by Stephen Soukup
Years of allegations of SPLC misconduct, politicized “hate” labeling, and media double standards converge as scrutiny shifts toward corporate accountability.
I hope you’ll forgive me this unorthodoxy, but I’m going to start today with a couple of long quotations from another author, Nathan J. Robinson. The first quote is about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the second is specifically about the SPLC’s much-ballyhooed “Hate Map.” I swear, there’s a point to all of this.
The Southern Poverty Law Center perfectly shows social change done wrong. It was a top-down organization controlled by an incompetent and venal leadership. It was hypocritical in the extreme, preaching anti-racism while fostering a racist internal culture and being led by men whose own commitment to equality was questionable. It didn’t care about listening to and incorporating the viewpoints of the people it was supposed to serve. It was obscenely rich in a time of terrible poverty and squandered much of its considerable wealth. Finally, it picked the wrong political targets and focused on symbolic over substantive change.
The key bit here, of course, is that which tags the SPLC’s leaders—Morris Dees and Richard Cohen—as “men whose own commitment to equality was questionable.” As far back as the late 1980s, the SPLC was identified by various media organizations as a bastion of racial animosity and discrimination. In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser—the SPLC’s hometown paper—published an eight-part series on the center and its leaders, accusing them of various problematic behaviors. The series—which was a Pulitzer finalist in 1995—was based on more than three years of investigation, and it “found a litany of problems and questionable practices at the SPLC, including a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who ‘likened the center to a plantation’; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money not on programs but on raising more money; and paying its top staffers (including Dees and Cohen) lavish salaries.”
As for the SPLC’s vaunted Hate Map, which liberals and the mainstream media love and which has produced the bulk of the center’s hundreds of millions of dollars in fundraising over the last few years, Robinson puts it this way:
The biggest problem with the hate map, though, is that it’s an outright fraud. I don’t use that term casually. I mean, the whole thing is a willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC. The SPLC reported this year that the number of hate groups in the country is at a “record high,” that it is the “fourth straight year” of hate group growth, and that this growth coincides with Donald Trump’s rise to power. . . .
This whole SPLC set-up strikes me as fraudulent in the extreme . . . They’re perpetrating a deception. . . . The SPLC has continuously sent out terrifying lies to make old people part with their money. They’ve become fantastically wealthy from telling people that individual kooks in Kennesaw are “hate groups” on the march. And they’ve done far less with the money they receive than any other comparable civil rights group will do. To me, this is a scam bordering on criminal mail fraud.
So, here’s the thing about these quotations from Robinson. They were written seven years ago. And they were hardly the only ones. In 2019, a handful of publications (in addition to Robinson’s Current Affairs) published long and detailed profiles of the SPLC and its recently fired founder, Dees. The overwhelming majority of these profiles were written by leftist authors and were printed by leftist publications. Robinson himself is a leftist, a “libertarian socialist” who idolizes Noam Chomsky. Likewise, The New Yorker’s brutal takedown of the SPLC was written by Bob Moser, a gay, self-described “liberal,” who worked at the center for three years.
Tyler O’Neil, the star investigative reporter for the Daily Signal, wrote the definitive account of the SPLC’s corruption and misconduct, first in a series of articles for his then-employer, PJMedia, and then in his critically acclaimed book, Making Hate Pay. Like the others, O’Neil documented the center’s malfeasance (albeit in far greater detail) but also explained how its dumbing down of the term “hate” damaged American politics and exacerbated the polarization between Left and Right, Democrats and Republicans. Dees, Cohen, and the rest were primarily interested in making money—gobs and gobs of money—and they didn’t care whom they hurt in the process.
O’Neil was—and still is—dismissed by the media and political elites because he is a conservative and works for an unabashedly conservative publication. As the likes of Nathan Robinson, Bob Moser, and the Montgomery Advertiser show, however, the bias at play here was not O’Neil’s. He didn’t say anything that leftists hadn’t already said. He just said it louder, more clearly, and in greater detail.
