The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, is one of the most influential civil-rights groups in the nation. Founded in 1971, it has spent the last five decades monitoring, documenting, and exposing hate groups and violent extremists. The group rose to national fame in the 1980s by financially breaking the modern Klan through strategic lawsuits on behalf of their victims. The SPLC’s most persistent targets have been white-nationalist groups like the Klan and various neo-Nazi gangs, but its work has expanded over the years as well. (More on that later.)
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche later said in a press release. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
Tuesday’s indictment lists eleven counts against the organization. The first six counts involve allegations of wire fraud. To prove wire fraud, prosecutors need to describe some sort of scheme to obtain money under false pretenses. Another count, conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, also hinges on the premise that the SPLC was trying to conceal details about “fraudulently obtained donated money.”
There are a few problems with this theory of fraud. First of all, the SPLC was not paying members of these groups to provide material support to their activities or out of ideological sympathy. They were cultivating informants who could provide damaging (or even basic) information about extremist groups, their members, and their operations, thereby furthering the SPLC’s goals of “dismantling” those groups. Sunlight, as Justice Louis Brandeis once said, is a potent disinfectant.
Second, it was hardly a secret to the public or to donors that the SPLC used undercover sources. (The practice reportedly stopped a few years ago.) You don’t have to look hard to find press reports that describe the SPLC’s clandestine work. In a 1996 New York Times article that was published on the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, the newspaper reported that the SPLC had “spies” at a white-nationalist convention at Lake Tahoe the preceding weekend.
Third, even if donors were somehow unaware, nonprofit groups often speak in broad terms when soliciting donations. Some promises are more deceptive than others: A superPAC affiliated with President Donald Trump claimed last month that donors would get access to “my private national security briefings” and “unfiltered updates on the threats facing America.” Those donors are obviously not receiving access to classified U.S. intelligence reports—at least, I hope they aren’t.
These companies, however, “were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no actual business,” prosecutors claimed. The unnamed bank later conducted an internal investigation into the accounts, which prompted the SPLC to request their closure in 2020. According to the indictment, SPLC’s leaders “admitted” in writing in 2021 that the accounts were “opened for the benefit of [SPLC] operations and operated under the Center’s authority.”
Federal prosecutors charged him with making false statements to a bank under Section 1014, the same offense in the SPLC case. But the justices unanimously reversed the conviction because the law only criminalized “false statements,” not merely misleading ones. (Some statutes criminalize both.) “Basic logic,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, “dictates that at least some misleading statements are not false.”
Another troubling aspect of the indictment is its target: the SPLC itself. The Justice Department chose to bring these charges against the nonprofit itself, rather than the individual members who allegedly committed the underlying offenses. The SPLC, obviously, cannot be jailed if it found guilty. But it could be forced to forfeit “any property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross receipts obtained, directly or indirectly, from the offenses” that were alleged.
Why the ire towards the SPLC? In recent decades, mainstream conservatives have often criticized the SPLC for categorizing anti-LGBTQ organizations as “hate groups,” arguing that the label unfairly treats them as akin to the Klan. Kristen Waggoner, who runs the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2025 after Charlie Kirk’s assassination that the SPLC’s labeling of Talking Points USA and her own organization “encourages violence.” There is no evidence that the SPLC’s labeling had anything to do with Kirk’s murder.
That brings us back to Blanche’s claims that the organization was “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” A cynical observer might suspect that the Trump Justice Department’s goal is to blame the work of white-nationalist groups on the civil-rights groups that oppose them. There is a long history of Klan denialism in this country that minimizes the actions of violent white supremacists, often by blaming its actions on their victims and opponents.
In reality, there has been an alarming resurgence in white-supremacist organizations since Trump first captured the presidency in 2016. White-nationalist rhetoric, which was once politically fatal ten years ago, is now regularly espoused by Trump administration officials and even by official government publications. Now the Justice Department is throwing its full weight behind a flimsy prosecution in an effort to destroy one of the Klan’s greatest opponents. There is no subtlety about what is happening here.
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