Tucker, The Hustle Thus Exposed?

Commentary

It’s one thing for reporters, podcasters, and authors to write up criticisms and critiques. They have been doing this on the Southern Poverty Law Center for decades. It’s something entirely different when a grand jury in Alabama issues a criminal indictment that is further codified by the U.S. Department of Justice. It finally feels like the end of the line for the SPLC, which has accumulated $822 million in assets, some of which are held in the Cayman Islands.

It is not possible to exaggerate the high place of the SPLC in the conventional thinking of the left in America. They have been the longtime masters of patrolling the country for “hate.” Their fundraising operations have been masterful, constantly feeding paranoia that the United States has a mighty and growing pocket of quasi-Nazis organized in cells and hiding out in cliques, preparing for some kind of coup d’état.

This story taps into everyone’s high school and college education about the rise of the Nazis and how it began in small ways and mutated into a vast killing machine. Never forget, we are told constantly, and be constantly watchful lest the same fate befall the United States. The SPLC was the designated cop on the beat, issuing unrelenting warnings of the dangerous movements among us.

I’ve long had suspicions about their reckless listings of supposed hatemongers. The Klan, the Aryan Nations, the Patriot Front, and so on; all of these are obvious bad guys and deserve calling out. But in the mix, they would also add mainstream conservative organizations and voices. It’s something else to throw into the mix organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Moms for Liberty, and Turning Point USA.

I’ve long been a critic of this kind of thing, and even been a target myself. Some 25 years ago I attended an academic meeting of historians, after which a subset started a new organization called the Southern League. I quickly lost interest in the group because it seemed too quixotic and strange. Still, because I was hanging around, they listed me as a founding member. When the group was called out by the SPLC, I was briefly and unjustly targeted for guilt by association.

So I’ve known about the scam for a very long time. That said, I never could have imagined what the Department of Justice has demonstrated. This is where it gets extremely peculiar. As it turns out, the SPLC had allegedly been paying out millions of dollars to the very individuals and organizations it was listing in its famous Hate Watch newsletter. They were keeping the haters on their own payroll! This is where donor money was going, or so the indictment claims.

Honestly, I’m stunned beyond description to learn of this indictment, even if it seems obvious in retrospect. I suppose I had maintained enough respect for their research to believe some of it even though I should have known otherwise. For example, I wrote a book in 2017 that argued against what I called collectivism on the right. The neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, happened just before going to print, so I put the incident in the introduction to illustrate my point.

The shocking fact we just learned: the SPLC allegedly had one of the organizers of that rally on its payroll and this person (we don’t yet know his name) arranged for logistics and transportation. We are waiting to discover the fullness of the SPLC’s involvement here but it seems that this widely publicized incident that night—with chanting mobs carrying tiki torches—was orchestrated to give the impression of a rising hate movement in America.

It may have all been theater designed for fundraising purposes.

Again, the implications of this are far-reaching if true. This was a headline event that seemed to make the point that American freedom and individual rights were deeply threatened by a quasi-Nazi movement, which (we could easily infer) was somehow a consequence of the rise of the Trump administration. Countless news broadcasters, including the presidential aspirant three years later, would cite the completely bogus claim that Trump had said that there are “good people on both sides” of that protest.

It was never true. Trump specifically condemned the racists and white supremacists. His comment about good people referred to those who did not want the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee torn down. It was a perfectly reasonable point. In any case, it may be the case that the SPLC had been paying the neo-Nazis to exist and stage these events.

Not only that. It’s alleged the SPLC also spread money to many others too, including the National Alliance chairman, the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club of the National Socialist Movement, and many others too. Do you see how this works? They funded both the problem and the supposed solution.

SPLC was the solution to the problem it was funding?

What a metaphor for understanding American life. Not everything is what it seems!

There are other features of the SPLC that tapped deep into American prejudice. For much of American history, the state of Alabama has gotten an unfair rap as the center of racial hate and ignorance. Having lived in many parts of the country, especially New England, for me this bias is obviously persistent. So by locating itself in Alabama at its founding in 1971, it posed as a brave force of resistance in the heart of hate.

All these years later, the racket, if proven, seems very apparent, though more cynical than most of us would ever have been inclined to be. We cannot ourselves imagine being part of such an operation any more than most people can imagine joining a drug cartel. As a result, we come at these things with a kind of naivete, assuming that surely there is some grain of truth in what they say.

Maybe there was a time when the SPLC was sincere and doing good work. I really do not know. But part of the problem here traces to the way nonprofits are forced to raise money to keep their nonprofit status.

The IRS calls this the public support test: at least one-third of an institution’s operating budget must come from the public or government. If not, the institution needs to convert to become a foundation, which gives money away rather than receives donations.

To comply with these strictures, the nonprofit raises money that it does not need for operations and then socks it away in the bank to earn interest and dividends. That money grows and grows and triggers the need for ever more fundraising. This is why these nonprofits hire large teams of professional fundraisers. It becomes a science to them, again, even though they don’t need the money.

Let’s round up and say SPLC has $1B in the bank. At 10 percent interest, they have revenue of $100M. That triggers the public support test: they must raise $50M from donations (100+50/3). The denominator grows and grows and puts ever more pressure on the numerator, which is further capped so that no single donor can account for more than 2 percent of the total.

See what’s going on here? They are absolutely required to send vast pitches to elicit small donations. These regulations create the template; it’s the nonprofit that abuses them.

Every nonprofit (excluding schools and churches) with hundreds of millions and billions in the bank faces the same problem, which leads them into shady fundraising practices. In the case of the SPLC, they may have actually started subsidizing the problems they were promising to fix in order to make their fundraising more compelling.

The Charlottesville riots cost them only a few hundred thousand dollars but earned them millions. Before that rally, they had raised $51 million in revenue. By the same time the following year, they had raised $133 million in revenue. You see how this works? That bump satisfies the public support test but also creates more numerator pressure in the future.

This is very dark stuff and almost impossible to conceptualize. And it also forces a complete rethinking of the political history of the last 10 years. We have been told constantly of the deplorables, the rise of white supremacy, the hegemony of hate, and so on. How much of this is pure political theater in a financial grift? Apparently a substantial amount of it.

Not sure how you are thinking about this but it is going to take me time to intellectually process the full reality of what the Department of Justice is saying here. How much of this sector is a scam and to what extent this racket has shaped public life will take months and years to understand.