down on the problem farm

the southern poverty law center and the dilemma of profitable problems

certain internet felines of questionable goodness have oft been heard to opine:

words you will never hear: “we the experts empanelled to study this problem have determined that it is not, in fact, a problem. please accept the return of the remainder of our budget and put it to more useful ends.”

it’s simply not done and even if it were, you’d rapidly get the sort of survivorship bias that would select only for those who kept their money and asked for more. the incentives that arise from this are entirely perverse: solutions = unemployment and ongoing, worsening, or hideously overstated risks, threats, and problems provide job security and bales of cash.

this is true in most companies, all government, and goes triple dog definite for NGO’s and transnationals, the uncontested kings of this grift. they are not problem solvers, they are problem farmers, cultivating them, nurturing them, encouraging them to grow and to become fecund, generating dozens of new problems all needful of solving and money. the more heart rending, fear inducing, or emotively sloppy the problem, the better.

once you accept this lens, the whole “why have we never found a sane, consistent answer on abortion?” question becomes obvious. because both sides want an open issue on which to fundraise and 200 NGO’s on both sides are drowning in scrooge mcduck level money from it. same goes for the green grift, global warming, the IPCC, the WHO, palestine, “rooting out fraud,” and the ever expaning NGO behemoths around election security, poverty, mental health, and the homeless industrial complex that can drop a cool couple of billion in a city and not house a single soul. it’s why the solutions are always unserious like “free needles” and “here’s a tent and sleeping bag” and “let’s lobby to legalize stealing and public defecation and prevent involuntary holds for mental health problems.”

but sometimes, even this is not enough. sometimes your grift is just plain drying up. you can cook the data, fudge the claims, and go full apocalyptic, and people just stop paying attention and the donations stop rolling in. guess you need to go find a new scam?

bah. those are piker sentiments!

the true robber of the rubes waits not for opportunity but rather goes and makes his own and if your problem will not cooperate by being sufficiently problematic, go and make the problem yourself! perhaps these things begin as a slippery slope, a little fudge here and there, a little thumb on the scale of the thermometer data over at the IPCC, but pretty soon, you wind up in full blown farm to table crisis grubbing.

every damn time.

this actually creates a useful heuristic: any NGO that has been around for long periods of time is almost certainly incompetent and corrupt.

you can watch it play out.

pretty soon your “anti-racism” group is funding actual racists to go play at agent provocateur and say the very things and commit the very atrocities that you’re going to put in the fundraising emails to stir your base to loosen their purse strings.

and this is how the southern poverty law center (SPLC) seems to have gone full “smollett” and spent decades wrapping nooses around its own neck to get some marketing-ready pictures.

and the justice department just dropped a 14 page grand jury indictment and it makes for some fascinating reading, especially from the group that was so keen to accuse everyone else of being “racist” and “white supremacist.”

the SPLC will doubtless argue that “we needed to have an informant network!'“ but this rings pretty hollow when that network was being paid to say things and organize events and when the very informants themselves were being used as bugbears to frighten donors into seeing a huge “white supremacy” problem that was mostly a bunch of paid puppets egging one another on.

this was not civil rights, it was theater.

some of these are pretty wild.

“F37” was a member of the online leadership of “unite the right” who had the event in charlotte that so many expressed sputtering outrage about. they suypervized his posting and messaging and paid him over $270k over 8 years to go coordinate these things.

F27, $300k, national socialist member, sadistic souls motorcycle club tied to aryan nations.

F42 DOJ says this source was a former chairman of the national alliance and also had an “extremist file” page on SPLC’s site. bugbear for hire: price $140k.

F30 leader of national socialist party of america, ran an aryan nation faction, in the actual KKK, has SPLC “extremist file.” bugbear for hire: $70k

it just goes on and on.

one was allegedly the imperial wizard of the united klans of america while another was allegedly a KKK member married to an exalted cyclops.

all in all, $3.3 million was funneled to extremist groups through a variety of false fronts, fake businesses, and illegal bank accounts.

given the hundres of millions it raised, the ROI was massive.

they used fictitious entities like the center investigative agency, fox photography, north west techniologies, tech writer’s group, and rare books warehouse to launder and mask money.

their ads to raise money used the specific people that they were paying in them. you think you’re cynical enough, but you aren’t.

they were literally paying the groups they claimed to seek to “dismantle” to go look scary and say inflammatory things.

in at least one example, these funds were used directly to commit crimes.

