Manufacturing Racism

National Review Online

Thursday, April 23, 2026

 

For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has stood as a malignant expression of progressive activism, blaring out warnings about the rise of hate, establishing preposterously wide-ranging public lists of organizations designated as “hate groups,” collaborating hand in glove with both the mainstream media and (until recently) the federal government, and raising millions of dollars toward the nominal goal of “fighting white supremacy.” Well, it turns out that it was funding it as well.

 

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice handed down an eleven-count indictment of the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The purported scheme? It turns out that for years the SPLC has been secretly funding “informants” and infiltrators in multiple racist groups around the country, paying them for inside information into these organizations’ activities — and incidentally supporting their white supremacist lifestyles.

 

The indictment outlines more than $3 million disbursed to white supremacists from 2015–2024, and they don’t sound like minor figures. They include someone who led the National Socialist Party of America, an imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a former chairman of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and the national president of American Front, among other white nationalist luminaries. Since high-level positions in fringe racial groups aren’t ordinarily lucrative, any amount of money handed to their leaders potentially could have kept them in the racism racket.

 

The sums, in some instances, were substantial — more than $1 million for one hater, more than $300,000 for another, and more than $275,000 for yet another.

 

Worse, a couple of the SPLC-funded informants showed up in SPLC anti-hate materials, suggesting that the group was working both sides of the fence.

 

Notably, according to the indictment, one SPLC-funded organizer helped plan the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and assisted people in getting transportation to the event. This doesn’t mean that Charlottesville was “an op,” but it would mean that the SPLC had at least a fingerprint on it. This organizer, the indictment says, kept receiving SPLC funds for years afterwards.

 

All of this is highly embarrassing to the SPLC. Whether it is criminal is another question. The government’s theory in this case is that the SPLC was defrauding its donors by failing to reveal to them how their donor money was being spent and spending on a purpose at odds with its mission. The SPLC counters that it has long used informants to advance its work, although it now says it’s discontinuing the practice.

 

This is bad news for sundry fanatics and bigots who will now find themselves off the gravy train of an organization that purportedly fought racism by paying for it.