan members came to the SPLC trying to leave and were instead encouraged and even paid to stay and continue growing their organizations.

This might seem baffling to those who don’t know that the SPLC was founded by an Alabama lawyer named Morris Dees, who had defended a Klansman before realizing that there was more money to be made on the other side from gullible Northern liberals. Dees, a partner in a direct marketing firm, turned his law firm into the SPLC. His partner founded Habitat for Humanity. Both men were eventually brought down by racial and sexual misconduct allegations.

The Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that it was trying to destroy the Klan, but it also needed the Klan, the iconic image of a Klansman with a burning cross had earned the organization a fortune, but the trouble was that the Klan was dying out and needed to be kept alive. While the SPLC moved on to Neo-Nazis and then later to ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Transphobia’, targeting the David Horowitz Freedom Center and conservative Christian groups, none of that was nearly as lucrative for direct mail fundraising as the KKK had been.

Having studied the Southern Poverty Law Center’s marketing over the years, it was abundantly clear that the organization was constantly fundraising off manufacturing supposed increases in hate groups. These increases, as we had exposed in the past, were often faked in transparently fraudulent ways, like the SPLC’s decision to suddenly count every single chapter of an organization as a separate hate group, but they also testified to the SPLC’s real agenda.

The SPLC wasn’t making money or gaining power from eliminating hate groups, but creating them. And the superseding indictment shows that in some cases the SPLC was literally backing some of the worst and ugliest organizations in the country, including Nazis, for its fundraising.

The problem wasn’t simply that the SPLC was rotten, everyone in the industry knew that, but that law enforcement and the media insisted on taking it seriously, liaising with it, running its press releases as news stories, and refusing to question any of its abusive and corrupt behaviors. When Dees and the SPLC’s leadership were finally toppled, it was under the cover of a BLM and #MeToo reckoning, rather than an admission that the organization was built on lies, and key employees migrated to other organizations with similar fradulent business models.

The federal government may be working to take down the SPLC, but clones of it began popping up everywhere in the last decade as interest in fighting ‘misinformation’ and censoring speech online burgeoned. The Southern Poverty Law Center is finally facing its reckoning, but how many other organizations are out there also funding hate in order to fundraise off fighting hate?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.