Make What You Hate So You Can Keep Hating

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

News broke yesterday that may be the sickest, creepiest thing I have ever heard. Seriously.

Here it is:

A grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment charging the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the Justice Department (DOJ). Between 2014 and 2023, according to the DOJ, the SPLC “secretly funneled” more than $3 million in donations to at least eight individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, the Nationalist Socialist Movement, Unite the Right, Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and more.

According to Blanche, the SPLC paid members of these extremist groups so it could create a “work product that reported on these activities.”

Just so we are absolutely clear here – this is “mission creep.”  The SPLC was founded to fight racism.  They did it very well – so well they choose to fund racism so that they could continue to fight it.  Otherwise they would have had to cease to exist.  It is a sick and twisted version of Munchhausen Syndrome.

Two important things to note out of this.

Groups like the SPLC, groups that spring up simply for some cause, take on a sort of religious glow, and can very easily grow corrupt.  It is entirely analogous to when churches corrupt, which happens far more than any of us would like to admit.  A seemingly “holy mission” is hard to let go of, and even harder to admit is complete.  We tend to forget that the demons we battle are not all out there; that we are they.  We tend to think the holiness of the mission makes us somehow holy and so we do not engage in the sort of self-examination and self correction we need to in order to keep from going astray.

The church is designed to be self-corrective, in its structure and in its very theology.  We call it “original sin,” “confession” and “saved by grace, not by works.”  That does not prevent the church from getting lost from time-to-time, but it does create a situation where it is not lost forever.  Secular organizations like the SPLC lack that check on their self-perceived holiness.  We here see the result.

This same issue arises in government agencies as well.  Usually it expresses as actual mission creep where an agency, the reason for its founding having been fulfilled, starts to stick its nose into places it was never intended to go.  Sometimes that is jurisdictional expansion and sometimes it is far more insidious.  Jurisdictional expansion is the EPA hunting around for some new pollutant (they declared CO2 a pollutant for pityfied-sake!) or Fish and Wildlife constantly finding news species, effectively indistinct, just to declare them endangered.

The more insidious expression is what we saw during covid wherein agencies acting on scant information and “an abundance of caution” stopped just short of marshal law and trampled our fundamental freedoms.  While SCOTUS has turned back the church bans that marked covid response in very blue places like California, it seems insufficient – it seems like punitive action should be possible.

But mostly what these charges against the SPLC indicate is that sometimes we are our own worst enemy – literally.