Earlier this year, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 fraud-related counts. Recall that these charges stemmed from allegations that the SPLC used donor funds to finance the very “hate groups” it supposedly existed to dismantle, including the KKK.
As I wrote at the time, “The SPLC has, like so many once-respected institutions, fallen to ideological capture. It was once viewed as an important organization keyed in on fighting the good fight against racism and hate by exposing extremist groups that fomented these toxic ideas.”
Indeed, the SPLC had succeeded in combating genuine racism. To justify its continued existence, however, its leadership began embracing a political ideology that ironically promoted the very racism it claimed to oppose.
Given its dubious “hate groups” map, it’s not surprising the SPLC was caught promoting racism and hatred. The SPLC has become a hard-left propagandist, falsely smearing conservatives and Christians who object to such things as abortion and the LGBTQ agenda as “hate groups.”
But due to the SPLC’s history of opposing genuine hate groups like the KKK, the organization gained a trusted status in popular culture for exposing problematic groups. Furthermore, the SPLC marketed itself as an organization that could help businesses and corporations direct philanthropic donations to charities vetted as “hate”-free.
To help large companies donate to charities, several corporate generosity platforms have emerged, such as Benevity, which works for major companies like AT&T, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola. Benevity helps connect “nearly 1,000 enterprise companies” with over 513,000 nonprofits. The platform has vetted over 2.1 million nonprofits.
Another charitable giving processor, Millie Giving, partners with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Both organizations have relied on the SPLC to vet nonprofits, as a deleted page from Millie Giving’s website noted: “All vetting for the Millie database is even through the SPLC!”
The Millie Giving website used to proudly advertise its SPLC-vetted nonprofit organizations. It has since deleted any reference to the SPLC.
While Benevity still references the SPLC as one of its vetting services, it makes clear that its “platform is designed to give clients flexibility and control over which nonprofits are eligible for their programs, including which third-party data sources, if any, they choose to apply.” Adding that “These options are not a default setting.” Furthermore, Benevity no longer permits donations to the SPLC from its platform.
The Washington Examiner reports, “Some corporate giving platforms that have integrated the SPLC’s data into their donation-processing systems have sought to soften or scrub company language detailing the SPLC’s role in deciding which nonprofit organizations are eligible to receive charitable contributions through their software.”
Several major corporations have also distanced themselves from the SPLC, including BlackRock, Mastercard, Nvidia, AT&T, Microsoft, and American Express.
It appears that the once-vaunted SPLC has rapidly become an untrustworthy, discredited organization, and businesses want little to do with it.
It’s good that this is finally happening, but truth be told, it’s frustrating that it took a fraud scandal to expose the fact that SPLC had long lost any genuine credibility. It had repeatedly shown itself to be little other than an ideologically leftist propaganda organization that specialized in smearing conservative organizations as “hate groups” simply for refusing to bow to increasingly radical leftist gender ideology.
