The Southern Poverty Law Center’s long-running scam is getting even shadier

It turns out 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 Justice Department’s superseding indictment against the SPLC alleges.

The organization secretly paid informants to engage in actively promoting and funding racist groups, while denouncing and “fighting” the very same groups in public.

The SPLC purportedly created fictitious entities to hide funding from their donors.

It’s accused, for instance, 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.

The two men were given salaries and 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 the 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 the 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 others would prop them up for fundraising purposes.

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 helps raise money.

But a far more vital objective of the SPLC is destroying the reputations of legitimate organizations 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 conservative groups like the American College of Pediatricians, the Family Research Council, Turning Point USA, the American Family Association and Moms for Liberty.

In 2016, for instance, the SPLC “Hate and Extremism” list added Alliance Defending Freedom, a highly effective legal organization that’s won multiple religious freedom cases before the Supreme Court.

It often 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 state 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.  

During the height of the 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 paper cited the group thousands of times over the previous decade.

And that’s a just a single media organization: From the mid-2010s through 2025, when the SPLC was spending millions to prop up the worst right-wing extremists in the country, virtually any story about rising extremism on NBC News featured 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 “civil rights” group.

The SPLC, formed in 1971 by civil rights activists in Montgomery, Ala., hasn’t been fighting for the rights of African Americans for a long time.

The KKK was already on its last legs in the early 1970s: The FBI estimated fewer than 2,000 active klansmen operating in the entire country at that point.

By the mid-1980s, the SPLC shifted away from a focus on civil rights to rooting out “right-wing extremism.”

In 1986 its 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 Justice Department’s new indictment further confirms it was worse than we thought.  

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi