Author, columnist, speaker
Progressivism's
Attack Dog SPLC
Blows Itself Up
By Robert Knight
“He has dug a hole and hollowed it out; he has fallen into a pit of his own making.” (Psalm 7:15)
The Southern Poverty Law Center, famous for battling “hate groups,” helped stoke hate by funneling millions of dollars to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other extremists and engaged in criminal activity to cover it up, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Announcing an indictment with 11 counts on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid big bucks to leaders at the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, Unite the Right, National Alliance, the National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nation Motorcycle Club, the National Socialist Party of America, and the American Front.
The SPLC set up shell companies to hide this from the public, the indictment alleges.
The scandal includes $270,000 in payments to an unnamed conspirator who helped organize the Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counterprotester was killed.
The left, especially former President Joe Biden, cited the episode frequently as proof that the biggest threat to America was “white supremacy.”
Mr. Biden repeatedly aired the debunked lie that President Trump had called neo-Nazis who were at that rally “very fine people.” Mr. Trump had been talking about the two sides in the debate over historic statues, after which he thoroughly condemned the neo-Nazis.
Following the rally, the SPLC’s donations tripled from $50 million in 2016 to $132 million in fiscal 2017, the Washington Times reported on Friday.
Stoking hate is good for business.
“This is a serious and egregious violation of a group that purported to dismantle violent extremist groups, but in turn actually only fueled the hatred,” said FBI Director Kash Patel, who added that the SPLC was “lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposedly violent extremist groups.”
The phrase “hoist with his own petard” comes to mind. From Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” it means being blown up by your own bomb.
SPLC interim president Bryan Fair said the allegations are “false,” and that the group “for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice.”
Well, it did, at first.
Founded in 1971, the SPLC went after bad guys and helped put them out of business. It was so lucrative that the show had to go on well after the threat was no longer plausible.
As the menace of Klansmen and Nazis grew dimmer, the SPLC invented a new enemy: conservative Christians.
To the SPLC, supporting marriage, family and porn-free classrooms and school libraries is a hallmark of bigotry and “white nationalism.”
By equating biblical moral values with hate, the group has gotten countless Christian organizations blacklisted and de-monetized. The SPLC is a key component in the progressive left’s campaign to criminalize Christianity.
Failure to embrace any part of the LGBTQ agenda can put a group on the SPLC’s national “hate map. These include Moms for Liberty, Liberty Counsel, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council.
The latter group was attacked by a shooter in 2012, who told police the SPLC’s “hate map” had inspired him. It was only the heroics of guard Leo Johnson, who took a bullet in his arm, that spared the FRC staff from mass murder.
More recently, the conservative campus group Turning Point USA, whose founder, Charlie Kirk, was shot to death on a college campus last September, was listed as “hard right” on the SPLC’s 2024 report on hate and extremist groups.
The SPLC has survived previous scandals. In the 1990s, black employees accused SPLC founder Morris Dees and others of racial discrimination, a charge they and the organization denied.
In 2019, the center’s director, Richard Cohen, announced Mr. Dee’s firing, citing “personnel issues.” Allegations included sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism. A week later, Mr. Cohen quietly resigned.
Since then, the SPLC has continued using Christian boogeymen to raise money by the boatload. It has an estimated $750 million endowment.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Justice Department severed ties in 2018 with the group, but it came back into vogue during the Joe Biden administration.
The SPLC was a welcome presence then, meeting with White House officials at least 11 times, according to Tyler O’Neil, author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The Pentagon and other federal agencies relied on the SPLC to provide materials for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) struggle sessions.
Corporations, including PayPal, relied on the SPLC to weed out “extremists” from their charity and client lists.
A top SPLC official boasted about helping government agencies craft anti-terrorism efforts at a time when federal agents under Biden were targeting parents protesting at school board meetings and traditionalist Catholics as potential terrorists.
Last October, the FBI again cut ties to the SPLC, which Mr. Patel called a “partisan smear machine.”
It’s hard not to indulge in a little schadenfreude when a particularly malicious actor like the SPLC is found out to be a hypocrite and worse.
But the Bible warns against celebrating others’ misfortune, especially since our sinful human nature makes us all prone to hypocrisy at one time or another.
"Do not gloat when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart rejoice when he stumbles, or the LORD will see and disapprove and turn His wrath away from him." (Prov. 24:17-18)
Illustration by Linas Garsys / The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
At the University of Texas on Feb. 6, Mr. Talarico said, “I’m a Christian progressive. I believe the Gospel is inherently radical—it challenges the powerful, lifts up the poor, and calls for justice in every sphere of life.”
When progressives talk about “justice” they mean “social justice.” This is envy, disguised as compassion and politicized to enable governments to redistribute income and rewrite society’s moral code.
In the first six weeks of 2026, Mr. Talarico raised $7.5 million to Ms. Crockett’s $2 million, even though she still has a lead in polls. He has raised $20 million since September.
Will Texas, like Mr. Beshear’s Kentucky, fall for a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.) in Frankfort, Ky. on June 8, 2025. (AP photo in The Washington Times.