The SPLC’s War on Immigration Restriction and America

Original article here

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is in the news because the Trump administration has been investigating, and is now prosecuting, it for various kinds of malfeasance.

In 2025, shortly after Charlie Kirk was murdered, Kash Patel’s FBI “cut all ties” to the notorious left-wing espionage organization, which has spent years persecuting conservative groups like Kirk’s TPUSA, my former employer VDARE.com, and all immigration patriot groups, no matter how mainstream they are.

Last week, Patel announced the prosecution of the SPLC for “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.“

It’s the SPLC as a corporation that’s being prosecuted, not its founder, Morris Dees, or its past or present officers and employees. You can read the indictment here.

While the Justice Department is concerned that the SPLC, with its stated mission of “dismantling . . . white supremacy and confronting hate across the country,” is sending bribe money to “fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups,” I think that’s the wrong framing.

What’s really wrong with the SPLC (aside from their massive profits) is that they’ve used their soapbox and their supporters in the media and law enforcement—all over the country, and including, until recently, the FBI—to demonize conservative and immigration-restrictionist opinion by calling their victims “SPLC DESIGNATED HATE GROUPS” with, as you can see below, literal Scarlet Letters.

Maria Espinoza’s Remembrance Project remembers the many, many “Americans and legal residents killed by illegal aliens.” That’s what the SPLC considers hateful.

As an example of the hateful rhetoric associated with the Remembrance Project, the SPLC highlights this as an example of

This Biden-Harris administration, I believe, just hates America. To your point with the border, this is intentional, it’s for a reason, and the reason is to destroy our country. And we have to get a hold of it. (Maria Espinoza interview with Fred[e]rick County Maryland Sheriff Chuck Jenkins on “The Maria Espinoza Show,” March 2022.)

All of this is true, and not in any way racist—in 2020, Joe Biden announced that he was running against racism, but he seems to have meant that he was running against America.

The same is true of other immigration restriction groups given the Scarlet Letter, like FAIR and CIS.

The problem is that because of the SPLC’s power, if you are an “SPLC Designated Hate Group”—and most of these are not “Hate Groups” but hated groups, i.e., hated by the SPLC, then you have a problem.

In 2015, when the SPLC was attacking Ann Coulter’s book Adios America, I compared their technique of declaring people or groups unclean—and of declaring others unclean for associating with them—to that of a quack doctor I heard about years ago: Dr. Hulda Regehr Clark, who claimed to be able to cure AIDS and cancer with a glowing light machine that she would shine on people. Her success in curing actual sick people was as limited as the SPLC’s success in helping ordinary black people in Alabama—who are being displaced by immigrants with the help of the SPLC.

Scarlet letters for me but not for thee, says the SPLC!

But Dr. Clark had another glowing light machine she would point at you—this one was diagnostic. With it, she could declare you to be infected with HIV, much as the SPLC declares people a hate group, and then she would point the other machine at you and declare you cured. (Like the SPLC, she didn’t do this for free.)

The people she had declared sick were successfully declared cured.

Which brings me to what they did to my former employer, VDARE.com. In a post on my own Substack, I explained recently that VDARE.com, headed by former Forbes and National Review journalist Peter Brimelow,

was basically a journalistic enterprise, like National Review, Chronicles, Mother Jones, or The New Republic. It’s not about street-fighting, agitation, demonstrations or even, despite our writing on politics, political activism.

It’s about reporting facts, and analysis, which is what I do now, but the SPLC didn’t like the analysis, or for that matter even the facts, which is why they would attack people who read, quoted, or forwarded things we wrote. People attacked for reading us by the SPLC included the Center For Immigration Studies, and Trump advisor Stephen Miller.

VDARE was first attacked by the SPLC in 2004, and many of its problems over the next 20 years (debanking, deplatforming, conferences canceled by hotels, etc.) were a result of the SPLC calling VDARE by the magic term SPLC-designated hate group:

The SPLC doesn’t have any legal powers, which is why people are so upset about it secretly paying informants. However, VDARE was forced to suspend operations in 2024 after lawfare attacks by NY Attorney General Letitia James . . . inspired at least in part by the relentless libels of the SPLC—which same libels may have helped inspire the murder of Charlie Kirk. And, of course, their ten-plus years of anti-Trump hate may have helped inspire the recent attack on Donald Trump.

The quack doctor I mentioned above, Hulda Regehr Clark, had legal troubles—she wasn’t a real doctor—and set up a clinic in Mexico, like a number of quacks. But she was so egregious that the Mexican authorities shut her down, and eventually she died of a disease that a real doctor would have sought help for.

The SPLC has been using the same strange methods against immigration patriots for the last 25 years. They should be shut down, and their huge offshore funds given to their victims.

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This article was originally published on April 28, 2026, on Substack. James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over 20 years, mostly for VDARE.com, and more recently for White Papers. Subscribe to his personal Substack here.