On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering for allegedly defrauding donors by secretly funneling over $3 million (2014–2023) to paid informants associated with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan without disclosure.

Glenn Beck, calling the SPLC a “tool of the progressive engine,” sums up the charges like this: “They were bankrolling the very racists [they were] denouncing on the evening news.”

The question is: Why?

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn unpacks why he believes the SPLC would allegedly fund the very “extremism” it claims to fight.

If true, the revelations about the SPLC, Glenn says, follow the same pattern of “controlled extremism” that we see in “really ugly political systems” all over the world.

“First, you help create or intensify the very danger you publicly are claiming to fight. … Money flows in quietly to radicals and to dangerous people, and it helps them become louder and more active,” he explains.

“The public then sees a bigger threat. The organization points that threat out and makes more money, more moral authority, media defense, and political leverage. And it’s just lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat.”

Step two involves “[turning] labels into weapons” so that “extremist, terrorist, [and] foreign agent” become tools to “isolate opponents.”

“You chill people’s association. You cut off funding. You make the public afraid to defend the target,” says Glenn, pointing to how Russia’s Supreme Court recently declared the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial an “extremist” organization and banned its activities in the country.

The third step, he says, requires cultivating “a climate where the map becomes territory.”

“Once a group is publicly targeted as hateful or extremist or subversive, the press, the foundations, the bureaucracies can begin treating the label as proof,” Glenn notes.

“This is where soft totalitarianism systems are born. You don’t start with gulags. You start with reputational death, which kind of becomes a soft blacklist. You start funding the choke points and public fear. That’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center was [allegedly] doing,” he continues, claiming it looks suspiciously like a “color revolution.”

He explains that “if an institution can inflate or steer the public perception of extremism, then it can help manufacture a crisis atmosphere,” which it can then use to delegitimize political opponents, pressure the media into conformity, justify surveillance and deplatforming, scare donors, churches, business, and individuals away from supporting the “wrong side,” and create moral permission for “extraordinary countermeasures” — even violence.

“Is that what the Southern Poverty Law Center was doing?” asks Glenn.

While he refuses to make premature judgments, Glenn says he “could sure make the case.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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