And that, in turn, is the point I promised to make at the top of this column. As you may know, last Tuesday, the Justice Department announced an indictment of the SPLC for wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters that “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public. 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.”
In response, the very same media and political elites who dismissed O’Neil have reacted in one of three ways. Some have replied with shock and horror at the revelations. Others have focused on the difficulty the DOJ will have in proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And still others have decided that the whole thing is partisan and that they should, therefore, defend the SPLC at all costs. None of them, however, has done the right thing. None of them has acknowledged the truth: that the SPLC is irredeemably corrupt, and everyone has known it for years. To be clear, the SPLC’s alleged criminality is mostly new information, but the organization’s propensity to misuse donor funds and to exaggerate threats for its own benefit has been common knowledge for years.
The bad news here is that none of the “reporters” or politicians who are feigning shock or, worse still, going to war for the SPLC will ever be punished for their support of this repeatedly discredited enterprise, despite knowing full well that it has long been corrupt and dishonest. Our bifurcated political culture (which the SPLC helped foment) makes that a near impossibility. To many on the Left, providing the other “side” with such aid and comfort would be far worse than anything the SPLC ever did.
The good news is that the accountability story doesn’t have to end there. The institutions that should have held the SPLC accountable have abdicated their responsibilities, but that’s hardly a surprise. Fortunately, there are other levers. Five years ago, I wrote the book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital to address this specific issue and to warn that business and capital markets were at risk of being overrun by ideology and politics, just as the media, education, entertainment, and the arts already had been.
In my book, I cited many of the above authors, especially O’Neil, in my chapter on Amazon, one of the three companies I highlighted for its politicization and misuse of shareholder resources. At the time, Amazon used the SPLC to determine the nonprofit organizations eligible to participate in its “Smile” program, which enabled customers to direct 0.5 percent of eligible purchase prices to the nonprofit of their choice. Given the SPLC’s record and biases, this meant that Amazon was effectively discriminating against mainstream conservative organizations. While publicly proclaiming its dedication to fairness, equity, and environmental justice, the company was actively engaged in advancing an overtly political agenda.
Amazon no longer operates its Smile program, but it has not, to date, disavowed its use of the SPLC or the damage that the center did to legitimate charities. This year, the Heritage Foundation (one of my employers) submitted a shareholder proposal to Amazon, asking the company to evaluate its charitable partners, specifically for this reason:
Amazon relied on SPLC data to vet charities in its former AmazonSmile program, resulting in the removal of groups such as D. James Kennedy Ministries and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in 2017 and 2018. This practice raises concerns among shareholders regarding whether Amazon continues to use SPLC data in other facets of its corporate practice and the potential reputational risks of doing so. Continued support for the SPLC may be perceived as endorsement of its controversial practices, potentially harming Amazon’s brand value and, by extension, its market value.
Amazon, naturally, recommended that its shareholders vote against this proposal, even as it ignored the SPLC question entirely. Shareholders have not yet had their say on this matter. (Amazon’s annual meeting will take place on May 20.) Nevertheless, the board’s unwillingness even to address the SPLC question is telling. Other companies—including, for example, Salesforce, whose founder, Marc Benioff, was also featured in my book—reacted with horror at even the possibility of being associated with the SPLC and negotiated with Heritage to fix the problem. As Heritage noted at the time, it withdrew its proposal because “Salesforce has agreed to discontinue use of the SPLC’s tools—including its controversial ‘hate map’—and has directed Benevity, the corporate giving and employee engagement platform it uses, not to rely on SPLC lists when administering services for Salesforce.”
Amazon and others have a problem. Shareholders are the beneficial owners of publicly traded companies, and they have rights. If Amazon’s executives and directors are unwilling to disclose whether they still do business with the SPLC in response to a proposal, then shareholders can—and likely will—pursue other remedies, including voting against retaining directors and against executive pay packages and even perhaps filing breach of duty claims against the company’s leaders.
No publicly traded company should be doing business with or supporting the SPLC—and that was true long before the indictment. The institutions that should have spoken up previously failed to do so. The people who actually own the companies, however, still can.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/28/holding-the-splc-accountable/
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