The SPLC Was One Giant Fraud

Fourteen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center named me a hate group of one. The honor wasn’t mine alone, I shared it with a sign outside a bar and a brand of gun oil.

What was behind the SPLC’s sloppy hate group designation of one man, a bar sign and other random items was its obsession with manufacturing a constant rise in ‘hate groups.’

Year after year, the SPLC would issue reports claiming that hate groups were increasing in number, and then fundraise off the urgent threat that they had invented.

I caught them doing it time and time again.

In 2017, the SPLC issued a report claiming that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015”. How did the leftist group arrive at this number? It listed Act for America, a patriotic organization started by a Christian refugee from Islamic persecution, as one group in 2015.

Then it listed 45 chapters of Act for America as separate organizations in 2017. Suddenly the number of ‘Islamophobic’ groups had tripled. Such pathetically obvious statistical frauds were all too common in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s work, but the media rarely questioned it.

Or why the SPLC seemed so bent on artificially inflating the number of supposed hate groups.

Next year however the SPLC listed a progressive town on its ‘Hate Map’ because there had been an online comment that proposed a Neo-Nazi book club should meet there. There was no evidence that the club existed, that it had ever met at the town or that the town had anything to do with it, but the town still found it impossible to get the SPLC to delist it. And media stories appeared for the first time questioning the SPLC’s methodology which proved to be made up.

In addition to inventing and faking ‘hate groups’, we already knew that the Southern Poverty Law Center had been helping fund some hate groups, but the recent grand jury indictment of the organization shows that the scale of these payments had surpassed $3 million.

Even while old ladies were being sent envelopes stamped with klansmen burning crosses and urged to donate to stop them, the SPLC was using their money to fund members of both the Ku Klux Klan and the United Klans of America through bank accounts linked to fake organizations.

Despite its public hostility, the SPLC always had always enjoyed a somehow complicated relationship with the KKK. Morris Dees (above), the founder of the SPLC, who had formerly worked for George Wallace, had defended a klansman attacking civil rights workers. Dees, an experienced direct marketer, turned his direct sales machine into the SPLC, suing Klan groups for millions, and then funneled millions to Klan members supposedly acting as ‘informants’ in ways that blurred the line between the SPLC and the KKK. The line grew even blurrier when Dees was ousted from the SPLC over organizational sexism and racism allegations.

Dees had switched from profiting off the KKK and allied racists to profiting from white liberal northerners who viewed them as a dangerous bogeyman. When efforts to pretend that the KKK was still relevant faltered, the SPLC went into the business of similarly fighting religious conservatives and anyone concerned about Islam. That’s how I became a hate group.

Along the way, the SPLC tried to destroy the David Horowitz Freedom Center, running a covert campaign to get our bank accounts shut down, to cut off donations to us and to stop us from being able to run our websites, like Front Page Magazine, and to even exist at all on the internet. We eventually beat the SPLC, but not without taking a serious beating along the way. Others suffered worse. Including a terrorist attack aimed at Alliance Defending Freedom by a gunman sourcing his target from the SPLC.

But, unlike the KKK, the SPLC didn’t write us any checks.

The SPLC had two motives for its systemic fraud: first to raise money, and second, to manufacture a crisis of constantly growing hate groups to justify censoring conservatives.

Equating David Horowitz, who had fought for civil rights, with the Klan, which turned out to be subsidized by the SPLC, was about weaponizing the fake campaign against the KKK to eliminate as much of the conservative movement as the leftist group could manage to take out.

The SPLC needed the KKK, just as it needed the ‘Unite the Right’ rally, where it was helping to fund a participant, to keep the money coming and to end free speech in America.

Soon after the Southern Poverty Law Center named me a hate group and I began looking into their hate maps and hate lists, I quickly saw that the SPLC was faking its data. The fake data helped make the SPLC into an authority on ‘hate’. The FBI and local law enforcement turned to the SPLC Politicians propped it up. The tech industry allowed it to censor whom it wanted to.

My listing was just one piece of bad data that the SPLC had been feeding into a machine of lies that made it wealthy and powerful. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s reign of terror was built on lies, on fraud and on funding the very people whom it promised donors that it was fighting.

Now, the curtain is rising to reveal the SPLC’s dirty tactics and how it faked hate in America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center faked a crisis to gain power and profit. Now it’s time for the SPLC to apologize to organizations like ours and to individuals like me for trying to destroy them by using lies, and it’s time for the legal system to hold the SPLC accountable for funding 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.