Scott Adams saw through the Southern Poverty Law Centers faade years before the latest scandal, warning that an organization paid to find hate would inevitably manufacture it.
According to the Gateway Pundit, the late Dilbert creator, who died in January, used his podcast to highlight the SPLCs glaring double standards, noting that the group refused to classify Antifa as an extremist organization while placing respected conservative figure Dr. Ben Carson on an extremist list. That kind of targeting has long fueled conservative criticism that the SPLC functions less as a neutral watchdog and more as an ideological weapon aimed squarely at the right.
From Focus on the Family, Adams is quoted as saying, Now, remember how I always tell you that if you know what happened, you might not know anything. But if you know who was involved, well, now you might know something. His point was simple but devastating: follow the incentives and you will understand why certain groups are smeared while others are conveniently ignored.
He elaborated on the perverse financial structure driving such activism. If your job is to identify ghosts, are you going to find any ghosts? Of course you will, because you get paid for it. If your job is to identify hate groups, are you going to find some new hate groups every year? Or are you going to find all the ones that exist, and then you say, you know, we dont even need to get any funding for the next year, I dont even know why we have a staff.
Adams then delivered his blunt verdict on the SPLCs business model. So, you cant trust anybody who gets paid by the amount of hate that they identify.Theyre going to find some hate. But is it real? No, Turning Point USA is nothing like a group, not even close.
Those words look even more prescient now that the SPLC has reportedly been exposed for allegedly paying racist groups to stage racist acts, a scheme that would allow the organization to raise money off the very hatred it claims to oppose. For conservatives who have watched the SPLC malign mainstream right-of-center organizations, the latest revelations only confirm that this powerful nonprofit has done tremendous harm to the country and should face serious accountability, if not outright shutdown.
Adams was right to wave the warning flag about the deviousness and destructiveness of the SPLCs tactics, and he was far from alone among those on the right who saw the danger in allowing such a group to police public discourse. It is tragic that Scott Adams left us so soon, but his body of workand his clear-eyed skepticism about institutions that profit from divisionwill continue to teach Americans for years to come.
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