Just How Many Criminal Cases Did the SPLC Corrupt?

If the Accused Was Whitish and the "Victim" Black, All of Them

"Sentence first—verdict afterwards," So said the Queen of Hearts in the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Writing in 19th Century England, Carroll mocked a legal process that often sentenced the accused before the evidence was presented.

In 21st century America, the Queen of Hearts could have safely outsourced her mischief to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In every prominent racially charged cases of the last 15 years, the SPLC decided its verdict, if not its sentence, even before seeing the evidence..

On April 30, 2020, the SPLC put out a press release whose opening sentence established its theme: “Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot to death on February 23 by two white men while he was out for a jog in Satilla Shores.” Arbery, of course, was no more a jogger than Lia Thomas was a female. As to Greg McMichael and his son Travis, they may have been veterans with impeccable records, but to the SPLC they were simply “white men.”

“Jogger” Ahmaud Arbery before the SPLC beatified him

No matter. Two months after the incident and six weeks before the arrest of the McMichaels, the SPLC had already established motive. “Absolutely no one should ever be targeted because they are Black or brown, and absolutely no family should ever endure the pain of losing a loved one at the hands of someone else as a result of their bias and hate.”

Indifferent to the evidence for self-defense, the SPLC saw the failure of local authorities to arrest the McMichaels as proof of systemic racism. This failure spoke “volumes about the level of respect that law enforcement in Glynn County have for Black lives.” In cahoots with the NAACP and other entities, the SPLC shamed Republican state authorities into arresting the McMichaels. Cheered on by the media, they then scared judge and jury into convicting them. With motive pre-established, the sentence—life without parole for Greg and Travis—was all abut assured.

The SPLC ignored the evidence in the Zimmerman case to better scare its funders

In 2012, the SPLC injected the same racial toxin into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, headlining its initial article, “Walking While Black is Still a Crime.” The article by Richard Cohen opened, “George Zimmerman appears to have concluded that young Trayvon Martin was ‘suspicious’ based on nothing more than his race and the fact that Trayvon was walking in Zimmerman's neighborhood.”

These assumptions, Cohen argued, were having “a disastrous impact on the young people of color.” Zimmerman, 28 at the time, was a young person color. An Hispanic civil rights activist and Obama supporter., he volunteered to be a neighborhood watch captain after a series of home invasions and break-ins, all by young black men, unnerved his wife. What triggered Zimmerman on that fateful night was not that Martin was “walking,” but that he was loitering—in the rain—likely casing out the town homes in this economically stressed subdivision.

The SPLC added to the pressure put on Republican Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to override local authorities and arrest Zimmerman for murder. When a jury rightfully acquitted Zimmerman, the SPLC responded with race-baiting double talk.

“Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” The SPLC egged on the Trayon agitators

Wrote Cohen, "‘They always get away.’ These were the words George Zimmerman uttered as he followed and later shot Trayvon Martin – words that reflected his belief that Trayvon was one of ‘them,’ the kind of person about to get away with something.” Added Cohen, “Trayvon is dead, and Zimmerman is free. Who was the one who got away?”

The women who founded Black Lives Matter felt the same way. It was the Zimmerman acquittal that inspired them to launch their crypto-Marxist hate group. This was one extremist group that the SPLC loved. In July 2020, the SPLC posted a celebratory article about BLM’s founding.

“When Trayvon’s killer was acquitted in July 2013,” wrote Tafeni English-Relf, “[BLM’s founders] expressed my outrage – and that of many others – with the phrase Black Lives Matter’ online. This month marks the seventh anniversary of a movement born from a social media expression against police brutality and has grown to become a clarion call for racial justice around the world.”

Derek Chauvin and his colleagues never had a chance

BLM and its allies may have caused some $2 billion dollars in damage during their orgy of violence post-Floyd, but that havoc troubled the SPLC not at all. In an environment that fraught, Derek Chauvin and his three colleagues had no chance at justice, but the SPLC did not blink. It celebrated “the tens of thousands of people [who] would march in solidarity for Floyd and BLM” and ignored the mob’s poisonous effect on the Minneapolis jury pool.

BLM first showed its clout in Ferguson, Missouri. The SPLC championed the cause of Michael Brown, “the black, unarmed teenager who was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., by police officer Darren Wilson.” As with the other racially charged cases, the SPLC put its finger on the scale for the black criminal but did so cautiously. The “looting, clashes with heavily armed police and dozens of arrests” did not make its BLM allies look good.

Officer Darren Wilson had to “go ghost” despite being cleared by DOJ

To offset the bad optics, the SPLC comically projected its own grubby modus operandi on the Ku Klux Klan. “If you ask the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote Don Terry, “a gut wrenching racially charged American tragedy should never go to waste.” The Klan, charged Terry, “tried to exploit and inject themselves into the middle of the sad saga,” “raised money for Wilson, who is white,” and “joined rallies for him with other supporters.” The nerve of them!

Terry conceded that these supposed terrorists “are not much more than keyboard Klansmen,” but failed to recognize the Klan was the mirror image of the SPLC. As became clear this past week, for years the SPLC has been using its clout to inspire chaos and to exploit that chaos to terrorize judges and juries.

Said famed liberal jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes a century in 1913, a century before the SPLC helped spawn BLM, “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.” It still doesn’t.