We discovered 15 years ago SPLC was “creating fictitious hate so that they could then fundraise off of it”
My appearance on the Scott Jennings Radio Show: “Joining us now to discuss this indictment is Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson… He’s been sounding the alarm on the SPLC for 15 years.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been a focus of ours since 2009. We were against SPLC before it was cool to be against SPLC.
I was against SPLC before it was cool to be against SPLC – my first post slamming their tactics was October 31, 2009, when they called @carolmswain an “apologist for white supremacists” – Since then over 50 posts: "If all the SPLC has left is the race card, it needs to find a… pic.twitter.com/s9U4tvUeVU
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 22, 2026
We uncovered multiple instances where its Hate Map showed Klan and Nazi groups in Rhode Island which didn’t appear to exist in real life.
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 22, 2026
But that was not all. We covered their inflated statistics and how they manufactured groups and branches of what often was only an entry on a website somewhere. So while I didn’t expect the level of criminality alleged in the recent indictment, I knew these were bad people doing bad things. That the Indictment alleges they helped organize and promote the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville is mind boggling – they helped create an event that changed the course of our political history, and then raised funds off of it.
It all makes sense now – me in 2017 – "Southern Poverty Law Center money machine cashes in on Charlottesville" cc @ScottJenningsKY pic.twitter.com/qLvHLobhuj
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 22, 2026
I got a chance to discuss my background with SPLC and the federal indictment of SPLC on the Scott Jennings Radio Show today:
Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity).
Jennings:
Joining us now to discuss this indictment is Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson. He is the founder of the Equal Protection Project, and he’s been sounding the alarm on the SPLC for 15 years. We have the expert on the SPLC right here on the Scott Jennings Show, professor Jacobson, thanks for your time. What was your reaction when you saw this indictment last night?
WAJ:
Not real surprised. Obviously, I was surprised that there was criminality going on at SPLC, but I’ve known about them for actually more than 15 years.
When I was young and naive and in college in the late seventies, I actually donated to them because I believed in what they said their mission was, which was to fight violent hate groups. That morphed over time.
And by the time I started following them, when I started my website, legal Insurrection in 2009, they were already attacking people. Carol Swain, they’ve attacked Dr. Ben Carson. They’ve attacked Rand Paul. They’ve attacked the Family Research Council. They’ve attacked Moms for Liberty, and they brand them as racist hate groups or racist hate people, and it has a huge political impact.
But what got my curiosity up more than anything is I’m from Rhode Island, and I remember in 2010 on one of their hate maps, they showed a Klan group in Rhode Island. And that kind of surprised me because I’d never heard of that. And I looked into it and there was no evidence of it. They had, apparently by everything I could tell, fabricated a hate group for their hate map in Rhode Island in 2010.
And then they did it again in 2012, they listed a neo-Nazi group in Rhode Island. I’m saying, I’ve never heard of this. I mean, who are these people? I even contacted the State Police Hate Crimes Bureau. They’d never heard of any neo-Nazi groups in, I think it was North Providence.
And so I realized back then that what they were doing is they were creating fictitious hate so that they could then fundraise off of it.
And that’s really what soured me on them. And I looked into them many times over many years, how they marketed themselves, how they would inflate the number of hate groups for their annual hate map, their annual hate map is their big fundraising tool.
And what they would do is they would find a mention on a website of some group, and all of a sudden that goes on the map, whether the group exists or not. When they found a group for argument’s sake, some group in some state and on that website they list 30 chapters. Now all of a sudden you’ve got 31 hate groups. Whether they exist or not, they might just be a blip on some computer someplace.
And so I really began to look into it, and I found out that this was, in many ways, I think could be fairly characterized as a fundraising scam outfit, that they would inflate their numbers, they would create groups.
Nonetheless, throughout this time period, I never thought they would engage in the sort of criminality that’s alleged to have been committed by them in this most recent indictment.
Jennings:
Obviously you were surprised by the criminality, but having gone through it, as you look ahead to a trial here, could they be convicted? And also, I know they charged the SPLC, but they didn’t charge individuals with the SPLC. Did that surprise you?
