The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

SPLC’s Clayton Bigsby Moment

Posted on | April 23, 2026 | No Comments

There is a lot of irony in the federal grand jury indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts including wire fraud. About 30 years ago, it was explained to me why the SPLC’s “hate watch” racket exists — i.e., that Morris Dees had taken the mailing list of donors to the 1972 George McGovern campaign and turned it into a gold mine.

Dees discovered that rich Yankee liberals would give! give! give! if you told them you were fighting racism in the South. Never mind that, by the time the SPLC got rolling, the Civil Rights era had come and gone, and nearly everybody in the South had made their peace with integration. Liberals had a weird nostalgia for the “heroic struggle” narrative in which they taught a lesson to those benighted bigots down in Dixie, and they’d pay big money if you could keep that narrative alive, which is what Dees and the SPLC were really all about. Sometimes you’ll hear conservative critics of the SPLC contend that the SPLC originally did worthwhile things, but then strayed from their noble mission. No — it was a scam from the outset, an elaborate fraud to collect money from gullible liberals.

Anyway, this week’s news is darkly humorous:

The Southern Poverty Law Center is accused of funneling millions of dollars to at least eight leaders and members of hate groups — including a Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard and a fundraiser for a neo-Nazi group — to act as informants, which one nonprofit leader likened to paying an arsonist to help put out a fire.
The Alabama-based non-profit was charged by the Department of Justice with wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering conspiracy on Tuesday for allegedly hiding from donors the fact that it doled out more than $3 million over the course of nearly a decade to “field sources” tasked with infiltrating violent extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced Wednesday.
The field sources — or “Fs” — were “secretly paid” by SPLC between 2014 and 2023, the indictment claims.
America First Legal president Gene Hamilton, a former DOJ official, told The Post Wednesday it’s unprecedented for a tax-exempt nonprofit to use donor funding to pay informants in violent extremist groups
“I’ve seen some leftists talking about, seen some chatter on social media and elsewhere saying, ‘Oh this is a commonly used tactic amongst the government for years to infiltrate organizations,’” added the lawyer for the conservative group. “That’s one thing if it’s the government — the government can prosecute people.”
Hamilton likened it to paying the proverbial arsonist to help put out a fire.
He said it would be like if his own MAGA-tied group was secretly giving money to DEI officials to set up more DEI programs — while raising money to fight against DEI.
“It’s mind bogglingly dumb,” he said.
Liora Rez, the founder of StopAntisemitism, said that SPLC’s work fighting antisemitism appeared to have fallen off in recent years. He was infuriated by the allegations.
“It’s unimaginable to us that a civil rights group would gin up fake bigotry in order to solicit donations from concerned Americans,” he said.
“If this is what the SPLC did, it is shameful and outrageous.” . . .
One informant was part of an “online leadership chat group” organizing the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and ended up posting racist comments at the SPLC’s behest while also coordinating rides for others to attend, per the indictment.
In total, SPLC paid the informant $270,000 between 2015 and 2023, the papers claim.
A veteran informant from the neo-Nazi National Alliance was paid $1 million over the same period and assisted SPLC at one point by stealing 25 boxes of documents from the violent extremist group’s headquarters, the filing alleges.
He worked as a fundraiser for the neo-Nazi group, according to the DOJ.

You can read the whole thing. If you’re laughing at the SPLC’s disgrace, that probably means you’re a neo-Confederate supremacist.

Clayton Bigsby could not be reached for comment.



 

Category: Racism

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