As you’ve no doubt heard, the Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud — specifically, for secretly paying leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups with donor money while publicly billing itself as the nation’s foremost watchdog against extremism.
Alarmingly, the indictment alleges that one of the SPLC’s paid informants was a member of the leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The infamous rally saw neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and militias come together in an open display of organized right-wing extremism, becoming a national inflection point early in President Donald Trump‘s first term. Its aftershocks shaped the decade of politics that followed: Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” remark — later debunked as a mischaracterization despite his explicit condemnation of neo-Nazis and white nationalists — became a weapon his critics wielded for years. Joe Biden cited the rally as the moment he decided the country needed him to run for president in 2020.
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According to the DOJ, the SPLC’s informant took part in the planning and execution of this seminal event in 21st century American politics. He attended at the organization’s direction, helped coordinate transportation, and made racist postings under SPLC supervision. He was paid $270,000 from 2015 to 2023.
In other words, the organization that built its reputation and fundraising empire on fighting racism may have been perpetuating it all along.
And that’s just the beginning of what the indictment alleges. In all, the SPLC faces six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of money laundering. These stem from this incident and others in which the nonprofit civil rights organization allegedly paid individuals associated with white supremacist groups. Other bombshell allegations include the payment of more than $1 million to a single informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance and the use of shell companies and fictitious bank accounts to hide the payments from donors and regulators. In one striking episode, the DOJ alleges the SPLC paid one informant to steal from a hate group, then paid a second informant $6,000 to take the blame for it.
But the Charlottesville allegation dwarfs all of this because of the political ramifications. If the SPLC did indeed pay $270,000 to a primary organizer of the “Unite the Right” rally — the event that saw one woman, Heather Heyer, killed when a neo-Nazi drove into counterprotesters and upended our national politics for a decade — then our understanding of the Trump era, and of ourselves within it, is irrevocably contaminated. History will have been rewritten. Our self-understanding as a nation will have been plunged into an even more profound confusion and darkness.
The SPLC has vowed a rigorous self-defense, and smart legal observers have been quick to note that a conviction won’t come easily. But as with the prosecution of Trump over hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the outcome of the trial is not the most important part of the story. The politically charged decision to indict a former president for something as minuscule as a campaign finance violation to cover up an affair is what history remembers. Likewise, the revelation that the nation’s most high-profile “anti-hate” organization funded notorious hate groups to the tune of millions — and helped change U.S. history in the process — is what will be remembered for decades. Not whether a guilty verdict is reached.
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And that’s because no verdict could unring this bell. The indictment alone calls into question the prevailing accounts of other events of the era.
We need a real reckoning here. Who in government knew? Which journalists were tipped off and said nothing? Which donors kept writing checks after the whispers began?
The trial is just the beginning.
