The Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly paid operatives embedded within the Aryan Nations, after effectively suing the extremist organization out of existence two decades ago, as part of what prosecutors say was a self-enrichment scheme to justify the law center’s purported bigot-fighting work.
Federal investigators are alleging that the SPLC has been operating a covert network of “field sources,” known as “Fs,” who either were associated with various violent extremist groups or had infiltrated them at the law center’s direction.
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To pay for the on-the-ground operations, the SPLC is suspected of secretly spending donor money, meant to go toward dismantling such “hate groups,” instead on infiltration efforts that actually helped the white supremacist cause.
SPLC accused of paying Aryan Nations associates
The Aryan Nations, which believed that white Aryans were superior beings, was one of the organizations whose leaders or foot soldiers allegedly accepted funding from the SPLC while engaged in the active promotion of white nationalism.
According to the grand jury indictment charging the SPLC with funneling funds to these paid informants, the law center gave an individual identified as “F-27,” an officer in the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, more than $300,000 from 2014 to 2020.
Another associate, called “F-30,” the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, allegedly received over $70,000 from the SPLC between 2014 and 2016. According to authorities, that time period overlapped with when F-30 was featured on the SPLC’s “Extremist Files” webpage, through which the legal clinic solicited donations.
The page used to be called the “Intelligence Files” under the SPLC’s “Get Informed” section, a database that contained profiles of prominent political extremists.
SPLC self-credited with collapse of the Aryan Nations
As the SPLC still touts on its website today, the law center sued the Aryan Nations in 1999 on behalf of two Native Americans, a mother and her son, who had been beaten and held at gunpoint by members of the Aryan Nations.
The victims were driving near the heavily guarded Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, which was dubbed the “Aryan Nations World Congress,” when bullets struck their car. They were then chased down and assaulted by security guards stationed at the Aryan Nations complex.
In 2000, the SPLC won its “landmark case” against the Aryan Nations, and the organization’s founder, Richard Butler, filed for bankruptcy several weeks later after he was ordered to pay the jury’s $6.3 million judgment in punitive damages owed to the victims.
Butler was then forced to relinquish the 20-acre compound at an auction, the site’s guard tower was subsequently demolished, and the church and meeting hall were burned to the ground during a firefighter drill. For decades, the Aryan Nations headquarters had served as the meeting place for the nation’s most violent white supremacists, the SPLC says.
Following Butler’s death in 2004, the Aryan Nations split into two factions, which differed over their belief over whether they could find common ground with Islamic jihadists via their shared hatred of Jews. However, neither offshoot was able to restore the Aryan Nations back to its former prominence.
In the mid-2000s, the last remnants of its leadership recruited among motorcycle gangs in the South but failed to reestablish operations beyond two chapters and a handful of recruits
One spin-off tried to erect a new Aryan headquarters in John Day, Oregon, a small rural town in the eastern region of the state, but the mayor, police chief, business owners, ranchers, and residents all adamantly opposed the skinheads setting up shop in their backyard, and the Aryan Nations followers had to abandon those plans.
The same spin-off attempted to raise funds in 2010 for a $5,000 deposit needed to buy 15 acres of land in southern Tennessee for the founding of “a new Aryan Republic Homeland.”
But by the end of 2010, its head, Paul Mullet, gave up on the Aryan Nations and left the group, though it was taken over by Morris Gullet, an organizer who was active in the Aryan Nations in the 1990s.
As of 2010, scarce splinter Aryan Nations groups remain, with little more than a website and relatively few known members to show for it.
The Washington Examiner contacted the SPLC for comment.
