The SPLC Funded The Hate It Sold To Donors

And created new enemies for power and profit

The Southern Poverty Law Center “hate map” is actually just a heat map of the American population. Per their name, shouldn’t a regional difference be visible?

“Although the SPLC has indeed done some good work in the past and still does some good work today, it has proven, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted in the business of identifying hate and policing America’s public discourse”, Tyler O’Neil writes. “Instead, it has abused the trust of gullible donors, media outlets, companies, and states to enrich itself and attack its enemies.”

O’Neill’s book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was published in 2020. This week, a superseding indictment by an Alabama grand jury charges that “SPLC actively led donors to believe that their donations would be used to ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups. However, the SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities.” O’Neill was more right than he imagined.

An employee of SPLC spent donor funds to shack up with one of the organization’s ‘sources’, a man who was on their payroll for 20 years, ‘earning’ $1.2 million as he organized hate. The leader of the National Socialist Party of America also received SPLC donor funds through a fake company, ‘Rare Books Warehouse’. SPLC denies the charges and dismisses all this as proper payments to informants. The grand jury indictment calls it bank fraud.

With SPLC donor money propping up the hate, the SPLC could simultaneously squeeze their donors using the reports they generated from these informants. “These activities were of the same nature as the activities about which the SPLC published articles on its website and other forums in an effort to obtain donations”, the indictment notes. Put simply, there was not enough hate to support the market for fighting hate, so hate had to be created.

The conclusions of Tyler O’Neill and the Alabama grand jury do not surprise me. A decade ago, I was a constant consumer of SPLC information and linked to much of it on a regular basis as part of a newsletter. After nearly two years, I realized that the story SPLC had told us, in which a thousand new hate groups sprang into existence during the first Obama term, was a lie.

Population heat maps of the United States have similar site distributions to the SPLC “hate map”. Either hate is perfectly uniform across all regions, or the map is bogus, and the underlying data has been cooked

Instead of a vast right wing conspiracy, I saw a proliferation of podcasts, Facebook pages, and social media accounts that did not represent an actual increase in the number of ideological racists in America. On the contrary, what I saw was that four people would form a loose connection, create four different online avatars, and get counted as four different ‘hate groups’.

“The SPLC’s list of ‘hate groups’ seems to be constantly growing. In 2000, it stood at a mere 602 groups. By 2005, it reached 803. In 2010, it jumped to 1,002. Between 2011 and 2014, it went down slightly, bottoming out at 784 before jumping back up to a record high of 1,020 in 2018.” That was the same year I stopped paying any attention to ‘hate’ reports, for I had seen too much inflation.

The definition of ‘hate’ at SPLC is ever-expansive, and so is the anti-hate mission of the SPLC. An organization whose events I have attended, and for whom I have done writing and editing work, was named as a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC in 2023. Genspect is the least-hateful environment I have ever encountered. Accusations of ‘transphobia’ seem quite hollow, given how many recipients of ‘gender medicine’ I have met through Genspect.

Weirdly, SPLC wants their donors to believe that Genspect is doing “white supremacy”. Race has never been a subject of any Genspect talk I have attended. The SPLC wants you to believe that southern racism is responsible for a conference that first organized in Ireland. The SPLC expects you to buy the nonsensical proposition that ‘gender’ equals race.

“For far-right extremists, the increased visibility of transgender people is a sign of the growing ‘degeneracy’ of the nation, wrought by ‘cultural Marxists,’ leftists and Jews as part of an assault on white, Christian families and strict gender roles”, Cassie Miller wrote for the SPLC website in 2019.

“They believe that trans people, like immigrants and non-whites, are hastening the destruction of an idealized white, Western culture,” which does in fact describe Queer Theory but does not describe the organizational beliefs of Genspect at all.

This racialist gibberish is not about fighting ‘hate’. SPLC was never fighting ‘hate’, O’Neill’s book reveals. Founder Morris Dees was always a direct mail entrepreneur, and SPLC was simply the most successful of his ventures. It always needed a certain amount of actual hate to exist, and seem threatening, so that liberal, middle-class white Democrats would open their wallets.

Dees met his co-founder Millard Fuller at a Young Democrats meeting. They were millionaires by 1964 and founded the SPLC seven years later as yet another direct mail franchise. Fuller left SPLC later to found Habitat for Humanity. Both men had extensive party connections.

By 1986, “the center had changed drastically,” Randall Williams, an SPLC writer and paralegal, admits. The direct mail start-up had become a trusted source of information for the government. “We were sharing information with the FBI, the police, undercover agents. Instead of defending clients and victims, we were more of a super snoop outfit, an arm of the law enforcement people.”

