The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) once fought the good fight. They took on the Ku Klux Klan and sued them into oblivion. This was a group that helped dismantle the architecture of violent racism in the American South. But that era is long gone. It’s dead. Well and truly buried.

What remains is not a civil rights watchdog but a well-financed paranoia machine — bloated, sanctimonious, and politically drunk on its own self-righteousness.

Their latest spectacle — sounding the alarm on “Active Clubs” and their supposed connections to Patriot Front — might sound serious at first glance. White nationalist groups using combat sports to radicalize should raise eyebrows. But context matters. And nuance matters more. The SPLC, however, isn’t in the nuance business. It’s in the moral panic business. They’ll grab the faintest whiff of association and present it as imminent domestic terror. Because they need you frightened, and they need someone to blame.

Here’s the truth: the SPLC has quietly morphed into a branding agency. One that trades in enemies. The more hate groups they list, the more donations roll in. And so, like a modern-day Inquisition with a PayPal account, they cast the net wide and sloppy — lumping Catholic school networks with skinhead militias, mainstream conservative nonprofits with literal neo-Nazis. A group doesn’t have to advocate violence to earn the SPLC’s scarlet letter. All it has to do is disagree.