now, obviously, these are allegations and this is a grand jury indictment and grand juries are notorious for being willing to “indict a ham sandwich,” but i suspect there’s quite a lot of fire in amidst this smoke and the SPLC has a long history of acting badly, lying to donors, and playing the political catspaw. they were not some little group, this was a core, rich liberal virtue signaling blue chip. i have a friend who got caught up with them (and tried to get me involved). i had to field accusations about charlie based on their absurdist claims that turning point is white hate. even 5 minutes ago, big chunks of the liberal coastal elites thought this group was credible. (they seem to think this about a bunch of once possibly useful rights groups from the ADL to BLM to amnesty international, human rights watch, acorn, and oxfam. this trend is everywhere once you start looking for it. see heuristic above.)

you’re rapidly going to realize that most of the calls always were

SPLC was not “anti-racist” they were anti-donor. they were frauds. racism was their product; they farmed it. selling you your “super good guy anti-racism badge” for opposing the very things they just paid the exact racist in their marketing video to say was their business model. and business was good.

they did not pick on charlie for being racist, they picked on him because he was high profile and they could not find or fund enough real racism so, as ever, they had to make some up. they just wanted attention.

all the way back in the 1990’s, the montgomery advertiser did an 8 part exposé on the SPLC guys and their gross exaggerations about the KKK and other donor bait. they won a pulitzer for it. nothing here is new apart from the “they were actually paying the provocateurs.” all the money went to “lavish” salaries. SPLC had hundreds of millions in assets. the founder drove a rolls royce. they “spend far more on fundraising than legal support.” they got more and more specifically political.

founder moriss dees is the classic crusader captured by wealth. maybe he was always a jerk and just hid it better or perhaps once he had good intentions, but he went so far off the reservation that in 1986 the whole legal staff apart from him quit in disgust. the org turned into a “fighter of right wing extremism” that was really just a sinkhole for stealing money.

in 2019, even “the new yorker” turned on them. dees was forced out over claims of corruption and, wait for it, racism. there are zero surprises here in terms of the morals or the methods. this is just another one of those things that “everyone knew but no one said.”

their headquarters was nicknamed “the poverty palace” and was a surveillance hive of “spying on your own people” with more cameras than colin farrell’s bedroom.

the words of former employees (joined in 2001) are telling.

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

“The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics.”

SPLC is not a bulwark against anything.

it’s fraudlently funded CPR for belief in white racism as a political force in america.

i’m here to tell you: this is not special, it’s not odd, this is the norm, the modal outcome. NGO’s have become quite possibly the greatest form of fraud in america and the only thing that could credibly contest it is stealing from government entitlement programs. and where those two circles overlap? whoo dooggie do you get some wild stuff.

i would bet you that something on the order of 20-30% of overall US government spending is being stolen.

and make no mistake, this is not a monster that will go quietly and allow itself to be dragged out into the light.

california may well be the poster child. the golden state with its massive economy and astonishing resources careens ever further into poverty and graft. adjusted for cost of living, CA has the highest poverty % in the US (roughly 18%, so over 1 in 6). taxes rise, services decline, and the politicians grow fat to bursting as everyone gets an NGO. you think i’m kidding?

there are 217,000 registered NGO’s in california. many focus onb “poverty.” CA NGO’s represent over $570 billion in annual “revenues.” that’s the GDP of maryland. and it’s probably understated. it’s 14% of california GDP. roughly 1/3 of this is government money (much of it federal)

for perspective, the whole california state budget is $320bn, so the NGO space dwarfs it.

it’s one nonprofit for every 182 people in the state. every politician of business titan’s spouse gets to have one and pay themselves “lavish” salaries. it’s an unending string of galas thrown for one another to look virtuous while stealing. and you cannot touch it because of “the base.” 1 in 14 jobs in california is at a non-profit. it’s “too big to fail.” add that 8% to the 15% of job holders who work for the state and you’re at ~23% of workers that are NGO (almost all social services, education, healthcare) and government workers. that’s a massive voting and special interest block with interest vested not in solutions but in problem perpetuation.

and, predictably, basically none of it works. i watched the “homeless charities” in SF do anything but get people off the streets. expenditure would double then double again, so would the homeless population.

the health care pass throughs work about as well as building high speed rail.

SB1380, “housing first” passed in 2016. it was supposed to be a landmark public private NGO partnership to “solve” homelessness and create “no judgment” housing with non-profits as the operational layer.

in 1990, homeless spend was ~$200 million. it was up to $3bn by 2019 and $7.2 bn by 2021.

