RCP’s Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon took turns on Wednesday’s podcast teeing off on the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was just indicted for allegedly funneling money to figures inside the extremist groups it claimed to be monitoring. Bevan highlights what the indictment says about their relationship with the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally, which President Biden cited as his inspiration for running for president in 2020 in his official announcement and Kamala Harris used to bludgeon President Trump during their 2024 debate. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has, for decades, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to basically say we have a racism problem in this country,” Tom Bevan began. “They put out these lists of ‘white nationalist’ groups, which often included conservative organizations that had nothing to do with any of that.” “So they’ve been a bad actor on the stage for some time, and they’ll finally be held to account,” he said. “Apparently, they were actually involved in organizing, funding, and executing the ‘Unite the Right’ rally that took place in Charlottesville in 2017-the one where Donald Trump said, ‘There were fine people on both sides,’ which the media just ran with for years.” “It was also the stated reason that Joe Biden gave for running for president-taking about ‘saving the soul of this nation’ in his DNC acceptance speech. And we find out that it was all orchestrated. It was basically a false flag operation orchestrated by the SPLC!” “I don’t know that they’ve committed any crimes. When the FBI can’t really get you on a crime, they indict you for wire fraud,” Carl Cannon said. “But the Southern Poverty Law Center has been a fraudulent group, small-f fraudulent, for decades.” “I always thought that rally was proof America isn’t a racist country. The word went out to every racist and Nazi in North America, and only a few hundred people showed up. The Ku Klux Klan used to get 20,000 people in Riverside, California.” “Biden citing that as his origin story always annoyed me because it was so obviously untrue,” Cannon continued. “He’d run for president two or three times before. Barack Obama made him vice president and said this is as far as it goes for you. He was looking for a way out of that, so he came up with this rally as the reason to run. It was never true, and it didn’t pass the laugh test. I’m surprised journalists fell for it.” “But the SPLC is essentially a hate group pretending to be an anti-hate group. They have done real damage to the country,” Carl Cannon said. I wrote about it eight or nine years ago for RealClearPolitics.” “They label people hate groups who don’t agree with them. They’re a front group for the Democratic Party, and they tell lies about people. They’ve encouraged censorship. They’ve engendered violence,” he said. “It’s a terrible organization, a bastardization of its cause. I’m glad they’re being called to account, but again, I don’t know that they committed crimes. But they’ve done great damage to the country, and they’re a dishonest and fraudulent group.”
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