Abetting Hate, Lacking Tolerance, Violating Justice

By Paul Angel

Born in 1936, Morris Seligman Dees always had a knack for grifting. To pay for the cost of law school—his ticket to wealth and influence—Dees sold birthday cakes, doormats, telephone directories, tractor cushions, and holiday holly wreaths to Christians.

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Dees later went on to use his keen marketing skills to amass a small fortune. But he realized early on that “hate” could rake in a lot more money than tractor cushions ever could.

Thus, in 1971, the SPLC was conceived and founded in Montgomery, Ala. by Dees, Joseph Levin Jr. and African-American attorney Julian Bond. The SPLC’s raison d’etre, according to its website, is to “fight hate, teach tolerance, and seek justice.”

Over the years, that “beacon of hope,” as the SPLC bills itself, has turned into a pit of despair. In March 2019, Dees was fired after multiple SPLC employees accused him of sexual harassment, maintaining a toxic work environment, inappropriate touching, lewd remarks, and, oddly enough, racial discrimination.

In April 2026, the SPLC’s shocking fall from grace culminated with Department of Justice Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filing a major indictment against the group, alleging federal fraud, and improperly raising millions of dollars to clandestinely pay leaders of “hate” groups for inside information that could be used to destroy those organizations—and their donors.

It has taken too long for this indictment to be filed. Way back in 1994, Jim Tharpe of the Montgomery Advertiser smelled a rat. According to an article Tharpe wrote for The Washington Post:

After three years of research, the Advertiser published an eight-part series … that found a litany of problems [including] a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who likened the center to a plantation; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money … on raising more money; and paying its top staffers [including Dees] lavish salaries.

But Dees and crew refused to allow facts to threaten their decades-long racket without a fight; the SPLC persevered. After the 2019 firing of Dees, however, the SPLC finally promised radical changes. Today, we know that the SPLC never really cleaned up its act. It turns out, as Blanche alleges:

The civil rights group defrauded donors and spent their money not to pay for lawsuits for minority citizens battling discrimination, but to fund the very extremism it claimed to be battling.

According to “PBS News Hour”:

The SPLC paid $3 million to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. Prosecutors allege some of the money was used by extremists to carry out other crimes. The civil rights group now faces charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Blanche’s indictment alleges:

The SPLC was not dismantling [hate] groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.

According to Blanche, the “law center” would take money from donors and, instead of helping “Southern” people in “poverty,” the SPLC would funnel it into shell company bank accounts through which informants would be secretly paid. This was, as Blanche says, “done to conceal the money’s actual purpose.”

Donors were never informed of this secret spy op/psy op. Blanche says:

[The SPLC is] required under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing.

The SPLC did not do that. What they did do was secretly pay at least nine stoolies to infiltrate right-wing groups to sabotage them from within. From the 1980s until at least 2023, the SPLC spent millions on informants and agitators.

For instance, according to information gleaned from an NPR report:

One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Yet another informant, prosecutors say, was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

The indictment also revealed that the informant attended the rally at the direction of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation for several others. That person was allegedly paid more than $270,000 over the course of several years.

When online chats were reviewed, it turned out that the SPLC informant was by far the most “racist” person involved, using violent language and epithets for blacks that organizers of the Unite the Right event would never have considered using. It was obvious the informant was trying to instigate those in the group to turn the peaceful rally into some kind of racist riot.

FBI Director Kash Patel may have said it best:

The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public. They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal.

Note that the SPLC designates American Free Press as a “hate group,” criticizing us for “peddling stories that demonize Israel and Zionism.”

Discussing the truth about those two subjects does not make us “haters,” it just makes us right—as we were about the SPLC when we helped expose their “hate swindle” decades ago.

Paul Ange is the Managing Editor of American Free Press. He can be reached at Paul@AmericanFreePress.net.