35X on spending, over 5 doublings. no one got housed. the homeless level exploded.

and the money? it poured in from the feds and state and cities and it was grabbed by NGO’s and slum lords.

and the homeless problem got worse. and they screamed for more money to “fix” it.

this is the default pattern, the modal outcome. and once you see it, you see it everywhere. the place where the state touches the NGO or the transnational has essentially become one vast organized crime syndicate.

RICO is wholly inadequate to roll this up. it has too much support with politicians, parties, prosecutors, and judges. the mob already bought it all and the stakes are huge. they may not sew the faces of their enemies onto soccer balls, but this is as big and as pervasive an issue as the cartels are in mexico and it likely wields more political power.

the sheer amount of “we get to do fraud and we’ll donate to your campaign and throw you some dirty cash on the back end” on display in minnesota is the tip of a rancid iceberg and while yes, i think any reasonable person would have to agree that the donkeycrats are by far the more prolific practitioners of this art, anyone assuming the GOP are not also wetting their beaks at the fraud feeder is being truth avoidant. this is the whole system. it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

nothing about this is an accident. this is what the system is for and why there is no possible way one can trust a state to administer this sort of largesse (even in the unlikely event that they meant well) because those good at solving problems will solve them and go away and those good at farming them will persist and expand taking more treasure and influence and plundering us all. nothing grows like a failing government program.

and we seem too demoralized or stupid to do anything about it.

the size of what keeps emerging is staggering. but where is the real action? these feel like DEA show busts where they pile a few kilos and some guns and money on the table and say “tad-tah, look, we’re winning the war on drugs!”

it’s a pantomime.

they just investigated 450 hospices in LA that were taking in $750 million a year in revenues. none were real. not a single one had an operating business. when they shut them off, not a single one called to demand reinstatement.

let that sink in.

let the scale and the “boom box in st peter’s basilica” obviousness of the whole thing sink in.

imagine how many cockroaches this means that we have yet to see.

now realize: nothing is going to happen.

just like in MN, a few wrists will get slapped, a few fines paid, folks who stole millions will be let out on $25k bail and skip the country, but the machine will close ranks. noise gets made, then it goes away, and the roaches come back.

you do not get to investigate this, too many with too much power are complicit.

nick shirley has been roaming around groovy gavin’s west coast wastage festival and documenting fraud. he found the hospices oz speaks of above.

a real place would be helping him, adding resources, digging in to save the money of those they allege to represent. but california, no. they are doing the other thing:

of course, they don’t call it that. they call it “AB 2624 — “Privacy for Immigration Support Services Providers”

they claim it’s to stop “harassment” and to “protect privacy” but the reality is that it’s intended to stop investigation and render it criminal and civilly actionable. no more filming fake hospice or daycare, no interviewing the staff at gavin’s learing center. it creates “protected entities” that will be basically un-investigable.

you cannot divulge the names, locations, and operations of many receiving public funds and a vast “the process is the punishment” system of liability and limitation around investigation. this is lawfare as censorship.

and that is not the action of an innocent.

they are doing it because they know they are guilty and they know how well the video plays.

and we’re seeing this everywhere from FDA to EPA to homelessness to medical care to infrastructure, military contracting, education, and welfare.

it’s one huge hostage puppy of “you cannot cancel or criticize this or the puppy gets it!” “do you want kids not to have daycare!?!”

but this starts to sink once you reach a point of more rust than boat. the theft and taking and misallocation and problem farming have simply grown too vast to support and eventually, as is always the case, you run out of other people’s money.

california is dying under it and its capital is starting to flee the taxes to come.

and they’re going to double down again on the taking until this becomes too obvious to miss.

the challenge going forward is that our system of government was designed for moral, golden rule people. and this is not that. we are not constitutionally equipped to handle “whole organs of government, justice, and judiciary as a crime scene.”

but we need to become so because this mafia is not going to stop making us offers that we cannot refuse until such time as we do.

pre bunking of “unaccountable dictatorship! nooooo!” as response to coming to clean up unaccountable kleptocracy by irresponsible aristo-clown will run out of rope if enough of this comes to light.

it’s so vast that the center struggles to see it. the lie is really that big.

this will be the coming of age of the west, the moment we either realize that house must be cleaned or consign ourselves to living in filth.

a choice is coming.

choose well.