SPLC’s Favorite Conservative Targets Get The Last Laugh

Conservative organizations that have faced years of vicious attacks from the Southern Poverty Law Center feel vindicated after a sweeping federal indictment accused the left-wing group of secretly funneling millions to white supremacist groups.

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist & extremist groups,” according to the indictment, including Aryan Nations, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and a member of Unite the Right, the group that infamously staged the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For Tina Descovich, CEO of Moms For Liberty, the charges were not a surprise. 

“I was shocked that people were shocked. The biggest target for the Southern Poverty Law Center over the last three years has been our organization,” Descovich said in an interview with The Daily Wire. “We make up over half of their hate map, and we have watched their unethical tactics over the last three years. We have watched them fabricate and manipulate.”

In 2023, SPLC designated Moms for Liberty, a grassroots group that fights for parental rights in schools across the country, as a pro-segregationist hate group.

“Immediately, the floodgates of hate were opened against us,” Descovich said. The intimidation tactics started immediately, as a result of them placing us on the hate map.”

Weeks after the designation, thousands of protesters descended on the Moms for Liberty’s national summit in Philadelphia, where vandalism the night before prompted a significant police response to secure the event. An anonymous international organization followed with a cyber attack that managed to take down their website.

The SPLC cost Moms for Liberty key vendor relationships, community engagement events, and new members, as some mothers feared the “hate group” label could carry professional consequences.

“The attacks for a small nonprofit, not well-funded organization of moms advocating for their children, were unconscionable,” Descovich said. “At our 23 Summit, one of our members’ daughters was outside of the hotel, and the protesters threw an egg at her, hit her in the face, and broke her retainer.”

 Following the indictment, Descovich said she’s in contact with attorneys and exploring legal options.

“When I think about all of the money that they brought in off of the backs of campaigning and lying and smearing conservative organizations like ours, not just ours, but others too, the real damage that they’ve brought to people’s lives. You know, I believe that there should be financial payments to organizations like mine to make up for what they have done to us,” she said.

Her organization is not alone.

SPLC classified The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for ending illegal immigration, as a hate group with “ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists.”

“The SPLC creates imaginary bogeymen who they use to rake in millions of dollars from donors who were scammed by them,” FAIR said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Too many mainstream groups have had their reputations tarnished, banking relationships canceled, and worse.”

“The media and political classes should finally treat the SPLC as the pariah organization it is,” FAIR added, a sentiment shared by Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that supports restricting immigration.

“It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of creeps,” Krikorian said in an interview with The Daily Wire.

“The part, of course, that’s so hilarious is that, apparently, the supply of racism didn’t wasn’t meeting the demand, so they had to create more of it,” Krikorian said. He described the group as a “fundraising racket,” whose co-founder, Morris Deese, demonstrated “proficiency at raising money from, you know, old ladies on the Upper West Side.”

 Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, the SPLC  labeled the CIS as a “hate group.”

 “And that was pretty clearly a strategic decision, because immigration was what he ran on. So they needed to try to delegitimize the outside groups that study immigration,” Krikorian said. “What they hoped was that it would be that the fear of violence would be so ever-present that people on the right would self-censor so that they didn’t get shot.”

The threat of violence was not a possibility, but a reality, for the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian nonprofit group that promotes traditional family values. 

Over a decade ago, a gunman, who cited SPLC material, entered the Family Research Council building and shot a security guard. He intended “to kill as many people as possible” and was later sentenced to 25 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice. 

“That’s why this moment matters,” FRC President Tony Perkins said. “Accountability should not stop with individual convictions. If wrongdoing is proven, justice should include restitution to those harmed. With over $750 million in their endowment, which includes offshore accounts, the SPLC should be held responsible not only for what was done, but for the damage left behind.”