By 2009, the National Alliance had become “almost irrelevant,” in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Material released by the SPLC in subsequent years detailed further decline at the West Virginia-based white nationalist organization, fueled by infighting and financial woes. As of 2016, the National Alliance had just a few dozen members, down from its 2002 peak of 1,400, the SPLC reported.
Despite publicly portraying the National Alliance as a barely functional, and therefore barely dangerous, organization, the SPLC paid more than $1.1 million to informants within it from 2014 onward, according to an indictment brought against it this week by the Justice Department. This was long after the SPLC had publicly stated that the neo-Nazi organization was in its death throes.
Central to the DOJ’s case against the SPLC is the contention that the civil rights organization misled its donors as to how its contributions were being used. Enriching a handful of white nationalists to take down a group that was already more-or-less dead, for instance, may not have been what people had in mind when they cut checks to the SPLC to fight racism.
Further, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC funneled at least $3 million to confidential informants on the far Right between 2014 and 2023. Why more than a third of that went toward infiltrating a floundering group of a few dozen neo-Nazis is unclear.
The DOJ claims that the SPLC used shell companies to pay multiple confidential sources within the National Alliance. The most well-paid, identified in the indictment as “F-9,” allegedly received more than $1,000,000 from the SPLC between 2014 and 2023 to, among other things, steal documents. A different SPLC informant accepted $6,000 to take the blame for stolen documents, per the DOJ.
A report published by the SPLC in 2013 asserted that the National Alliance “indeed seems on the edge of ‘obscurity’” and that the organization’s headquarters had fallen into a state of disrepair.
Another SPLC informant within the National Alliance reportedly received $140,000 from the SPLC between 2016 and 2023. Their role was not specified in the indictment.
As money provided by SPLC donors was being dumped on the National Alliance’s neo-Nazi leadership, the SPLC itself reported that even a small infusion of cash could have saved the failing white nationalist organization.
In a June 2016 report, the SPLC celebrated the fact that a Canadian court had blocked the estate of a deceased National Alliance member from distributing $220,000 to the organization — a sum that would be worth about $160,000 after taxes. According to the SPLC, this sum, small in comparison to what it was paying National Alliance members, would have constituted a “lifesaving financial lifeline” for the neo-Nazis.
“This decision ends the threat of a reinvigorated National Alliance, one of the most notorious hate groups of the modern era,” Richard Cohen, then the president of the SPLC, said of the court decision. “At a time when the radical right is larger than it has been in years, this is a genuinely important result.”
Despite claiming that the threat of the National Alliance had been vanquished in 2016, the SPLC continued cutting checks to its members for almost a decade more, only cutting off funding in 2023.
It is possible that the SPLC contributed to the National Alliance’s steep decline after its founder died in 2002, seeing as its best-paid informant had been working with the group for more than 20 years as of 2023. Additionally, the DOJ mentioned that the SPLC began maintaining informants in hate groups during the 1980s, meaning that some of the SPLC’s work, which could have contributed to the fall of the National Alliance, may have been excluded from the Justice Department’s indictment.
Why the SPLC continued to fund the National Alliance after it publicly declared victory over it, however, remains unclear. Other civil rights groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League, and media reports, corroborate the SPLC’s account of decline within the National Alliance.
“Like a crooked record company bribing DJs to play its songs and prop up revenue, the SPLC gave secret payola for a decade to racists at a ‘moribund’ Nazi group,” Capital Research Center President Scott Walter told the Washington Examiner. “Nothing better proves the SPLC does not protect us from dangerous sickos; it just operates a charity racket more rotten than anything I’ve seen in decades of studying the sector.”
The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment.