Fighting hate—or funding it

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Combating hate.

The Southern Poverty Law Center faces a legal battle after a Grand Jury indictment. It alleges the group told donors their money was being used to fight hate when they were actually funding it.

NICK EICHER, HOST: The group, also known as the SPLC, began as a legal organization and gained notoriety for bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan back in the 1980s. But now DOJ says the SPLC manufactures tensions to keep themselves financially afloat. 

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: When the SPLC was founded in 1971 in Alabama, white supremacy ran deep in many parts of the South. Clinton Johnson is a pastor in Mobile:

CLINTON JOHNSON: The feelings and attitudes of people who choose to hate is deep, it's rich, it's real.

The SPLC took on everything from helping get streets paved in historically black neighborhoods to fighting for more black representation in politics.

Then in 1981, in Mobile, a black 19-year-old named Michael Donald took a late-night trip to buy cigarettes. He never came back. 

The next morning, the town found Donald hanging from a tree.

JOHNSON: I remember being shocked to have lived to experience in my time, firsthand, seeing a body of somebody who looks like me hanging from a tree.

Members of the Ku Klux Klan lynched Donald because a jury deadlocked in the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer.

JOHNSON: It sent a lesson about how important it is to be careful about where you go, what you do, when you do.

Police quickly arrested and convicted Donald’s murderers. But Johnson says the real win came when the SPLC helped Donald’s mother sue and ultimately bankrupt the Klan.

For years, that 1981 victory stood as the gold standard for civil-rights litigation. But the Department of Justice now alleges that in the decades following that landmark case, the SPLC’s relationship with extremist groups shifted from dismantling them to secretly sustaining them.

FBI Director Kash Patel last week:

PATEL: The Southern Poverty Law Center, in a massive, sweeping indictment, has been charged with allegations of fraud and using the banking system to perpetrate that fraud.

According to an unsealed federal indictment, the SPLC engaged in a “clandestine” operation involving bank accounts for fictitious companies.

PATEL: Funds were used to facilitate the commission of further state and federal offenses totaling over 3 million dollars.

The most damning charge involves a paid informant who helped coordinate the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The government alleges the SPLC paid that organizer more than a quarter-million dollars to help plan the event and make racist posts online.

Gene Rossi is a shareholder with the law firm Carlton Fields. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor with the DOJ. He says one set of counts is at least academically clear:

ROSSI: You can't set up fake accounts at a bank, which they did, and you can't lie to the bank about the fake accounts. But would a jury, would a jury convict?

He says the wire fraud counts are less clear cut and will hinge on whether donors knew where their money was going. 

Rossi notes it’s unusual that the DOJ only listed the SPLC in the indictment.

ROSSI: When they indict nonprofits, they usually put in the nonprofit, but they also have one or two or three executives or people in power who were involved.

Prosecutors can add more defendants to the indictment up until the trial date … but if they’re going to, it will likely be within the next month or two.

The Biden administration looked into the SPLC, but closed an investigation. The Trump administration reopened it.

Over the last 20 years, conservatives have criticized the SPLC for using its so-called "hate map" to label any group that disagreed with a far-left agenda.

The SPLC hate map included not only the Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood … but also organizations like Focus on the Family. 

President Jim Daly says Focus was listed last year and lost some funding because of it.

JIM DALY: Fortune 500s, Fortune 1000s, their HR departments, their corporate boards, they look at that list as somehow, some kind of gospel.

Then there’s Moms for Liberty. CEO Tina Descovich says they advocate for parental rights in schools and were put on the list three years ago.

TINA DESCOVICH: We immediately started receiving all kinds of threats and protests at our events.

Other organizations listed include Turning Point USA and Alliance Defending Freedom.

The American Family Association has been on the list for more than a decade. Vice President Walker Wildmon says pro-family values are not “fringe.”

WALKER WILDMON: The problem with all of this is that we've taken political, ideological, and religious differences and we've labeled them hate.

While advocacy groups are legally permitted to label their opponents, this federal case hinges on more than just rhetoric. The government is alleging a systemic criminal enterprise—one that used the same court system the SPLC once championed to instead hide millions in payments to the very extremists it claimed to be fighting.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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