The SPLC Is Being Hoisted By Its Own Petard
Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard have suspended customer donation services to the scandal-plagued SPLC, which is used to the boot being on the other foot.
From the New York Times news section:
Schwab Affiliate Halts Customer Donations to Southern Poverty Law Center
Fidelity’s and Vanguard’s donor-advised fund entities have taken similar actions since a Justice Department indictment of the civil rights group.
By Ron Lieber
May 1, 2026
The donor-advised fund affiliated with Charles Schwab, DAFgiving360, has suspended account holders’ ability to give money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted the group and accused it of financial crimes. This week, the donor-advised funds that bear Fidelity’s and Vanguard’s names also cut the group off.
A spokeswoman for the Schwab-affiliated fund said, “If a governing body of a charity declares an investigation into a charity it oversees, DAFgiving360 may suspend grants to the organization.” She would not provide a list of other organizations that it has suspended.
Donor-advised funds allow individuals to create accounts, donate cash or securities into them and take a tax deduction for the full amount that year. Then they can parcel out donations to charities and other nonprofits over many years.
… Users can “recommend” grants to “eligible” charities, for example, which means DAFgiving360 controls the money and the account holder is technically just advising.
This is almost never a practical issue for account holders; donor-advised funds generally rubber-stamp donation requests. …
DAFgiving360 customers are expressing similar sentiments. “This is too safe a position, and they shouldn’t have done it,” Jani Rachelson, a retired labor lawyer in New Jersey who was unable to donate to the S.P.L.C., said of Schwab’s action. “Compliance in advance is the scourge of our life these days.
… In the past, a Schwab predecessor charitable-fund entity stopped granting money to National Rifle Association-affiliated charities when an active investigation was underway. …
Prudent trustees with decision-making authority do consider indictments of charities before approving donations to them.
The irony is that the SPLC is a massive player in cutting off other NGOs from these kind of services.
From Patrick McKenzie’s huge Bits About Money blogpost “Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud” about all the systems now in place to freeze bad guys out of the financial system, and how the SPLC became Bad Guy-Sniffer-in-Co-Chief (along with the Treasury department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, which enforces sanctions and the like):
Another data product is so-called “adverse news” screening. This one is not an extension of state power like the OFAC or prosecutorial lists, not directly. You have much more discretion on whether you buy it than you have on OFAC screening. But your screening provider might have gone to the trouble of licensing wire service articles or newspaper feeds or the Twitter firehose or similar. They repackage it and match e.g. mentions of colorful local businessmen (a classic newsroom euphemism for “mob, but we can’t prove it and he has lawyers ready to sue for defamation”) to your accountholders. If a colorful local businessman is reportedly on the lam and feared to have left the country, and then he asks for an international wire transfer, you probably don’t want to simply process it.
And now the data product you’ve been waiting for: the SPLC Extremist Files. Like the OFAC list, it’s available for free on their website,
The SPLC has two slightly different blacklists:
Its Extremist Files, which lists 83 “groups,” 146 individual “extremists”, and 30 “ideologies.
And its Hate Map, which only lists groups. The Hate Map is harder to use, but it may be better for fundraising because it appeals to elderly donors who want to know: “Is the Hate in the room with us?”
For example, according to the SPLC Hate Map, in my general neighborhood, hate groups include PragerU of Sherman Oaks and the David Horowitz Freedom Center of Sherman Oaks.
The Hate is in the neighborhood with us!
Although, keep in mind, that the SPLC stretches the definition of “hate” and “group” to cover roughly anybody the SPLC hates. For example, I wanted to look up if Rose City Antifa, which played such a large role in the endless Portland riots of 2020, is on any SPLC lists of hate groups.
Nope. The SPLC doesn’t hate Rose City Antifa.
But “Save Oregon Schools” is on the SPLC Hate Map, although, as far as I can tell, Save Oregon Schools is actually an informative, well-researched Substack written by a fellow named Jeff Myers reporting on the causes of the notorious underperformance of Oregon’s public schools during the current Woke era. For instance, here’s a Hate Graph from his most recent post:
In other words: no group, no hate.
And here are some of the “hate groups” the SPLC sees as operating in Washington D.C.:
Center for Immigration Studies
Federation for American Immigration Reform
Immigration Reform Law Institute
ProEnglish
Family Research Council
The truth is that there are virtually no right wing hate groups left in 21st Century America committing major violence. Practically every sizable right wing extremist atrocity in this century with multiple deaths was carried out by a lone loser like Dylann Roof.
The SPLC adding hundreds of millions of dollars to its accounts in recent years is much like if there were an ABLC, the Anti-Beatnik Law Center, fundraising vast sums by stoking fears of the rising Beatnik Menace.
Back to McKenzie:
… but there do exist screening providers which will happily charge you for it. Part of that work is for scraping, part of that work is for e.g. matching names to e.g. charity EIN numbers, etc. Your screening vendor will happily tell you, though, that the data product they’re selling you is really SPLC’s considered judgement, packaged in a way that makes it easy to include into your pipelines.
Why would you buy this data product? In part, it is because the financial industry broadly considers the SPLC an extraordinarily trustworthy non-profit. It is widely believed that if they say you’re a Nazi, you’re a Nazi, and we don’t want to do business with Nazis.
Note that the SPLC’s modus operandi is to make up hate lists that include obvious thugs, such as white prison gang offshoots and the like, while tossing in people and groups that they really hate, such as Charles Murray and the Center for Immigration Studies think tank. (The SPLC particularly hates environmentalists who want to restrict immigration to protect the ecology.)
The SPLC’s schtick for piling up three quarters of a billion dollars in its endowment seems …
Paywall here.
