The following is a Catholic Action League of Massachusetts news release…
The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today is applauding the decision of the Trump Administration’s U.S. Department of Justice to indict the notoriously anti-Catholic Southern Poverty Law Center.
On April 21st, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama delivered an eleven count indictment against the SPLC — six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment alleged that the SPLC funneled more than $3 million to members of white supremacist organizations and other extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party.
The SPLC claimed it was only paying informants, but it created dummy corporations to shield the payments from donors.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The SPLC was founded in 1971, by Morris Dees, Joseph Levin and Julian Bond, ostensibly to support civil rights and expose violent extremist groups.
In recent years however, it has waged a campaign of demonization against such mainstream conservative groups as the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Turning Point USA, Liberty Counsel and Moms For Liberty.
The SPLC has demonstrated a particular animus against traditional Catholics who attend the old Latin Mass.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was the source for the infamous, 2023 FBI Richmond memo, which called for the surveillance of traditional Catholics as prospective “white nationalists” and “violent extremists.”
The memo, which was retracted and disavowed by the Bureau after it was leaked to the press by a whistleblower, identified nine traditional Catholic organizations as hate groups which it recommended for “assessment,” “mitigation,” and “source recruitment.”
The memo claimed that “Radical Traditional Catholics” were marked by an “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.”
Included among the footnotes in the memo was a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” which the SPLC said “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-Semites in America.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comments:
The SPLC is a lucrative bunco scheme which monetizes left-wing paranoia about conservative Christians.
Lucrative indeed! The revenue of the SPLC in 2024 was in excess of $129 million, while it boasted assets of nearly $787 million.
Apparently, for the fundraising purposes of the SPLC, the demand for hate groups has outrun the supply.
With the modern implosion and marginalization of the KKK and the American Nazi Party, financial interest impelled the SPLC to target mainstream conservatism, and then traditional Catholicism.
Now, the SPLC is funding its own hate groups to raise money off of them.
One of the Catholic victims of SPLC disinformation was the traditional order, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, located at the Saint Benedict Center, in Richmond, New Hampshire.
Among the absurdities about them peddled by the SPLC were claims that the nuns practiced martial arts, the brothers carried rifles with night vision scopes, and that automatic weapons fire could be heard coming from the monastery grounds. [See our response on this site —BAM.]
It should, by now, be clear to any honest observer, that SPLC is a collection of sociopaths, who lie recklessly and unscrupulously, defaming and endangering innocent people, to line their own pockets.
It is a confidence game and a hate group, itself, and it ought to be shut down.
The Department of Justice is to be commended for finally exposing this fraud.
