"Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud"
Patrick McKenzie on the SPLC.
A lot of people are talking about an epic blog post about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s legal troubles on Bits About Money by Patrick McKenzie, who appears to have about a 175 IQ:
Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) • May 1st, 2026
To my shame, I have to admit I never heard of Patrick McKenzie before. But he reminds me of first reading Paul Graham 15 or 20 years ago.
The first half of his blogpost is about why you should never, ever, ever lie to any financial institution, such as a bank, about anything, no matter how tiny your little white lie might sound to you at the time.
According to McKenzie, the laws passed over the decades to block terrorists, narco traffickers, and white collar criminals from using the banking system mean that if the feds don’t like you (and who knows whether future Administrations will be on your side or not?), they can take you down for anything you told a financial institution that wasn’t exactly true.
Note: I’m not a lawyer, I’m just passing along here what McKenzie asserts. But … I have a pretty good track record of figuring out whether people sound like they are talking through their hat. And McKenzie’s command of logic sounds clear to me.
The second half of McKenzie’s blogpost is about how funny it is that the SPLC has gotten itself into this situation where it may well go down, hard, over violations that it spent much of the last decade trying to impose on people it hated.
That reminds me …
Paywall here.
