In a weird way, the corrupt Southern Poverty Law Center was behaving just like the Democrat Party: First, you create a problem — like crime or poverty or climate change or illegal immigration — and then you create a government program to solve it.

If only the SPLC had been honest about its, er, alleged treachery. Instead, while purporting to fight hate, it was at the same time surreptitiously funding it and making it seem worse than it was. Like the Democrats, the SPLC was justifying its very existence.

Money laundering — one of the 11 charges leveled against the SPLC — is serious stuff. It’s what drug cartels do. And, now that I think of it, that’s how the SPLC has behaved — like a drug cartel. The difference is that instead of trafficking in fentanyl, it’s trafficking in hate.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the SPLC was also smearing every conservative, patriotic, and family-oriented organization along the way as a hate group. When we focus on that outrage, we tend to ignore two other, more troubling outrages altogether: first, that the FBI took its marching orders from the SPLC; and second, that the mainstream media has behaved like the SPLC’s public relations office.

“For years,” writes Nicholas Giordano at The Federalist, “the bureau didn’t just consult the SPLC. It folded the group’s ideology into its threat assessments and other work products, then used those products to brand Americans as hateful or flag them as potential domestic violent extremists.”

Did Chris Wray’s FBI know what it was doing? You betcha. And some decent agents within the organization were understandably troubled by it. Said one FBI official, “Apparently, we are at the behest of the SPLC.” Said another, “[The bureau’s] overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”

Problematic? You’re telling me. The once-proud FBI had been utterly corrupted and weaponized under Barack Obama, to the point that it spied on Donald Trump and conspired to wreck his presidency with, in scumbag Peter Strzok’s own words, an “insurance policy” against the “terrifying” prospect of his election.

But it wasn’t just Donald Trump. It was everything right of center. Remember that now-infamous Richmond memo — the document produced by the bureau’s Richmond field office to push the targeting of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism in radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology,” whatever the heck that is? That memo was inspired by — you guessed it — the hyper-partisan “analysis” of the SPLC.

And so, as Giordano puts it, “The bureau stopped treating the SPLC as an outside source and started treating it like a partner.” Did you vote for the FBI, this singular American institution, to be co-opted by radical money-grubbing leftists and weaponized against the American people? I sure didn’t.

Sadly, this is nothing new. As Chandra Bozelko writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The Counter Intelligence Program, or Cointelpro, holds a prominent place in the annals of governmental abuse. A 1976 report by the Senate’s select Church Committee, ‘Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,’ exposed how the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secretly paid and directed informants embedded inside extremist groups, which it claimed to be neutralizing. The bureau routed payments through false-front entities while assuring the public that its mission was to suppress rather than stimulate violence.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Where have our media “watchdogs” been during all this? Sitting in the SPLC’s lap, that’s where. National Review’s Becket Adams has the goods in the form of some mainstream media headlines and musings: “The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades,” USA Today reported. No mention of money laundering here.

And this: “Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes.” That’s the nothingburger from The New York Times, which doesn’t seem to think the SPLC’s funding of the KKK and other white-supremacist groups is newsworthy.

Those headlines sound like the fulminations of an institution bent not on getting to the truth but rather invested in protecting the SPLC. Face it, friends: We don’t despise the mainstream media nearly enough.

Fomenting hate is a lucrative business. Just ask the “nonprofit” SPLC, whose total assets are around $800 million. You don’t rake in that kind of cash unless you’re peddling something really powerful, really alluring, really addictive.

Let’s hope the government’s case against these vile hate pimps is as strong as it sounds. And let’s hope the FBI can be permanently reformed. And let’s hope the mainstream media can be, uh … never mind.