On the 21st April this year the US Department of Justice released a statement that said that a Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama had returned an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on 11 charges related to the transfer of $3 million US to individuals involved in various violent extremist groups. These groups include the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation group and the National Socialist Party of America.
It is alleged that this money, much of it obtained from donors who gave the SPLC money to fight things like racial hatred, was used to foment racism in the USA, which would in turn make the SPLC look more needed and necessary. In short, the SPLC is accused of manufacturing racial hatred for political and pecuniary advantage.
Some of this money was allegedly transferred to those involved in the Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstration in 2017 which turned into a public disorder situation that resulted in the death of a woman. This raises the question as to whether or not this event would have taken place in the manner that it did and whether the public disorder that resulted in the death of a woman, might not have occurred had not he SPLC not been fiscally involved in it?
Here’s part of the press release from the US Department of Justice:
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public," said FBI Director Kash Patel. "They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups - even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”
Whilst the indictment concerns the period 2014 to 2023, the statement from the US Department of Justice also mentions that the SPLC has been involved in embedding their people in hostile extremist organisations since the 1980’s. While embedding operatives in dangerous organisations in order to gather intelligence is not in my view completely morally wrong, I do wonder whether investigations spurred by this new indictment might uncover similar behaviour by the SPLC outside of the 2014 – 2023 period?
It’s a standard practise for investigators, police forces and journalists to try to embed their operatives in the organisations that they are interested in but it is a practise that needs careful safeguards, in order that the embedded investigation agents do not create the very problems that they are supposed to be documenting or uncovering. For example it’s one thing for a journalist to get into group X and listen to what is going on in that organisation and a quite different and non-permissible thing for that journalist to take part in what might be illegal or unethical activities that the group being investigated is involved in. There’s a reason, to give but one example, why reporters on the old News of the World paper when investigating some dodgy massage parlour, refused sex by the girls when offered it. ‘I then made my excuses and left’ was the usual form of words, as doing otherwise would have compromised the journalist and his publication both ethically and legally. What the SPLC is accused of doing is the equivalent of the newspaper journalist turning off the tape recorder and enjoying himself with the employees of the dodgy massage parlour. They are accused of encouraging the very crimes and behaviour that they were supposed to be only monitoring or campaigning against.
It’s clear that this case in the US is going to be very very interesting. It could be the one that exposes the astroturfing of so called ‘grass roots’ anti racism organisations and maybe reveal that there may have been less genuine racial hatred in the USA than groups like the SPLC have claimed.
However this case may not only be a parochial issue pertaining only to Americans. Organisations like the SPLC and NGO’s in general can become a transnational issue. It’s quite possible that other ‘anti hate’ organisations and those entities that are opposed to freedom of speech might also have borrowed from the same playbook that the SPLC is alleged to have followed. This could mean that organisations meant to monitor what are called hate groups might have been infiltrated by agents who might have been paid for directly by donations from the public to these anti hate groups or indirectly via grants from the taxpayer. We could be looking at a situation where the actions of some far right organisations might not be as organic as some might claim. It might be the case that far right groups that have kicked off violently might not have done so had not an agent provocateur been embedded in these organisations. This is the sort of question that we need to ask ourselves: How many crimes or instances of incitement might be laid at the feet of far right groups that might have been inspired by embedded operatives from some of these anti-hate NGO’s? At present we do not know but we cannot dismiss it as a possibility.
We might have similar problems in the UK with our ‘anti hate’ and anti free speech groups as the Americans have had with the SPLC. For all we know much of the media noise about ‘hate speech’ for example, at best this ‘noise’ might be either groundless in that it does not credibly foment immediate violence against people and property but has been classified as such by various anti-free speech groups? At worst some of the speech that is being complained about might be completely inauthentic and been put out there by operatives of organisations who have a vested fiscal and ideological interest in seeing ‘hate speech’ instances rise in number.
At present I’ve seen nothing credible to link some of Britain’s anti-free speech or anti-racist groups with the SPLC, although others are claiming otherwise. However I have no knowledge about how trustworthy these sources are. What we might have on the other hand are groups that might be using similar tactics to create problems which might otherwise have been either smaller or non-existent.
With the American government taking a long hard look at their NGO sector and at some of the major entities within that field, such as we’ve seen with this new indictment against the SPLC and the gutting of USAID which was supporting far Left and anti Western groups, shouldn’t Britons be asking for more transparency from our own NGO’s? At present we don’t know if British anti-hatred and anti-free speech groups are behaving honourably and only monitoring the issues they were set up to monitor or if they are creating the problems that they purport to stand against and we really need to be told what is happening.
Link
US Dept of Justice press release regarding the Southern Poverty Law Centre