By the time O’Neill’s book was published, this close working relationship had turned into something quite sinister. As we learned in the first indictment in May, the FBI “stopped treating the SPLC as an outside source and started treating it like a partner”, Nicholas Giordano writes at The Federalist.

“Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” one FBI agent complained in an email exchange regarding a memo listing SPLC terminology targeting Catholics. “Apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC” in a sectarian abuse of power that hinged on the word ‘hate’.

“By treating the SPLC’s partisan analysis as a substitute for sworn evidence, the government laundered ideological narratives into official federal threat assessments. This shadow intelligence partnership was not an accident”, Giordano writes.

Now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the government’s scrutiny of the SPLC began years ago. If true, this admission exposes a far deeper scandal where the bureau was aware of the rot and chose to preserve the partnership anyway. The FBI doesn’t get to rely on SPLC training and resources and then plead ignorance about the organization’s methods.

Mark Potok, senior fellow at SPLC, has said that “We see this as a political struggle. We’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups. We’re trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them.” In fact the SPLC was funding the hate groups, monitoring and directing them, in order to destroy the political enemies of the left.

Per the indictment, SPLC money paid the hosts for hate rallies, paid for the attendees to travel, paid for recruitment, paid them to create new chapters of hate groups, bought the crosses to burn, bought the Klan robes, bought the “racist paraphernalia that extremists sold at rallies”, and paid their hate managers such a good living they never needed real jobs.

This programmatic spending seems to have started when multiple KKK members wanted to stop their activities in 2010. It played a role in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, as one of the organizing leaders, listed as F-37, made racist social media posts under the supervision of an SPLC handler and arranged transport for some of the rally attendees. Altogether, the unnamed F-37 received $300,000 in SPLC donor money as an ‘informant’.

The charges in the indictment get cartoonish in their breathtaking shamelessness. SPLC set out to revive the Klan organization responsible for the most infamous church bombing in American history so they could announce a “millennial reboot” of old hate.

Tyler O’Neill anticipated this outcome in 2020. His book features critical voices suggesting shenanigans. Laird Wilcox, an extremism researcher, stopped taking the SPLC seriously when he could not find many of the ‘hate groups’ on their list. O’Neill writes that “critics have suggested the SPLC ‘plants’ apparently racist protesters at civil rights events.”

Here is a clip of O’Neill giving recent congressional testimony.

Making hate pay turns out to pay well. The SPLC has three times the assets of the YMCA and twice the assets of Planned Parenthood, O’Neill noted. Charlottesville was “an investment” that paid handsomely, he said, recalling his research on the SPLC’s “hate map”.

The map also includes groups that barely exist, like a Confederate memorabilia shop and a convent. In 2023, I analyzed the map and found that it exaggerated hate by at least 267% by including mainstream conservatives, double-counting groups, and mentioning defunct organizations.

Given this track record, is it really so far-fetched to think the SPLC might be propping up some of the very white supremacist groups it claims it exists to oppose?

More recently, the SPLC Hatewatch staff criticized Genspect for holding “Detrans Awareness Day.” According to SPLC, detransitioners have “inaccurate narratives” about medical transition, while parents who do not support ‘gender affirmation’ are hateful bigots.

“Anti-trans ‘detrans’ rhetoric weaponizes a small contingent of trans people’s experiences to malign gender-affirming health care and LGBTQ+-affirming public spaces”, the SPLC charges. “Anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups exaggerate the prevalence of transgender people who no longer identify as trans and obfuscate the reasons why.”

Detransition hardly ever happens, goes the propaganda. Even when it does happen, we should not talk about it, because that “weaponizes” the experiences of ex-trans people. Listening to people who have left the self-harm cult hurts the “gender-affirming health care” — the sterilization regimen for kids — “and LGBTQ+-affirming public spaces”, that is, the ‘right’ of men to be in women’s locker rooms and toilets. Also, how dare anyone refer to ‘gender medicine’ as a harmful cult. This is literally white supremacy, says the SPLC.

Tyler O’Neill noted the SPLC turning to ‘transphobic hate’ as a new growth sector in his book six years ago, before Genspect was founded. According to his book, SPLC published “The Gender Spectrum”, the story of a genderqueer fourth-grade child(!) who ‘identifies’ as nonbinary, in 2013. This launched their business interest in smearing Genspect as a hate group.

However, Genspect does not receive funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Judging from the grand jury indictment, this is definite proof that the organization has nothing to do with the south, poverty, or racial hate. SPLC is just pandering to the biases of their mailing list. The reason we know SPLC has lost its way is that the marketing plan has transformed the mission.