The moral of this story is, anything you don’t understand is dangerous until you do understand it.
Science fiction author Larry Niven, “Flatlander” in Neutron Star (1968).
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Larry Niven
On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the Seventh Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp.
A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, last week, on 11 counts including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Department of Justice claims that the organization deceived donors and banks about its use of charitable contributions from 2014 through 2023.
Now, the shocking accusation that “the SPLC’s paid informants (‘field sources’) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance” is not what the SPLC is being prosecuted for. Neither is the SPLC’s distribution of over $3 million to such secret agents. Like the SPLC’s public strategy of lying and calumny, undercover support of infiltrators (as the SPLC defends its agents) isn’t illegal.
Of course, those same agents encouraging crimes does implicate the SPLC in conspiracy to commit acts of terror, but that’s not the crime being prosecuted.
The charges come, instead, from the methods allegedly used to keep these disreputable methods secret.
Not everyone’s impressed with the case; the DOJ may lose. So the bigger question becomes, will the progressive media continue to exalt the SPLC?
And for the SPLC itself, will anti-racist benefactors still give money to an organization shown to gin up hatred the better to soak in donations?
Upon learning that the organization you funded to fight the evil, violent racists turned around and funded the evil, violent racists, would you continue to donate?
Yet the lines of ideological loyalty remain clear. In normal fraud cases, it is the defrauded who feel the most aggrieved. But here it is their political enemies who express the outrage that the defrauded should be feeling.
That may be the saddest element of this sick situation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Robert A. Heinlein
I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowded enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs — microphones and lenses and so forth — are that much harder to spot.
The character Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein’sTime Enough for Love (1973), Prelude I.
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Ratifier #7
On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the new United States Constitution.
The government should not be pushing private firms, including banks, to sever relationships with customers on ideological grounds.
Nevertheless, in 2013 the Department of Justice and FDIC began pressing banks to cut off services to certain “high risk” industries, like the gun industry. The initiative was called — with laudable candor — Operation Choke Point. The pressure was an expression of the Obama administration’s hostility to Second Amendment rights and various views and advocacy, not a response to alleged lawbreaking by the debanked customers.
The Trump administration first sought to end this practice in 2017. But the urge to censor and punish viewpoints, including by debanking, resurged during the Biden administration.
In 2025, President Trump, in his second shot at heading the executive branch, issued a new executive order directing federal agencies to review the situation and issue new regulations to protect customers. It was to be made clear to banks that despite the impression conveyed by other administrations, so-called “reputational risk” — which boils down to hostility to certain views and enterprises — is not a warrant to fire customers.
A finalized and, one hopes, truly final rule has just been issued. It prohibits relevant agencies from criticizing or penalizing a supervised institution based on “reputation risk” or from instructing institutions to kill accounts because of customers’ constitutionally protected speech or activities.
The proper functions of government do not include acting to punish people directly or indirectly for their speech . . . or other exercise of their rights. The fact that just such a squarely improper (and illiberal) policy endured through several administrations shows just how shaky constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are in the current ideological climate.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Larry Niven
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!
Larry Niven, as quoted by Arthur C. Clarke in “Meeting of the Minds: Buzz Aldrin Visits Arthur C. Clarke” by Andrew Chaikin, Space.com (February 27, 2001).
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Twenty-Seventh of April
- In 1667 on this date, a blind and impoverished poet named John Milton sold his greatest work, Paradise Lost, to a printer for £10, so that it could be entered into the Stationers’ Register, which was an early form of copyright protection and censorship mechanism rolled into one.
- The year was A.D. 1805, and the United States Marines and Berbers attacked the Tripolitan city of Derna on the 27th of April, referenced in the “shores of Tripoli” in the well-known Marines’ Hymn.
- On April 27, 1861, Abraham Lincoln — having served as president of the United States for less than two months — suspended the writ of habeas corpus, twelve days after he had declared that an insurrection was underway.
- As World War II neared its European conclusion, Benito Mussolini was arrested — on the 27th day of the fourth month of 1945 — in the act of fleeing . . . disguised as a German soldier.
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The Southern Poverty Law Con?
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been a deeply pernicious organization for a very long time. In 2017, Paul Jacob characterized one of the outfit’s key modi operandi as a scam, lumping “political opponents — conservatives and libertarians — in with Nazis and the KKK, in order to smear them.” That is, expand the enemies list the better to incite activist involvement.
It turns out that may not just be the judgment of SPLC critics like Paul.
The Department of Justice, last week, added another dimension to the story, bringing fraud and money laundering charges against the organization. What is the SPLC alleged to have done? A federal grand jury indicted the organization with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.”
Substantively, the claim is that the SPLC funded and directed infiltrators into racist organizations, including the organizers of the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, who — as leaders in those organizations — pushed radical, extremist tactics (including criminal acts) that the SPLC then used to gin up donor panic to increase the organization’s funding.
Whether the case succeeds in court, legally, remains to be seen, but already the revelations of the SPLC’s tactics show a twisted moral sense, a corrupt view of strategy and tactics, and a general ethical ickiness.
Journalist Tim Pool added more information, telling his video and podcasting audience of his own encounters with the SPLC — based on the “psy-op” run against him a few years ago, in which Biden’s egregious Attorney General Merrick Garland publicly proclaimed that the journalist had been funded by Russia. But Garland wasn’t the first to advance this accusation. The SPLC had done it earlier. Mr. Pool suspects that the CIA was involved in this, too, apparently trying to destroy him and some other non-woke alternative media voices. Pool says it did not work because there was nothing to it:
“Weird, isn’t it?” asks Mr. Pool.
Not-so-weird, once you know the history of the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to attorney Robert Barnes:
Barnes also notes an eerie CIA odor to the whole affair.
Speaking of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA “whistleblower” who has been making the rounds on podcasts in the last few months does not dismiss the charges, noting that they are specific enough that whether or not the crimes have happened can indeed be determined in court:
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Robert A. Heinlein
Oh, I have strong opinions, but a thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out. Galileo proved that and it may be the only certainty we have.
An admission by the character Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love (1973), Prelude I.