I very strongly appreciate this essay and wish there were a hundred more like it for other orgs. The SPLC is one of the biggest and most important nodes in the closure of the Internet, coordinating debanking and censorship outside the formal state.
Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry.
The SPLC coordinated pressure campaigns against the private sector 2017-2022, specifically Internet companies and payment processors. The easy for any individual company to do is knuckle under, especially since most decision-making managers will be sympathetic to begin with.
Major threats included "coordinated negative public messaging" and also legislative, executive, and regulatory action.
Industry employees are, right now, in 2026, afraid for their physical safety if they say things that hurt the SPLC.
The timeline: debanking really starts in earnest in 2017 in response to the election of Donald Trump, and was supercharged after Charlottesville.
The SPLC explicitly included elected politicians and extremely high profile normal conservative political figures in their list of individuals and accounts to be debanked and censored. This is, eg, responsible for the ad boycott of Tucker Carlson*.
*And no, this isn't retroactively justified by Carlson being crazy; there are many crazy media figures.
The SPLC seamlessly moved from "debank actual terrorist organization" to "debank regular elected politicians."
What makes this all really funny is the SPLC getting hoisted on their own petard; they were the major voice calling for nonprofit financial transactions to be more heavily scrutinized by the government!
Organization called "Free Press" 2021 EoY communication: "Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump... We’re now pushing [Facebook[ to permanently ban Trump." We're nonpartisan BTW.
Anyways, I'd like to publicly thank Patrick McKenzie for writing this. I recommend all of my followers read the whole thing and purchase a paid subscription to McKenzie.
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