Debanking, Not Dees: How the SPLC's Legacy Cost Its Founders

Morris Dees walked into a lecture hall at Claremont McKenna College in the 1990s. I was a student then. He co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center. I forgot his speech. I never forgot the gun.

He adjusted his sports coat. A silver six-shooter slid out. It looked like the weapon Clint Eastwood carried in "Dirty Harry." Deep grooves. Burnished metal. The SPLC had billed Dees as the man who took on the Ku Klux Klan. That steel object made the legend tangible. For us in the room, it signaled something darker. Racism was alive. It was thriving. Dees needed that firearm as a hedge against evil that might strike at any moment.

Decades later, we learned the cost of that legend. It drained bank accounts from certain Americans.

In August 2024, the SPLC published an article dismissing complaints about debanking. R.G. Cravens wrote it. He accused the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom of perpetuating a false conspiracy theory. He claimed big government and corporations were victimizing conservative Christians. The tone was accusatory.

Then the regulators spoke. On Oct. 14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a 47-page report. It examined debanking practices at the nine largest banks under its supervision. Regulators reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints. They sifted through approximately 420,000 pages of bank records. The findings were specific. Four banks referenced the SPLC while closing accounts or denying loans. Those institutions were JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, and TD Bank.

The details in the report are worse than the summary suggests. WePay, a JPMorgan subsidiary, screened customers against specific terms. The list included "MAGA" and "America First." It also included names of groups designated as "hate groups" by the SPLC. In July 2021, WePay closed an account raising money for a "devout Christian's" legal challenge to anti-discrimination laws.

PNC refused a line of credit to a media company. One owner’s foundation had funded several Christian conservative groups. The report noted these included groups identified as hate organizations by the SPLC. A PNC employee explained the decision. "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values."

What struck me most? None of these banks checked if the SPLC’s allegations were true. Regulators found that "mere allegations, negative press or negative reviews contributed to some banks declining to serve average Americans, even in the absence of any validation of the underlying facts or concerns."

It is hard to be shocked these days. We must recover that ability. Why would a bank let an advocacy group decide who gets an account? No verification. No due diligence.

The report provided the answer. "Fear of being on the wrong side of public opinion led at least one bank to distance itself from certain customer affiliations that could possibly be viewed as partisan." Banks labeled these customers a "reputation risk."

My father, Shelby Steele, has a better name for this phenomenon: White guilt. He has spent forty years examining this question. To paraphrase him, White guilt is the eternal drive by many Whites, especially those on the left, to prove their innocence of racism. They show over and over that they are not complicit in America's historical racial sins.

This drive gives White guilt a transactional nature. To buy innocence, someone must have innocence to sell.

Selling innocence requires a specific kind of moral leverage, particularly regarding race. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, secured that authority in the deep South by helping integrate Alabama state troopers and suing the Ku Klux Klan following violent attacks. But the machinery of white guilt demands an endless supply of hatred. If racism actually faded away, what would there be left to sell?

The SPLC faced a problem. The Klan was shrinking. By the organization’s own count, Klan groups dropped from 130 in 2016 to just 72 a year later. Their Intelligence Project director noted that these groups seemed to be "collapsing." With their primary target dwindling, the SPLC had to manufacture racism. They did this by broadening the definition of what counted as hateful.

Enter the "Hate Map." This tool placed mainstream Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood. The numbers swelled quickly. In 2021, the SPLC counted 733 "hate groups." By 2022, that figure jumped to 1,225 "hate and antigovernment extremist groups," a category that now included parents' advocacy groups focused on education. Today, the list features Moms for Liberty, PragerU, and Turning Point USA.

For the banking industry, being associated with the Klan was the kiss of death. When bankers saw conservative Christian groups listed alongside the Klan, they accepted those labels at face value. They cut off the customers the SPLC had named. In exchange, they bought their own innocence. Their institutions appeared cleansed of racist elements.

JPMorgan played this game with particular savviness. The bank donated to the SPLC. Then, a JPMorgan subsidiary used those same SPLC labels to close accounts it had flagged as racist. It purchased innocence and simultaneously wielded it as a weapon.

The power of white guilt lies in how mercilessly it leverages the charge of racism. Proof is rarely required. The accusation itself carries the weight. That has been the SPLC’s core power all along, and it is an incredibly lucrative one. The victims were often Christians holding views shared by millions of Americans. They got shoved into the race box and charged accordingly.

Recall the gun Morris Dees wore to my college. It was theater. We believed it signaled that racism was a living threat, ready to erupt at any moment. Decades later, after tracking the SPLC’s record, I see the "Hate Map" as part of that same performance. Banks bought into it because challenging the SPLC’s methodologies would have been costlier than simply accepting the racist charge.

This is the white guilt transaction my father has long warned us about. The OCC report provides a gift: it reveals the truth many suspected but could never prove. The document details exactly what happened. But a harder question lingers. What do these banks, the SPLC, and everyone who profited from this machine owe the people falsely placed on that list?

That gun never had to be fired. Neither did the Hate Map. The power was always in the accusation.