WAJ:
Well, this is not the end of the story. There may be a superseding indictment, I would expect that might happen. What’s alleged here is not the way it’s being portrayed in much of the mainstream media. They are being charged with criminality, money laundering, wire fraud, lying to banks which investigated them.
So this is alleged criminality. This is not just bad characters who are smearing people, although certainly they are bad characters who smear people.
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Comments
It’s bad enough that its fake.
What is 1000x worse is their customers prefer the narrative, knowing it’s fake to a drab reality.
SPLC such a fraud.
Lock them up.
There is so much fraud in this country , so many people and organizations stealing from the American taxpayers
Just imagine the amount of money each hard working citizen would have in their bank account, or invested if the world hadn’t been stealing from us for a hundred years?
Pretty disgusting
Please DOJ send one of these bastards to prison, this fraud of hate groups is like the Reichstag fire, it’s insane that so many Dems knew about it and said nothing
Said nothing? They were a part of it!
Turning on one of them is like turning on all of them. Their house of cards is about to be subjected to a stiff wind.
Seems to be rare they ever put anyone in prison if they’re well connected politically. It would be a nice start to get rid of the country club federal prisons and make the criminals do hard time.
Might make a few of them shy away from a life in the democrap criminal enterprise machine.
Similarly, it was recently publically acknowledged that marijuana has no proven medicinal benefit. The whole medical applications edge was used as the thin edge to get more and more reforms in place to where we now have people (illegally) just walking around the hood smoking doobies. Rather than helping disease, it has led to even more addiction and societal dysfunction and mental illness. When this was proposed thirty years ago, a highly regarded surgeon commented that “it was factitious treatment for factitious disorders.” So this weeks revelations came as no surprise.
Follow the money, always.
Progressivism is primarily a religion trying to get as much hedonism going as possible.
Let’s be fair: they are a death cult that uses hoaxes, propaganda, lies, misinformation and lawfare to achieve their goals.
In other words Democrat socialists. Nobody will ever accuse them of being conservative. Never, except in a last desperate attempt at projection.
The Dem socialists have not done a single thing to help this country since PRESIDENT Trump was reelected. In power or out, they are the Fifth Columnists, the domestic terrorists, the scourge that should be removed from all the levers of government.
It just relaxes people and helps them zone out. They smoke a joint instead of drinking alcohol and feel all righteous about themselves and their “medicine” even though they’re not fixing anything, just escaping reality. At low levels it does help with nausea, I had a neighbor with leukemia who used it successfully, allowing him to eat and keep his weight stable but it didn’t do a damned thing for his cancer.
There’s soebody here (rhardin?) who continually argues that people shouldn’t have to claim “freedom of religion” every time they need to “be allowed” to escape a government mandate, they should be able to claim “freedom.” Same argument for MJ.
A glass of wine each day has health benefits for the heart. Is this the reason we’re “allowed” to take “cocktail cruises,” and snarf Jello shots off coeds’ navels during Spring Break? No, it’s because we’re free consenting adults and we want to. And that should be all that’s necessary for MJ.
So, not only was the self-righteous mantra invoked by corrupt/sleepy Joe Biden for his 2020 election campaign (restoring the “soul” of America) and his self-righteous moral crusade based on a totally contrived, domestic psy-op/false flag operation (the “United the Right” rally), funded and organized by the wretched SPLC, but, the vile Dhimmi-crats then proceeded to lie about President Trump’s response to that psy-op/false flag op, with the brazen “Very fine people” hoax and distortion.
Layer upon layer of brazen mendacity and deceit were employed by the Dhimmi-crats to influence the 2020 presidential election outcome, combined with pervasive ballot fraud and shenanigans, just to ensure Biden’s victory.
The Charlottesville rally was not “a totally contrived, domestic psy-op/false flag operation (the “United the Right” rally), funded and organized by the wretched SPLC”.
Nor was it a neo-nazi or white supremacist event.
