SPLC: Raising Up Hate Groups, Raising Money

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Please note that it was recorded before Friday’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz is open. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. 

Jack Fowler: Let’s return to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which you and the great Sami Winc talked about the other day at some length. But one of the aspects of this is corporate involvement with this institution. And actually, I forget where I picked this up from. It may have been Capital Research Center. Yeah, Capital Research Center is a great resource for investigating these left-wing nonprofits. 

But Apple made a publicly reported $1 million donation to the center in 2017, following the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. JPMorgan Chase gave $1 million in 2017. Google gave $250,000 in grants. Then also the Clooneys—George and whatever her name is, Amal Clooney—also gave a million dollars. So, and that’s just a tiny slice of—Victor—corporate America, whether it’s the Southern Poverty Law Center or Black Lives Matter or ESG or the, you know, changing the rules of how we’re going to invest your money, they are so deeply involved in so much that’s wrong. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t think anybody understands that. I’m on the Bradley Foundation, a center-right conservative organization. It’s mostly for free markets. But we have, I think, about a $1.2 billion endowment. And we had a presentation about four years ago where somebody very brilliantly—I won’t mention who—showed us the top foundations in the United States based on their endowments.

Jack, the top 50—there was no conservative there. We were like 200. I mean, when you look at the Rockefeller or the Gates or the Tides Foundation or the MacArthur—all of this money—it’s huge. It’s $5 billion, $10 billion, $20 billion, $50 billion. 

And then they’re not satisfied with that. And then they become the receptacles, the revolving door, for retread bureaucrats in USAID who give government contracts. 

So they call their friend up and say, “Can you give us $10 million for transgender homeless people’s operations?” Yes. And then when that person retires, they say, “Can you get me a job for $500,000 as a case officer or something?” And that’s what they do. 

And Trump tried to break that up. And the Southern Poverty Law Center is really—as I mentioned to Sami—the vigiles in Rome. These were the later fire brigades that would show up conveniently at a fire. They just happened to kind of, sort of know where the fire was because they kind of, sort of lit it. Marcus Licinius Crassus had, as I said earlier, done the same thing. But it wasn’t sure whether he lit the fires. People had accused him of that. But he showed up as their house was burning down and bought it at a cheap price. 

But these guys would light the fires, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and then show up and say, we can give you a remedy. We will put the fire out for either signing the house over to us or paying us money. 

So there wasn’t enough—everybody knows that until [Barack] Obama, racial relations had almost reached what we would call equilibrium. And Obama didn’t like that because the Democratic message was not resonating. So he wanted to divide the country between victim—as the old Marxist victim—victimizer. And that was going to be based not on class, like Marx, but it was going to be based on race. And it wasn’t going to be black, white. It was going to be anybody who wasn’t white, regardless of their social status or economic status. 

And that’s what he did. He did that. And so, when he did that, the victimization, the oppression—it was like an epidemic. All of a sudden, we heard all these different groups who had—that was when the reparations movement, to take one example, was dead after 9/11. Remember that? David Horowitz wrote a good book right on the eve of 9/11. Then it was over with. And as soon as Obama came in, it started to creep back in. Now we have a California council on reparations, etc., etc. 

And the Southern Poverty Law Center knew that. They knew that there were not enough victimized people, so they started to seed the KKK, all of these white supremacist groups, and Unite the Right at Charlottesville. This is very, very important because most of those groups were defunct. They were decentralized. They were irrelevant. But they actually funded one of the people—allegedly—who was the transportation coordinator, to make sure that all these different groups showed up. 

And when they did, no single thing had hurt Donald Trump more than that riot, when one person was run over. Because at that point he said there were fine people on both sides. And he meant—if you listen to him, and he qualified that, which they always left out—he said, “I’m not talking about the racism,” etc. They took that out of context and they said there was a big white racist predetermined riot, and Donald Trump took the side of the Klan. And that really haunted him. Even though people tried to explain that, they cut off the second part of the qualifier of the sentence. 

And now we know that the Southern Poverty Law Center was worried that there were not enough victims around that they could justify their fundraising to their donors. They needed a lot of Charlottesvilles. They needed a lot of Michael Browns. They needed Trayvon Martins. Every one of those was not as it was, as everybody knew. 

Michael Brown did not say, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” We know that Trayvon was not a little innocent teenager in a football uniform. Somebody pointed out you can take a picture—the left would take Charles Manson and show those 12-year-old pictures of him, you know, if they wanted to. That’s how they operate. 

But the point I’m making is that once they started funding those people, it was burning down the house. And then they showed up with a cure. Well, these people are organizing Unite the Right. They’re really getting out of hand. We’re following and we’re tracking them. We need money. We need money. We need money. Because it’s going to be like the 1960s, you know, in the racist South. 

