The SPLC Gets Busted, At Long Last
After decades of lucrative fundraising, the partisan smear machine that has been called “the richest poverty organization in the history of the world” faces its most momentous reckoning–criminal charges in federal court.
This essay originally appeared in the U.S. edition of The Spectator as “The Tawdry Shenanigans of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” on April 23, 2026 (here), and The Spectator Australia on April 24, 2026 (here). Thanks to Bill Otis’s Substack, Ringside at the Reckoning (here)!
In the financial world, most frauds are short-lived, because Ponzi schemes such as Bernie Madoff’s eventually run out of new suckers to provide enough funds to pay the phony “returns” promised to earlier investors. When the cash flow dries up, the scam collapses. The con artists at the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center have a different racket, and a different problem. Instead of swindling the public with promises of unrealistic, too-good-to-be-true investment returns, the fear-mongering SPLC sold “paranoia porn” to credulous donors, convincing them—falsely–that the country is full of dangerous right-wing extremists who need to be identified and brought to heel.
SPLC’s problem is that in 21st century America, there is not enough “real” racism and far-right extremism to keep left-leaning donors sufficiently panicked to continue writing checks to finance SPLC’s fat executive salaries, SPLC’s palatial six-story quarters in Montgomery, Alabama, and SPLC’s nine-figure investment portfolio (some of which is held in offshore accounts). SPLC’s solution? They made up, and even funded, a Potemkin façade of right-wing extremism, secretly funneling at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to leaders within the KKK, the Aryan Nation, and neo-Nazi groups to create the appearance of an incipient crisis. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo quipped that “the supply of right-wing ‘hate’ was so low that a left-wing ‘anti-hate’ group had to subsidize it, so it could then raise money to fight it.”
Joking aside, this is precisely what a federal grand jury in Alabama found while issuing an 11-count indictment against SPLC this week. The indictment alleges that SPLC committed wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering when it told donors that their money would be used to dismantle so-called hate groups, when SPLC was actually promoting such groups with secret payments through bogus bank accounts. In the words of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, SPLC was surreptitiously “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” SPLC has systemically defrauded its donors by perpetrating a hoax—claiming that the country is on the brink of an extremist takeover, while secretly fomenting the activities of extremist groups.
In fact, SPLC helped engineer one of the most highly-publicized and bitterly-polarizing events in recent history—the violent conflict in Charlottesville in 2017 that resulted in a tragic fatality and many injuries. For SPLC, the riot was–predictably—a fundraising bonanza. Among other findings, the indictment states that one of SPLC’s paid operatives (who received more than $270,000 between 2015 and 2023) “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. [The secret operative] made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” At the press conference announcing the indictment, Blanche was asked by a reporter: “I just want to make sure I understand. You’re alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the leaders of KKK and other groups?” Blanche responded: “I’m not alleging it. The grand jury returned an indictment that says that.”
The multi-count federal indictment is not SPLC’s first brush with controversy, but it is the most serious. As I recounted in an article for City Journal in 2017, SPLC’s entire legal staff quit in 1986 to protest the organization’s move away from cases involving actual “southern poverty,” such as pro bono representation of death row inmates, in favor of headline-grabbing lawsuits against impecunious KKK chapters—which served as fodder for lucrative direct-mail fundraising solicitations that became SPLC’s bread and butter. One disillusioned SPLC lawyer, Gloria Browne, charged that SPLC programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.”
Later, SPLC drew criticism for raising far more money than necessary to sustain the non-profit’s operations, leading to the organization receiving an “F” rating from the monitoring group CharityWatch. SPLC has so much money socked away that it maintains hedge fund accounts in the Cayman Islands. SPLC spends more on fundraising than on its legal program.
Founded in 1971, SPLC has been criticized for recklessly labeling as “hate groups” and “extremists” mainstream organizations such as the Family Research Council (whose employees were attacked by a gunman in 2012, after SPLC listed the group on its “Hate Map”) and Ben Carson, the retired pediatric brain surgeon, former HUD secretary, and one-time presidential candidate. More recently, in 2019, SPLC founder Morris Dees was fired for misconduct, and the group’s President, Richard Cohen, resigned two weeks later. The turnover did not end there. In 2025, amidst employee turmoil and a no-confidence vote from the union representing SPLC’s workers, President and CEO Margaret Huang resigned.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year after SPLC branded Turning Point as a “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024,” claiming that Kirk “embraced a white nationalist conspiracy theory” and that TPUSA “is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.” Tellingly, Kirk’s alleged assassin is an LBGTQ ally. Under President Joe Biden, federal agencies, including the FBI, used SPLC’s reckless labeling to treat law-abiding American citizens, including traditional Catholics, as “radical extremists” and members of “hate groups.”
H.L. Mencken described the secret of successful demagoguery as “keep[ing] the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” SPLC has gotten away with its tawdry shenanigans for decades. Venue for the criminal trial will be bright red Alabama, not the “friendly” locales of New York City or Washington, D.C. SPLC’s grift may finally be coming to an end.
