What the Southern Poverty Law Center has done to America’s racial and cultural cohesion is just the tip of the spear. Environmental groups and their enablers have inflicted equivalent damage.
“Progressive” politicians, activists and journalists have long extolled the SPLC as the epitome of virtue and justice, “a vigilant voice in civil society against radical white nationalist violence and extremism, neo-Nazism, and other forces.”
They’ve joined the SPLC in falsely accusing President Trump of seeking to “undermine civil society organizations” and “reduce our ability to defend ourselves against the virus of racial violence.” They’ve smeared other people and organizations with equally baseless and inflammatory allegations.
The Center’s shiny veneer has now been scraped off, revealing a wealthy, vicious, politicized, corrupt institution whose stock-in-trade is defamation and race-baiting. In 2019, it fired co-founder Morris Dees for his alleged complicity in racial discrimination, sexual harassment and a toxic workplace environment.
Now a Department of Justice investigation and 11-count grand jury indictment alleges that the SPLC has been engaging in fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and other high crimes, misdemeanors and hateful actions.
It appears the Montgomery, Alabama-based Center was funding the very hatred it repeatedly denounced. According to the indictment and Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist and extremist groups.” It even gave money to a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the DOJ says.
It created bank accounts in the names of “at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose.” The money was passed from SPLC “to one sham account, to a second sham account, and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to members of extremist groups,” including people who planned the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, VA.
In effect, the SPLC lit the racial fires, fanned the flames, and then arrived like a white knight to extinguish the inferno and Save the Republic. It then used the widely publicized incidents to persuade corporations, foundations and other donors to fund its “vital civil rights” work: Apple, JPMorgan Chase, George and Amal Clooney, $1 million each; Google, $250,000; little guys, $25-500 … right after Charlottesville.
Left-leaning investigative journalist Ken Silverstein revealed 25 years ago that “the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising – $5.76 million last year – as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses.”
Donors cannot say they weren’t forewarned about SPLC’s activities or the likely consequences.
A white supremacist used his car to kill a young woman in Charlottesville. After the SPLC labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group,” an actual hater tried to gun down FRC employees at its headquarters. A year after it added Turning Point, USA to its “hate group” list, next to the KKK and neo-Nazis, a “transgender activist” murdered Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University.
Just as troubling, the defamatory accusations, destroyed reputations, sleazy fundraising, and endless media and political campaigns against perceived enemies are not limited to racial matters. The tactics and incidents are just as common in the climate and environmental arena.
Collude and plan with like-minded organizations and funders. Inflame impressionable students and adults with junk science, fearmongering and outright lies. Accuse companies and fossil fuels of climate change, species extinction, toxic pollution and planetary ecocide. Advance laws, regulations and verdicts that delay and bankrupt essential projects. Encourage and excuse disruptive and violent action against them. Raise billions of dollars. Avoid any accountability.
Retain tax-exempt status as an “educational” or “public interest” organization. Enjoy lavish media, political and Hollywood praise. Raise more money.
As of 2022, more than 77,000 U.S. environmental groups were registered with the Internal Revenue Service, according to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics. Their cumulative assets were well north of $200 billion.
A vanishingly small amount of this came from membership dues and individual contributions. The financing comes largely from corporations, government agencies, lawsuit settlements and foreign governments, natural resources policy expert Greg Walcher reports.
But the vast bulk of the money comes from private foundations with familiar names: Pew Charitable Trusts, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett Foundation, Packard Foundation, Walton Family Foundation – all of which, like the recipients, profit mightily from America’s generous tax code and tax dodges.
And ironically, Greg observes, much of that funding originated with successful industrialists and corporations – whose descendants now support organizations dedicated to destroying the very industries and free-market economic system that created their wealth.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (Intel computer chip money) gave $100 million to block Alaska’s Pebble Mine, which would have developed a worldclass deposit of six billion tons of copper, gold, molybdenum, silver, rhenium, palladium and other critical minerals essential for computer, defense, aviation, medical, communication and other technologies.
Environmental groups claimed development would have harmed local waters and fisheries. Of course, they oppose nearly every US mining project, but don’t care about child labor in African mines.
They are perpetually silent about the local, national and global impacts that their “renewable” energy “solution” to the climate “crisis” inflicts on lands, wildlife and people: from covering millions of acres with solar panels, bird-butchering wind turbines and transmission lines; from the mining, quarrying, processing and manufacturing needed to build those installations; from having to build backup power plants and grid-scale, fire-prone battery installations for windless, sunless periods; from heart and other human health problems due to infrasound from wind turbines; and countless other issues.
They ignore the often deadly consequences that result from their Net Zero policies and obsession with climate change, mostly as an excuse for near-criminal malfeasance and mismanagement: mostly elderly people dying because they can’t heat their homes properly in wintertime or cool them sufficiently during heat waves; families burned to death because they couldn’t escape raging infernos in overgrown forests; millions dying from poverty, malnutrition and disease in countries that still don’t have electricity.
The foundations, trial lawyers and foreign entities also fund climate lawfare and third-party litigation –hundreds of lawsuits against US energy companies, over climate change, pipelines and other specious issues, with the result, if not the goal, of destroying businesses, jobs, affordability and living standards.
About the only accountability we’ve seen thus far is Greenpeace being held liable for defamation and malicious destruction of property over the Dakota Access Pipeline – and ordered to pay Energy Partners $345 million in damages.
Congress, the Justice Department, and state legislatures and attorneys general should investigate these organizations, examine their financial dealings, and remove their phony science and civil rights materials from schools. Where appropriate, prosecute them under RICO and other laws. Above all, perhaps, revoke their nonprofit, tax-exempt status.
Injured parties should sue for defamation and damages. Be creative. A lot of juries are fed up with these destructive antics.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.