CRC News: SPLC coverage

In late April the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for (according to the U.S. Department of Justice news release) “wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.” Among its claims, the government alleges that the SPLC was secretly funding the very racist extremists that they have claimed to oppose.

Over our history the Capital Research Center has chronicled the many controversies regarding the SPLC. After the indictment was released, we posted a blog compiling many of them: “A CRC history of Southern Poverty Law Center controversies.”

When these latest allegations arrived, CRC again became a go-to source for media seeking perspective.

Shortly after the indictment, Capital Research Center senior fellow Kali Fontanilla discovered a new SPLC controversy, which she wrote up in an April 29 report titled “Southern Poverty Law Center suddenly shoves lesson plans for school children down the memory hole.” As a California public school teacher for fifteen years, Kali had noticed the SPLC promoting its agenda in the classroom.

Kali wrote:

These SPLC-produced lessons were even included in the official curriculum for English Learners in my district. Learning for Justice is SPLC’s educational arm, formerly called Teaching Tolerance. I believe they abandoned that original name because these lessons were no longer about “teaching tolerance” but building resistance movements in our public schools.

The SPLC distribution model was simple. Teachers are exhausted and always looking for free, ready-made material. The SPLC provided it. In 2021 alone, more than half a million educational resources were downloaded from the site. Six hundred thousand copies of its magazine went out to teachers and districts nationwide.

What their lessons actually contained is what I wrote about three years ago: ready-made lessons for teaching radicalism in public schools.

But after the federal grand jury indictments came down, Kali noticed the lessons had disappeared from the SPLC website:

One of the plot elements of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four was the “memory hole,” a chute leading to an incinerator, down which the regime’s Ministry of Truth would dump embarrassing news stories that had been rewritten to cover up official misdeeds and humiliations.

Click over to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classroom resources page and you will get a 404 error. Next, try the archive lesson plan builder, where teachers can build themed units based on the SPLC’s lesson plans. Same thing, error code, and access is denied. Hundreds of lessons that were freely available to teachers last month, lessons that made their way into public school classrooms across the country, are now locked away or scrubbed entirely.

The SPLC’s memory hole sure has been getting a lot of use recently.

On May 5, Kelli Ballard, national correspondent for Liberty Nation News, used and extensively quoted from Kali’s report extensively in her own analysis of SPLC’s teaching materials: “SPLC Tries to ‘Memory Hole’ What It Really Taught Children.”

On May 4, Liberty Nation’s Joe Schaeffer interviewed CRC president Scott Walter on the SPLC scandal: “Liberty Nation Exclusive: How the SPLC Kept the Hate Money Flowing: . An interview with Scott Walter, president of watchdog org Capital Research Center.” There is also a video of the discussion.

Here’s a sample Q&A from their chat:

Joe Schaeffer: My first question is to kind of define our terms here. I’ve heard, the SPLC, well, they’re not really an NGO, but they act like one. Well, actually, they are an NGO. Is the Southern Poverty Law Center an NGO? And why does it matter?

Scott Walter: Well, originally, the term NGO just meant anything that was neither a business nor government. Nowadays in common use it’s often used to describe groups that are getting money from the government or are working very tightly with the government. The SPLC doesn’t particularly get government money, but it definitely colludes with government agencies, especially the Department of Justice and the FBI, where the SPLC is trying to have its hate list, which, you know, claims to identify really bad actors out there, used for prosecutions or for other downgradings of groups’ respectability or ability even to function. And some of the groups on their hate list are really nasty. They’re, you know, genuine neo-Nazis and crazy fringe people like that. But, in recent years, they’ve started adding just mainstream Christian groups, mainstream conservative groups, and smearing these completely legitimate actors, whether you agree with them or not.

Listed below are some additional recent examples of CRC researchers cited in media regarding SPLC:

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Newsbusters (Media Research Center)—WIKI-BIAS EXPOSED: Wikipedia Editors Scramble to Bury SPLC Indictment

The SPLC’s continued privileged status at Wikipedia provides editors with what amounts to a digital weapon to use against faith-based organizations, free speech advocates and Republicans and right-leaning organizations and individuals. The SPLC is approved for use while sources like Breitbart, Fox News, the New York Post and The Daily Wire are heavily restricted or even blacklisted. Such policies limit favorable coverage of those the SPLC has unfairly targeted and lumped in with hate groups. At the same time, editors are free to use the SPLC’s “extremist files” to undermine credibility or perhaps even damage reputations.

