One doesn’t expect an anti-racist organization to help finance white supremacist groups. But that is precisely what Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a public interest law firm that fights discrimination, stands accused of.
The accuser is the Department of Justice, which last week issued a surprising indictment of the SPLC, charging it with secretly funding hate groups, including affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.
According to the government, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid over $3,000,000 – laundered through bank accounts registered to fictitious entities – to people in those groups.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, further claimed that the SPLC had failed to comply with its non-profit status, saying they committed fraud against their donors by failing to disclose the payments.
“And in no fundraising efforts that the investigation found,” he noted, “did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’ So that’s fraud.”
Mr. Blanche, speaking alongside FBI Director Kash Patel at a news conference, said the organization made payments to at least eight people, including those affiliated with violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi organizations.
“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Mr. Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Mr. Patel said that the SPLC “used the money they raised from their donor network to actually pay the leadership of these very groups.”
Established in 1971 and based in Alabama, the SPLC, over many years, successfully battled the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups in courts, and helped reporters and law enforcement keep tabs on domestic extremists.
In recent years, though, the group widened its net, identifying arguably mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups, which it defines as having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people.” Among the more recently SPLC-targeted groups are the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA (TPUSA).
In 2024, the SPLC said that TPUSA’s “primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants… and civil rights activists… [The group] is at the forefront of the movement to promote Christian nationalism, the theocratic worldview that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian country and that Christian values and beliefs should inform the government and wider culture…”
It notes that the late Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s executive director until his murder in 2025, said, “You cannot have liberty if you don’t have a Christian population.”
Whether TPUSA is a hate group or what most people would simply consider a conservative (okay, “ultra-conservative”) organization, the SPLC certainly alienated some Republican lawmakers – and President Trump.
During a December congressional hearing, House Republicans accused the group of “being partisan and profitable.” In October, Mr. Patel severed FBI ties with the SPLC, alleging that it “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.”
In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.” Needless to say, Mr. Trump was not pleased.
What, though, exactly, did the SPLC do to earn the administration’s charges?
It hired informants to infiltrate the targeted groups and convey back information about them and their plans. Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s chief executive, said that the group no longer used informants, but did so when extremist violence was common.
“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” he said.
There is nothing illegal about paying informants to spy on groups, something that government agencies like the FBI themselves have often done. Which fact has let the president’s critics to accuse him of vindictively targeting the SPLC with specious charges.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History,” Mr. Trump exulted on his social media platform, “has been charged with FRAUD.”
And, he added, somewhat incongruously, “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”
© 2026 Ami Magazine