Mere months after the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk a “hard-right extremist,” a transgender-rights activist allegedly murdered him in cold blood. This came more than a decade after a man inspired by the SPLC’s “Hate Map” walked into the Family Research Center’s lobby and tried to kill everyone there. Now, thanks to a Justice Department indictment, we learn that the SPLC spent years fraudulently funding extremist organizations, stoking hatred while telling donors it was working to end it.

According to the indictment, over a nine-year span ending in 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million to “field sources” associated with violent extremist groups such as the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, and the National Socialist Party of America. SPLC employees created fake companies with names such as “Center Investigative Agency” and “Fox Photography” to open bank accounts through which they could move money from the SPLC’s treasury to violent extremist leaders. In 2020, after a bank began investigating suspicious activity connected to these accounts, the SPLC admitted it had lied to the bank, transferred the remaining balances to its own account, and closed the fraudulent accounts.