When Bank-1 investigated, an SPLC employee asked the bank to close several of the accounts and transfer the remaining balances to an SPLC account. Later, SPLC’s president/CEO and board chair confirmed in writing that the accounts were opened for SPLC operations and operated under SPLC authority. As Patrick writes, the letter is “a succinct confession to bank fraud.” Thus, the case that the SPLC paid informants through bank accounts opened under fictitious business names appears strong.
But the government had long been aware of SPLC’s informant work, indeed the existence of the informant program has been public knowledge for decades. It’s hard to see how to run a secret network to pay informants without hiding some information–could the SPLC simply have told the bank what they were doing? It seems to me that the punishment for false statements to a bank ought to depend on the motive and intention of the false statements but the law isn’t written that way. Another administration, however, would certainly look away. Which brings us to the second part of the story.
The SPLC itself was embedded in banking and private-sector decision making. Suppose Acme Inc., a large business, wanted to offer its employees matching grants for charitable donations. Acme, however, doesn’t want newspaper headlines like “Acme donated to the KKK!” So Acme contracts with a firm that vets charitable donations, and that firm uses a blacklist created by the SPLC. This was routine. Amazon used the SPLC list for AmazonSmile; workplace-giving vendors used or advertised SPLC screening; all of this gave the SPLC and the broader Change the Terms coalition power to pressure social media, tech, and financial infrastructure firms over speech, blacklisting, and payments because they were already in the door and embedded in their systems.
When the SPLC was mostly identifying nearly universally despised organizations like the KKK, all of this was more or less accepted by everyone in the know, except perhaps for a few hard core civil-libertarians. But in the woke era the SPLC overplayed their hand. The SPLC and related organizations began to take on conservative, Trump affiliated organizations with widespread support. Through a massive PR and outreach campaign they pressured social media organizations, tech firms, and finance firms to follow along–and this was not just a media campaign, the Change the Terms coalition had hundreds of meetings with top level staff. The partisan nature made it legally questionable but when your allies are in power. these things can be overlooked. In perhaps the most remarkable part of the document, Patrick quotes a donor fundraising letter from Free Press and Free Press Action (not the SPLC but part of the larger coalition):
Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump[.]