As SPLC Defends Itself from Criminal Charges, Group’s Anti-Gun History Seems Relevant

The Southern Poverty Law Center used lawfare to take down racist groups back in the day. They did a pretty good job of it, too, because few of those groups are as powerful as they used to be.

However, a federal indictment seems to say that because they were so good at their jobs, they had to use donated money to fund enough hate to justify its continued existence.

There’s a bit of interpretation on my part, admittedly, including a lot of bias against the organization that might have started out doing good work, but has since labeled anything right of center as racist or extremist.

Still, the indictment is real, and the allegations are extremely serious.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said a federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was not politically motivated during an appearance Tuesday on “The Ingraham Angle.”

The Alabama-based civil rights group was federally indicted Tuesday on fraud charges and is accused of funneling millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

“That indictment is free for everybody to read, and if the takeaway is that that’s political, I mean, I think the opposite is true,” Blanche told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

…

The group faces charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The SPLC, which uses litigation to fight White supremacy and dismantle extremist groups, performed counter to its mission, Blanche said.

“The very entities that this group was raising money to go against are the very entities that they were taking the money in and paying to these entities and these individuals associated with those groups,” the attorney general told Ingraham.

Blanche claimed SPLC-funded informants helped initiate the deadly Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The SPLC says that it pays confidential informants for information, which isn’t an uncommon practice because law enforcement does it all the time.

However, let’s understand exactly what Blanche is saying, because a lot of outlets are leaving out a very specific and very serious allegation.

Breitbart, however, didn’t.

The SPLC also allegedly “funneled more than $3 million donated funds to individuals who were associated” with groups such as the National Socialist Movement, United Klans of America, and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, between 2014 and 2023, according to the press release.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”

This is genuinely troubling because this is the same Southern Poverty Law Center that has a long and storied history of anti-gun behavior and using their standing as an anti-extremist organization to protect itself from criticism.

Take, for example, a “report” regarding Kyle Rittenhouse back a short time after the shooting in Kenosha. They have a lot of rhetoric from a man who was supposedly “immersed” in racist propaganda who suddenly decided to reach out to the SPLC to tell them just how bad Rittenhouse was and how the SPLC just happened to be completely right about Rittenhouse, the group that went to Kenosha with him, and everything else.

No skepticism at all at this guy’s claims is present. They just took him at face value, even though that’s something they should probably know to be on the lookout for. False confessions for the sake of undermining extremist groups just makes these groups look more righteous, after all, so they should want to vet things better, but nothing about that claim added up.

When Thomas Crooks tried to kill President Trump on the campaign trail in 2024, the SPLC tried to argue that simply being part of the gun culture was a red flag for extremism.

Cam wrote:

Authorities have already said that the gun that was used in the assassination attempt was purchased by the assassin’s father, so we know that there was at least one gun in the home. So what if Matthew Crooks made a single purchase of some kind at a online retailer in the firearms space four years ago. There are literally tens of millions of Americans who’ve done the same. 

The Associated Press, citing law enforcement sources, reported the rifle was purchased by Matthew Crooks at least six months ago.

Seven months ago, a Gmail account using the name Matthew Crooks posted a review for a licensed gun reseller in Nevada called CashMyGuns.com. The reviewer praised the business as “the easiest way to get rid of unwanted firearms” and recommended it to others. 

Multiple data brokers connected that Gmail account to a person named Matthew B. Crooks. Information in the Google profile aligns with Matthew Crooks’ geographic location, showing other reviews for businesses in the Pittsburgh area, including in Bethel Park, where public records and neighbors’ interviews show the Crooks family lives. 

Botach and CashMyGuns.com did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Company officials with authority to answer questions could not immediately be reached.

The purchase record and online posting suggest “gun culture was in the home,” Squire said. “When we see this at SPLC, it just starts setting off a lot of the same flags that we see all day, every day with the folks and groups that we study.”

When they see what, exactly? The purchase of a single firearm? The potential sale of another? 

Exactly. The guy’s dad bought a gun years earlier, and that’s a red flag? Seriously?

But again, they have to manufacture a problem so they can benefit from the outcome. There was nothing about the Crooks family buying a gun years earlier that represented anything, but the SPLC would rather paint millions of Americans as potentially violent extremists because they not just own a gun, but several, rather than just admit that they don’t know everything.

They targeted the Second Amendment sanctuary movement as anti-government extremism, while never having said anything remotely similar about immigration sanctuaries. In fact, groups critical of illegal aliens tend to land on their list of hate groups.

Hell, back in 2015, the SPLC tried to paint Project Appleseed as a bad seed, all because some guy who had been kind of involved briefly years earlier was convicted of murder and of being a pro-militia guy. He’d never been a full-fledged instructor, and when they found out about his views, they bounced him, then took steps to make sure someone like that couldn’t gain a foothold in the organization again, but the SPLC failed to note any of that. 

Now, let’s take a look at the allegations regarding the SPLC and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. You may remember that one counter-protestor was killed when she was hit by a car. The driver was convicted of killing her and went to prison.

However, there were guns aplenty there, and even at least one shot was fired. The indictment says that the SPLC paid money to one of its supposed confidential informants, who was also an organizer for the event itself. 

Following that event, we got a lot of handwringing about how we need gun control in the aftermath. I took issue with Politico’s effort, and The Trace used it to justify an attack on preemption.

In other words, they not only had anti-gun positions, even to the point of outright hypocrisy when compared to their other positions, but are alleged to have funded an extremist rally that was then used to justify gun control by the anti-gun media.

It’s not just the allegations that they were funding the very extremism they supposedly exist to eliminate, but they were also leveraging that to attack our fundamental, constitutionally protected rights. Then again, one could easily argue that’s part of their founding principles as well. Freedom of association is a thing, after all, even if you don’t like why people are associating.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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