And there—there was no threat that they hadn’t ginned up. 

And so, the other thing about them is they’re insidious. They’re everywhere. I was giving a lecture to the late Avi Davis. Remember him, Jack? Yeah, he died prematurely, but he was the head of something called the American Freedom Alliance. And they asked me to speak on immigration maybe 10 or 12 years ago. It was very moderate. 

I said, if you have immigration that is illegal, not diverse, too large to be assimilated, and people who were coming impoverished, assimilation will be almost impossible—and integration. And the next thing I knew, the Southern Poverty Law Center had a big article that Victor Hanson went to this right-wing organization and he was spouting neo-Nazi stuff. 

And there was a person in the audience who came up to me. She was very nice, and she said, let me get this straight. I heard you, and you think that immigration should be diverse but different. I said, Yes. It makes it like the country itself. Not all from south of the border—not because I’m picking on them. It’s just the more different types of people we have, the more opportunities people have to come to America. 

And they need skills so we don’t endanger our poor citizens with an overtaxed social services system. 

And they should come only legally. And they should know English.  

Next thing I knew, Southern Poverty Law Center had me on their website. And they do that to everybody. They did that to Ayaan. They do that to everybody. 

Yeah. 

So, and you know what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire? 

It wasn’t holy, it wasn’t Roman, it wasn’t an empire. 

And the same thing is true about the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s not Southern at all. It’s really white liberals all over the country, but not so much in the South. And I mean, I encountered them in California. 

So it’s not the Southern. And it has nothing to do with poverty. They have probably a near–billion-dollar endowment. They were getting million-dollar—as Jack pointed out—donations. Their head was making, I don’t know, $500,000 or $600,000 a year. They were paying out to this white racist—what was it?—$220,000 to cause mayhem. So they could come in as the fire brigade to put out the fire they lit and make a profit out of it. 

And they’re not anything to do with the law. They’re about breaking the law. Southern poverty law? No. You break the law. That’s illegal for a private organization to pay people to cause havoc, and then to defraud their donors by suggesting that was a spontaneous event that they cooked up, and to gin up their receipts. 

Yeah, and I think the only thing I would say for them—it is a center of something. But, you know, it’s not Southern, and it’s not poverty, and it’s not law. But maybe it is a center of chaos. 

Fowler: They’re very important, Victor, to the whole leftist project. Because not only is this funding the Ku Klux Klan and these things, but they will then say, you, Victor, are a racist, or this nonprofit is racist. 

And then foundations will not give donations. 

Hanson: That’s what they do.  

They use their staff as a litmus test. And if you get on the wrong side of the litmus test, that goes into a computer and you’ll never get a grant from these multibillion-dollar foundations. Or your career—Oh, he’s been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So what? That’s a joke. 

And it’s kind of like the ACLU—the American Civil Liberties Union. They used to be—actually, there were moments in their history when they were defending really unpopular people for free speech. And they got criticism. Remember that Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois? 

Fowler: Right. 

Hanson: Skokie, yeah. They intervened. I don’t think they should have, but they did. And they said, we have to because we have to support the principle of free speech when no one likes free speech and the people who are expressing themselves freely are odious. 

Not now. 

Now they have boot camps to train people how to be activists on the left. 

So everything has changed with the Left. I think, again, it was because the country moved to the right, especially after Reagan. And they tried to resurrect the Left, and they got frustrated. And so they outsourced their entire agenda to areas that were not contingent on politics. 

So the foundations, academia, Hollywood, popular culture, professional sports—they infiltrated all of that. The corporate boardroom. And they controlled that. And they said, “We’re going to change the culture and civilization of this country within the military, within the corporate boardroom, within the university.” 

And we won’t have to have actual power. It’ll be good when we do. And eventually it’ll result in actual political power because these institutions will change the balloting laws in states. 

They’ll call you a racist if you think you need an ID. They’ll help open the border. But we don’t need them to get our hard-left message—that everybody doesn’t like—through. We’re going to do it without the people’s consent. 

And that’s how they got the transgender—you know—men in girls’ restrooms. Nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted biological males competing in women’s sports. But they had the ability, through all of these institutions, to make it very hard on people who spoke out. 

Look at Riley Gaines. If she spoke out, the operatives of the left in the university almost tried to kill her. Almost. She was trapped in California. 

Fowler: Was she in San Francisco? 

Hanson: Yeah, at San Francisco State, I think it was. She couldn’t get out of the room. And she was stalked. She had to have security. And that’s what they do. 

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