Every claim being made by the right in this forum is not true. So, while we see members of this forum rushing to use far-right extremist white supremacist media sources to make claims about the SPLC paying the KKK and how they made up racism, but the facts are more like this:
FBI: SPLC paid informants without donors knowing. Feds pay them too
The nation’s top law enforcement officials, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a slew of criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that has worked for decades to investigate, report on and combat White supremacist, neo-Nazi and other hate groups.
The charges allege the SPLC’s use of paid informants defrauded donors to the organization because the donors were not aware their money would be used for that purpose. According to prosecutors, informants were paid large sums of money to infiltrate some of the nation’s most infamous and dangerous extremist groups. This tactic, Blanche said at a news conference, “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The federal indictment against the SPLC, unveiled April 21, states: “Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”
Paying informants to infiltrate hate groups has, however, been used by federal law enforcement agencies “for decades, if not longer,” said Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
The FBI has long paid, and probably is still paying, confidential sources across the country to gather intelligence on extremist groups, including organizations like those named in Tuesday’s indictment, Ali said.
“There are, I would have to imagine, every day those kinds of operations,” Ali said.
The federal indictment contends that the SPLC "explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups," and "donors were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups, and others, nor were donors ever told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes."
The indictment describes how the SPLC for years publicized its successes − including by disseminating information and documents provided by paid confidential sources − in articles and newsletters.
Confidential sources who have been paid by the FBI have included “high-level leaders.”
One such source, David Gletty, spent years infiltrating anti-government militia groups and neo-Nazi and biker gangs for the FBI. He told USA TODAY he received “a lot of money” from the agency for his work, which he described as dangerous and exhilarating. But he also got into trouble while working for the agency, Gletty acknowledged.
“I was getting paid $1,000 a week at the beginning, then I went up to $2,000 a week after I did certain crazy stuff, but there were also bonuses,” Gletty said. “ But I got arrested one time working undercover and it cost me."
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, paid operatives like Gletty had the option to work for law enforcement agencies or to hire themselves to organizations like the SPLC, he said. Operatives working for a private entity could “fish” for information by getting inside groups before any probable cause existed to investigate them, a handy loophole for law enforcement agencies that would, invariably, eventually be handed the information gathered by the private group.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for allegedly paying sources in hate groups without donors knowing. The FBI also pays informants
www.usatoday.com
THE FBI IS DOING THE SAME THING RIGHT NOW!
What we are seeing here is an administration that is basically a white supremacist organization. They are doing everything they can to help white supremacists by eliminating anything threatening opposition to them or their ability to implement a white supremacist agenda. The next group they will try to attack is the ACLU.