Wikipedia editors have cited the SPLC more than 7,000 times across Wikipedia. SPLC is cited far more than organizations that are fighting for religious liberty or working to end discriminatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion “DEI” programs or similar advocacy. For example, as of May 1, Wikipedia only cited Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) 48 times; The Federalist Society 313 times; Capital Research Center 87 times and the New Civil Liberties Alliance 20 times. Despite each having its own page on the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia doesn’t cite to either America First Legal or the Thomas More Society law firm.

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Washington Examiner—SPLC allegedly spent over $1 million infiltrating hate group it publicly claimed was ‘almost irrelevant’

“Like a crooked record company bribing DJs to play its songs and prop up revenue, the SPLC gave secret payola for a decade to racists at a ‘moribund’ Nazi group,” Capital Research Center President Scott Walter told the Washington Examiner. “Nothing better proves the SPLC does not protect us from dangerous sickos; it just operates a charity racket more rotten than anything I’ve seen in decades of studying the sector.”

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Wall Street Journal— The SPLC’s Contradictions: The Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly paid more than $1 million to someone affiliated with a group it called “almost irrelevant.”

• The WSJ published a brief, letter to the editor, from CRC president Scott Walter providing additional information about the alleged $1 million payout by SPLC to the supposedly defunct hate group.

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The Federalist—Norm Eisen Frets DOJ Indictment ‘Jeopardizes’ People On SPLC’s ‘Hate List’ (And Payroll)

• CRC’s InfluenceWatch cited:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has long served as an important fixture in the left’s efforts to vilify and attack conservatives. So, it wasn’t exactly surprising when former Obama administration lackey Norm Eisen eagerly defended the group over its allegedly unlawful informant scheme that paid members of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

The moment occurred on Wednesday during a virtual press conference hosted by the Democracy Defenders Fund. Founded and led by Eisen, the left-wing organization launched in 2024 to partake “in legal advocacy opposing Republican efforts to implement changes to election administration and procedures,” according to the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch database.

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Just the News—SPLC’s Double Game: Funding extremists while spending millions to swing Southern elections: While the SPLC was funneling money to extremist group insiders, it was spending lavishly to try to swing elections in the Deep South.

The conservative, nonprofit watchdog group Capital Research Center has long argued that the SPLC has deviated from its original mission and now uses its massive war chest to stoke division and paint benign conservative groups as vectors of hate.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization that has so succeeded in pushing bigots out of the mainstream, that now over 40 years after their founding, they need to constantly find new bigots inside the mainstream to fight against,” the group wrote in 2023. “When there aren’t many left, that means dangerously expanding who is called a bigot.”

The recent indictment alleges that even as the SPLC publicly decried “white supremacy,” it was bankrolling the very figures who could provide the inflammatory social media posts and public controversies the SPLC needed to trigger a constant stream of donations, making it wealthier than many colleges and universities.

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Middle East and Terrorism Blog—SPLC’s Double Game: Funding extremists while spending millions to swing Southern elections

• This report repeated the text from the Just the News report cited above.

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Just the News—Nonprofit Crackdown: Feds target the liberal dark money infrastructure: From the Congress to the Department of Justice and the IRS, the Trump administration and allied lawmakers are examining the anonymity and tax-exempt status enjoyed by some of the most influential progressive organizations in the country.

While the SPLC claims these were legitimate payments for undercover informants to monitor threats, the FBI and DOJ allege the funds were used to ensure that “hate” remained visible enough to justify the SPLC’s mission and purpose.

The scale of the SPLC’s wealth has long been a point of contention for investigative watchdogs.

As of late 2024, the organization’s consolidated financial statements showed nearly $790 million in net assets. The conservative, nonprofit watchdog group Capital Research Center argues that the SPLC has deviated from its original mission and now uses its massive war chest to stoke division and paint benign conservative groups as vectors of hate.