The SPLC is most famous in conservative circles for being one of, or perhaps the biggest funder of, the hate groups it claimed to fight.
It was so tight with the hate groups that it committed bank fraud to fund them, laundered donor money to subsidize recruiters, and one of its key employees was literally living and sleeping with a white supremacist.
It is also the NGO that helped the left create what amounts to a Stasi that socially, politically, and financially isolated and tried to destroy legitimate conservative groups that were labeled potential terrorists and hence kicked out of the financial system. And the targets it focused on most were Christian conservative groups, presumably because they reached the most politically motivated conservative population in the country.
What made the SPLC so powerful and not just evil was its institutional ties with the Democrat Party, government institutions such as the FBI, and its ability to use its hate map as a "do not fund, and do not do business with" list that cut off a group's access to the American financial system.
The same group that committed bank fraud to funnel money to hate groups also labeled legitimate conservative organizations and individuals as too dangerous to do business with, and the FBI backed them up and used them as a source to bring down the weight of the federal government on innocent people.
It was the enablers of a Stasi, and nobody but the victims knew they were targeted. Most Americans were convinced by the media and the prestigious government institutions that the SPLC was a definitive source for institutional legitimacy.
Why would America's biggest banks let the Southern Poverty Law Center decide who gets a bank account? Because the @splcenter made a business out of leveraging the accusation that white, religious conservative were racists. This puts the bank at a crossroads: risk the racist charge or dissociate from these racists. The SPLC began this witch hunt of sorts by putting mainstream Christian groups on the "hate map" along with KKK groups. And the banks never checked to see if these groups were truly racist or not. Seeing them on the "hate map" was enough. As the federal review revealed, "mere allegations" were enough, "even in the absence of any validation of the underlying facts." An employee from PNC said, "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values." That's not risk management. That's the white guilt terror of being called a racist, a bigot, a hater, written into bank policy.
— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) October 24, 2026
Why would America's biggest banks let the Southern Poverty Law Center decide who gets a bank account?
Because the @splcenter made a business out of leveraging the accusation that white, religious conservative were racists. This puts the bank at a crossroads: risk the racist charge or dissociate from these racists.
The SPLC began this witch hunt of sorts by putting mainstream Christian groups on the "hate map" along with KKK groups. And the banks never checked to see if these groups were truly racist or not. Seeing them on the "hate map" was enough. As the federal review revealed, "mere allegations" were enough, "even in the absence of any validation of the underlying facts."
An employee from PNC said, "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values."
That's not risk management. That's the white guilt terror of being called a racist, a bigot, a hater, written into bank policy.
No doubt banks and donor-directed nonprofits are filled with woke liberals who would rather not fund conservative groups, even if their clients want them to, but even if they wanted to be objective, the SPLC and the FBI made clear that their own standing was at risk if they did business with disfavored groups.
According to an Oct. 14 report from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, a federal bureau within the U.S. Treasury Department that regulates the nation’s banks, the SPLC’s bigot-flagging operations were politically influencing debanking decisions at major financial institutions across the country, including PNC Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank.
The 47-page report said the SPLC played a key role in the debanking of, as well as the denial of financial services to, conservative clients wanting to support Christian groups or individuals financially.
But just last year, the SPLC published a “Hatewatch” memo claiming that institutional debanking of the religious Right was an imaginary threat existing only in the minds of Christian supremacists called “dominionists,” those who believe that Christians are “called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society” by taking control of all institutions.
In particular, the SPLC alleged that the “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group” Alliance Defending Freedom, a mainstream Christian conservative legal firm known for taking up religious rights cases, was pushing these “conspiratorial claims of Christian victimhood.”
This unfounded alarmism, the SPLC claimed, centered on a belief that banks were colluding with government regulators to deny or strip Christians of access to financial services.
It turns out, however, that many of the banks highlighted in the Treasury report were regularly basing their decisions to debank certain disfavored customers on the SPLC’s classification of “hate groups” operating in America.
A bulk of the organizations and individuals named in the SPLC’s “Extremist Files” are actually moderate conservative commentators, charities, and activists whose beliefs fit well within mainstream conservative positions.
Its work of “tracking hate” was called into further question earlier this year when the SPLC was criminally indicted in April on wire fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly defrauding donors out of millions of dollars. Prosecutors say the SPLC manufactured “hate” to boost its lucrative Nazi-busting business by paying operatives to embed themselves in neo-Nazi groups, some that were already dwindling in numbers and had been effectively bankrupted by the SPLC.
Probably the most important institutional support was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which not only gave the organization an implicit seal of approval, but also an explicit one. It used the SPLC as a definitive authority upon which to base investigations, training, and public information campaigns that claimed that Christians and white supremacists were the biggest domestic terrorism threat.
Banks, using vague "reputational risk" criteria driven by their own left-wing employees, systematically debanked conservatives, and aggressively so under the Biden administration.
A report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found over 100,000 complaints about debanking and other restrictions by major banks, and tens of thousands of documents on the vague criteria and activism within the banks to destroy conservatives.
Very few Pravda media have even covered the revelations, for obvious reasons, although CBS did cover the story (thanks, Bari!). As usual, they claim anything associated with Trump is obviously a lie. The reality is that the SPLC is deeply tied to the media, directly as a source, and indirectly as belonging to the same class of elites.
The SPLC, of course, was a key part of the censorship complex the Biden administration and the media drove. In many ways, it was a keystone to the censorship industrial complex, along with the FBI and the public health authorities, all of whom pushed hard to suppress dissent.
Indirectly, the SPLC and its ideological allies have significantly affected independent media. We have been targets of the same sort of suppression by being labeled "unsafe," and we get punished for challenging the Narrative™. Search engines explicitly deboost some stories, and news aggregators actively push left-wing narratives. I just saw an NGO ranking Drop Site News, a viciously anti-Israel "news" site, as one of the most factually accurate news sources in the media ecosystem.
Debanking, suppressing donations, and delegitimizing the messaging of conservative groups by tying them all to the explicitly racist groups that the SPLC was secretly and illegally financially backing made the SPLC one of the most powerful groups in the country in the fight against conservatives.
And the FBI and liberal politicians gave them the institutional cover and backing to do this. And I can tell you, it works in most cases. That's how you get FBI agents targeting parents and Catholics as potential terrorists. That's why groups such as Moms for Liberty or the Alliance Defending Freedom get labeled "extremist" groups.
In Western countries, you can't just build a Stasi; you need to create an institutional complex to do what the East Germans did by creating an actual government agency.
But the intended result is the same, and our only fighting chance is that the Trump administration is fighting back.
The Democrats, should they gain back power, are already drawing up lists of conservatives they say they want to jail, while they decry any investigation of even the most obviously corrupt Democrats like Ilhan Omar. It is their playbook, and the SPLC shows one of the institutional mechanisms they use to justify it.
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