It turns out that the most generous funder of white supremacist groups in the United States was likely the Southern Poverty Law Center.
At least that’s what the Department of Justice‘s superseding indictment against the SPLC alleges. The organization secretly paid informants to engage in the active promotion and funding of racist groups while denouncing and “fighting” the very same groups in public. The SPLC purportedly created fictitious entities to hide funding from its donors.
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That’s what is colloquially known as a “racket.”
The SPLC, for instance, is accused of bankrolling the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, paying a leader nearly $300,000 to post racist messages, organize, and even transport people to the infamous Charlottesville protest, where one person was killed.
In another instance, a pair of white supremacists who approached the SPLC about leaving the Ku Klux Klan were encouraged to stay in the group and recruit new members. Given salaries, the two men were allegedly reimbursed for the costs of their activities, including those “incurred for cross-burning events, to include the wood and fuel used.”
In the end, I’m not sure what legal jeopardy there is in engaging in this brand of duplicitous activity, but it is without a doubt corrupt, fraudulent, immoral, and bad for the country.
Many people correctly point out that SPLC is merely interested in keeping white supremacist groups operational to justify its existence. White nationalists and identitarian groups have no genuine political power or support, so it makes sense that SPLC and other groups would prop them up for fundraising. The notion that Americans live in a nation of deep-seated systemic and cultural racism is a foundational belief of the American Left. Having a bunch of cartoonishly racist groups running around the country not only perpetuates the myth but also helps raise money.
But a far more vital objective of the SPLC is destroying the reputations of legitimate organizations involved in mainstream political debates that have absolutely nothing to do with racism or extremism.
The purpose of the “hate” maps and enemies’ lists compiled by SPLC isn’t to alert Americans about local skinheads, but to associate those skinheads with the American College of Pediatricians, Family Research Council, Ben Carson, Turning Point USA, American Family Association, and Moms for Liberty.
In 2016, for instance, the SPLC added Alliance Defending Freedom, a highly effective legal organization that’s won multiple religious freedom cases in front of the Supreme Court, to its “Hate and Extremism” list. Oftentimes, the ADF represents minority clients. Its most high-profile case involved Jack Phillips, the persecuted cake maker from Colorado whose First Amendment rights were stripped by the government. But the group also takes on cases regarding state funding for abortion or biological males competing in girls’ sports.
You may disagree with ADF’s positions on those issues, but only an extremist progressive actually considers it a “hate” group worthy of inclusion on a list with “neo-confederates.” It’s not the pinhead “neo-Volkisch” that concerns the SPLC. It’s the impressive lawyer with the ADF.
Yet, the SPLC’s “hate list” has been treated as an authoritative source on extremism by virtually every legacy media outlet for years. Like the SPLC, the left-wing media has a symbiotic relationship with white supremacists. You might recall after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race, a hysteria about white supremacists gripped coverage. Suddenly there were Nazis running around everywhere. When a gaggle of millennials cosplaying Schutzstaffel put together a conference in Washington, D.C., virtually every major news network dutifully showed up. In the end, there were more reporters than participants at the event.
The preposterously outsize coverage was meant to create the impression that the new GOP was crawling with covert klansmen. The SPLC was featured in virtually every story tying the threat to Republicans.
During the height of Black Lives Matter protests and riots, the New York Times cited the SPLC as an unimpeachable authority on hate groups in hundreds of stories over a one-year span. The group was cited by the paper thousands of times over the previous decade. That’s a single media organization. From the mid-2010s through 2025, when the SPLC was sending millions to prop up the worst right-wing extremists in the country, virtually any story about rising extremism on NBC News featured the SPLC.
Some of this, no doubt, can be chalked up to laziness. Many reporters and producers will take the path of least resistance. Relying on the SPLC as a proxy to smear Republicans will never get you in trouble with an editor. Then again, most legacy media scoops are handed to reporters by activist groups like the SPLC these days. Reporters just spruce up the text with some vaguely neutral-sounding pseudo-journalistic vernacular.
It’s not only the media that relied on SPLC, though. You remember that FBI Richmond field office internal intelligence memo identifying “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential domestic violent extremists? The key source — perhaps the only source for the underlying claim — was the SPLC.
The question is, how can any reputable media outlet, much less a government agency, ever use the SPLC as a source again?
They’ll try. Even now, outlets like the Associated Press refer to the SPLC as a “civil rights” group. The SPLC, formed in 1971 by civil rights activists in Montgomery, Alabama, hasn’t been fighting for the rights of African Americans for a long time. In its infancy, the group adopted unique legal tactics to undercut the influence of the klan, which was really on its last legs by this point anyway. The FBI estimated fewer than 2,000 active klansmen operating in the entire country by the early 1970s.
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By the mid 1980s, the SPLC had already shifted away from the civil rights fight to rooting out “right-wing extremism.” In 1986, the entire legal staff, save founder Morris Dees (who was pushed out of the organization in 2019 after allegations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination), quit over the change.
The SPLC, probably superfluous when it was formed, has long been a shady left-wing activist group with a near-billion-dollar endowment. The new indictment only further confirms it was worse than we thought.