One of the people involved in the online discussions for organizing the event turned out to be a paid SPLC informant. As far as we know that was the extent of its involvement. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that this individual even contributed any money to the event, let alone that that money came from the SPLC.
The event was, as President Trump said at the time, a legitimate protest against the statue removal, which attracted some very fine people, as well as some very nasty people. The leftist counterprotest also attracted both very fine people and very nasty ones.
And it was the nasty people at the counterprotest who initiated the violence that day. The nasty people at the rally eagerly jumped at the chance to engage in violence, but they didn’t start it. And the very fine people on both sides just watched in horror.
And the SPLC then raised a lot of money out of it.
Correct except for the leftist counterprotest having fine people. If they’re so fine how do they end up on the Left?
As the President said, and as anyone observing could easily see, the majority of those who turned out to protest against the rally were good, decent people who are anti-racist and were there to peacefully oppose white supremacy, antisemitism, the Klan, the Nazis, and all those terrible elements who were absolutely present at the rally. These people had a legitimate point of view, just as did all the equally good and decent people who turned out to peacefully oppose removing the statue. If only the decent people on both sides had turned out, there would have been no problems.
Based Jacobson knows the score.
For years the FBI has been cooking up hate and extremism hoaxes to score woke points using paid informants and provocateurs. The SPLC taught them.
Do you seriously think the FBI needed the SPLC to teach them? Maybe it was the other way around.
Outsourced it to them.
Plausible deniability
Yes. Prior to the SPLC partnering with the FBI post-OKC, the FBI used informants to do just that, inform. Post-OKC, the SPLC provided the intel on not only suitable informants but also on how to turn them into provocateurs. The FBI scored woke points and the SPLC scored donor dollars every time a hate “plot” was uncovered. The retards who fell for these went to prison.
This isn’t even close to being true. The FBI have been doing this since at least the 1960s, and almost certainly much longer.
You’re one of those people who always has to be right, aren’t you…
Well, you’re wrong again. FBI use of agents provocateur to concoct terrorist and hate crime plots didn’t become common until after OKC and routine until after 9/11. You managing to find some similar case from the 1960s doesn’t change that post-OKC prominence. I’ve been following the SPLC’s moves for 35 years based on publicly available information and have personally witnessed their use of informants and provocateurs in private interactions. I’ve personally witnessed the outing of SPLC-sponsored informants and provocateurs working in league with the FBI.
In the years following OKC and 9/11 the SPLC worked so closely with the FBI the relationship was publicly described as a “partnership.” Things remained that way until Trump’s first term when the relationship began to turn cold due to the SPLC’s targeting of conservative organizations. They started to warm again in Biden’s term and have since gone cold again.
Cointelpro:
My elder Sis lived and worked in Vermont for about a decade as an RN after graduating from St. Joseph’s Nursing School in Syracuse, NY. After that she returned to Syracuse, where she worked the rest of her career.
Now, decades ago she noticed something curious, which she shared with me in passing, that the SPLC was reporting wayyyyy more “hate group” activity in Vermont – a very liberal state – than she thought actually existed.
Peg herself was also way more liberal than myself – so I was very prepared to believe her when she told me that to her knowledge the SPLC report on Vermont was garbage. She had looked into it, and discovered they’d listed individual nutcases and inactive / name-changed groups as if multiple active groups. To her personal knowledge one lone nut who published several racist newsletters they were listing as several multi-member active groups.
So even to a confirmed Lib (with on-the-ground data) (years later she was a Bernie Bro) it was obvious that someone was manufacturing fictional hate group supply to meet the wanted hate group demand.
I grew up in VT. When I look at their map I see groups listed I’ve never heard of or seen evidence of. They once showed a group there, can’t remember what they called it, based in my hometown of 1,000 people. Pretty damn sure I’d have heard of a group in a town that size. I know they are making crap up for money. In fact, at one point they had over $100 Million stashed overseas and still have $30 Million in the Caymans. Why do they have money there?
This is the opening salvo in reigning in organizations abusing their tax privileges. For years 501c3’s and c4’s have continually violated their obligations under those tax codes. The left lives by these NGO’s doing the dirty work of tainting conservatives with the stench of racism. Media Matters should be next on the list.
