The SPLC's Racism Industrial Complex

The scourge of moral market-making

So it turns out that the racism industrial complex might have been a self-licking ice cream cone all along. The Southern Poverty Law Center, once a renowned and respected civil rights advocacy group, has been charged by the US government with manufacturing Right-wing false flag operations Kash Patel, director of the FBI, yesterday announced a “massive, sweeping indictment” of the SPLC, for fraud:

Patel alleges that the SPLC raised money from donors, claiming it would be spent on efforts to dismantle violent extremist groups. But instead, they used that money to pay the leadership of the groups they were purportedly combating. Groups alleged to have been funded included the Klu Klux Klan, Unite the Right (the group linked to the Charlottesville terrorist attack against counter-protesters), the National Socialist Movement, and the Aryan Movement biker group. The federal charges allege that over $3m was used not to combat Right-wing extremism, but to fund further extremist crimes, in a scheme that Patel says ran for over a decade through shell companies and other entities.

What it would seem to suggest is that demand for racism was so much greater than supply, that professionalised activist bodies whose incomes depended on combating racism ended up funding racism themselves, order to justify their own continued existence and fundraising. But perhaps this isn’t all that different from agitating for (and sometimes delivering) “LGBTQ+” programming in schools, such that suggestible young people are nudged toward the kind of identities the SPLC makes a living defending through campaigns and court cases. Others make analogous pump-priming allegations against the “homelessness” charities whose interventions never seemed to reduce the amount of actual homelessness.

Perhaps once social activism is professionalised, these kinds of perverse incentives are unavoidable. After all, if my income depends on there being a supply of homeless people to rescue, or racism to combat, it’s not really in my interests for these social ills to be eliminated. This kind of moral market-making is a close cousin of the post-liberal scourge of “policy laundering”, in which activist charities and international bodies are used at one remove by governments as lobbyists for policies government itself wants to pursue. Like policy laundering, moral market-making contributes to the pervasive modern-day suspicion that the framework to which public life is ordered has come wildly adrift from common-sense policy on the ground, in ways that are difficult to identify and thus impossible to challenge.

Even so, the SPLC’s alleged, decade-long, fraudulent cultivation of a seemingly largely synthetic “far right” threat, variously to justify their own existence or to smear other more mainstream political opponents, has to rank as one of the most cynical, toxic, and morally bankrupt pieces of sustained political theatre I’ve ever come across. It also served as the foundation for wider persecution of mainstream enemies of the Left, as the existence of extremist groups the SPLC themselves funded was cited to smear ordinary conservatives as “hate groups” by association. If the allegations are proven, those smeared might legitimately feel that some retribution is in order.

Should this happen, I hope this organisation is dismantled, and its leaders are never again allowed to claim the moral high ground. More gloomily, this probably wouldn’t end moral market-making as such: you’d have to de-professionalise the entire NGO sector for that. It probably wouldn’t do away with policy laundering, either, as this is way too useful to governments of every stripe to be entirely done away with.

But it might help to rebalance the overwhelmingly Left-wing direction of travel of these phenomena. And it would end the noxious influence of an organisation that has clearly long since lost any semblance of integrity.