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.
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.
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.
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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