Never forget this . This fraud would never have come to the forefront without Trump as president. NO other Republican president would have brought this forward
There aren’t many Amy Waxes or Heather MacDonalds. All this moronic palaver ginning nonsensical battles is for female consumption.
Its been questionable for over 30 years. The problem has always been getting anyone in power to do something.
May I suggest that they didn’t change, you did. That they were always the same phonies they are today, but your eyes are now more open than they were then.
It’s depressing that it took 15 years to strip down the SPLC.
In 1994 when Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to win the House for the first time in 4 decades there emerged claims of Republicans as racists. USA Today ran a front page story claiming an huge increase of black church burnings and blamed the Republicans. The author of the piece essentially retracted it about 3 months later but it wasn’t on the front page. (In fact it turned out that there was no spate of church burnings black or white.) We heard at the time that the SPLC was the main group pushing the fraudulent story. I recall reports that they had raised 25 million(70 million in today’s dollars) from the fraud.
I heard it was an insurance scam.
No, there was a spate of church burnings, but they were unconnected, and all kinds of churches were burned — black, white, and mixed.
tbonesays, some of the burnings were for insurance. Most were for other reasons. The main point, however, was that there was not some racist movement out there targeting black churches. Churches were burning and some of them were black. The news industry chose to report on those fires and not on all the others.
Activists group exist to perpetuate and enrich themselves. They might have once started with good intentions but that will quickly morph once the money starts rolling in. The last thing they will ever want is to declare victory over their cause and then go home.
What leave and have to work a real job, That’s hard!
I believe this is the case for all activists groups for all causes.
I always wondered where that Charlottesville rally came from. Who were those people? Why did I never hear about them before? Now everything is explained.
At the same time, I think the DOJ is overreaching. A political activist organization secretly funding its opposition to create political theater may be shady, but I don’t see how it can be illegal. SPLC’s job is promoting Leftist causes. Their donors got their money’s worth. Nobody was defrauded. And Intelligence Agencies funding both sides so they fight in the streets happens all the time. That is how color revolutions are staged.
Maybe the case will finally test the limits of mail fraud/wire fraud. When private people do private business the federal gov should not have jurisdiction. But if they found one thing a person said to be misleading then they could charge them under federal statutes.
It wasn’t “misleading”. SPLC created fake identities and used them to create fake bank accounts. Which is a violation of black letter law.
Their paid informants (i.e. employees) actually bought materials for the hate groups that were used in the commission of crimes. That is classic aiding and abetting – I don’t have to rob the bank, just drive them to the bank and pick them up, with knowledge that they were planning to rob it.
The SPLC is NOT the police.
Look at the specific charges, not what the press is saying. Almost all of it has to do with bank fraud, money laundering, and wire fraud. The problem was how they went about paying their employees, i.e. informants. They also utilized the funds to facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes by hate groups. They also defrauded donors – saying the money was going to fight groups the SPLC financially supported. I think those last two charges won’t stick, but the first three are slam dunks.
“In order to covertly pay the individuals, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts. ”
The federal government is allowed to do this stuff with informants and witness protection. The SPLC most definitely is NOT allowed to do this. No private entity is. Someone there watched too many cop shows.
Most of the organizers were well known before the rally. There had been a lot of reporting about the “alt-right” (and almost none about the ctrl-left) and these people were prominent in that.
SPLC donor
Chick-Fil-a
Chick- Fil-a….what a scam as the sons took over their fathers business
Shame shame shame
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/04/23/far-left-splcs-donors-include-george-clooney-tim-cook-george-soros-and-chick-fil-a/
“Now all of a sudden you’ve got 31 hate groups. Whether they exist or not, they might just be a blip on some computer someplace.”
My guess – their paid “informant” in the group added the chapters to the website. I mean, why not?
I remember Charlottsville, and how it all seemed to phony to me. I’ve traveled and worked all over the country and had a hard time remembering anyone saying or doing anything racist for years now. And organized hate group? Unite the Right? WTF?
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