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The Indictment Beneath the Indictment: SPLC's Strategy for Silencing Americans

When federal prosecutors finally brought down Al Capone, it wasn’t for murder, extortion, racketeering, or the violence that defined his criminal empire. It was for tax evasion. The charge was real. The conviction was legitimate. But no serious student of history believes tax evasion told the whole story of Capone’s criminal empire. It was simply the charge prosecutors believed they could most readily prove. Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center stands federally indicted on charges involving bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Those charges are serious. But for those familiar with the SPLC’s destructive path, the indictment is just the tip of the iceberg of what appears to have been a much broader system of coordinated influence and institutional coercion.

First, I want to commend the FBI and the Department of Justice for their investigation and indictment. I am sure there are some here today who spent time with the FBI during this investigation. I spent considerable time with them explaining SPLC’s work and how their influence in the financial world impacted us as a Christian nonprofit.

With the indictment of SPLC, which has been the Left’s vanguard in their attack on conservative organizations who stood in their way, cowardly corporate figures who kowtowed to SPLC are starting to talk. So, we are learning more.

But there are several realities we need to understand.

Recognizing that traditional hate organizations like the Ku Klux Klan were drying up, the SPLC adjusted its business model by appointing itself as the national arbiter of “hate.” Leveraging its storied reputation from the civil rights era, it expanded its targets far beyond violent extremist groups.

The first reality we need to understand is this: although the indictment focused on SPLC’s money-raising scheme, SPLC’s real focus was its institutional influence on government, media, and corporate America.

Over time, SPLC hate and extremist classifications evolved into far more than media narratives. Their labels increasingly became a form of reputational risk assessment used by banks, payment processors, technology companies, financial compliance systems, law enforcement, media organizations, and even elements of the federal government.

The jewel of the SPLC operation was its Intelligence Project, which became deeply influential as the government, media, and finally financial institutions used their biased data in determining which organizations were viewed as acceptable participants in the financial and digital marketplace.

In November of 2010, the first wave of Christian organizations was placed on the SPLC hate map and hate list, with Family........

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