Mere months after the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk a “hard-right extremist,” a transgender activist allegedly murdered him in cold blood. This came more than a decade after a man inspired by the SPLC’s “Hate Map” walked into the Family Research Center’s lobby and tried to kill everyone there. Now, thanks to a Justice Department indictment, we learn that the SPLC spent years fraudulently funding extremist organizations, stoking hatreds while telling donors it was working to end them.
According to the indictment, over a nine-year span ending in 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million to “field sources” associated with violent extremist groups such as the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, and the National Socialist Party of America. SPLC employees created fake companies with names such as “Center Investigative Agency” and “Fox Photography” to open bank accounts through which they could move money from the SPLC’s treasury to violent extremist leaders. In 2020, after a bank began investigating suspicious activity connected to these accounts, the SPLC admitted it had lied to the bank, transferred the remaining balances to its own account, and closed the fraudulent accounts.
That money was used by extremist groups for many purposes, including the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The indictment alleges that the SPLC specifically directed one field source not only to promote the event through racist social media posts, but also to help coordinate transportation for attendees. In total, the SPLC spent more than $270,000 on that one field source.
It was this “Unite the Right” rally, where 21-year-old Ohio man James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer, that Joe Biden claimed inspired him to launch his campaign for the presidency. “It was a defining moment for this nation,” Biden said of the protesters in Charlottesville that day. “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” he claimed. Now we learn that those protesters were bankrolled by the SPLC for the express purpose of promoting hate groups and generating controversy and donations. That Biden’s disastrous presidency was inspired by a faux hate event is a fitting coda to his pathetic contribution to American history.
The motive for the SPLC’s funding of hate groups is simple: Without high-profile hate incidents in the news, the SPLC cannot raise the donations it needs to remain relevant. It has a deeply corrupting vested interest in continued social division and appears to have fomented it. It is why the group has been so eager to expand its definition of hate. In addition to the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA, the SPLC has labeled human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson as sources of hate. As recently as 2023, Biden’s FBI even targeted Catholic families after the SPLC labeled them an outgrowth of “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.”
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The SPLC now claims it was paying these violent extremist groups only to protect staff and inform the public, but it also says it stopped all such payments in 2023. That raises an obvious question: If the payments were necessary to protect staff in 2023, why are they no longer needed today? Or is the real problem that the SPLC got caught promoting the very hate it claimed to oppose and is now saying whatever it can think of to cover up its role as an agent provocateur and fraudster?
The SPLC built its brand by selling fear, and now the mask is off. If the indictment’s allegations are true, and that would certainly be in keeping with the loathsome character that the SPLC has displayed for several decades, this was not civil rights work. It was a racket: inflame extremism, exploit the fallout, cash the checks, and smear opponents. America deserves accountability, and President Donald Trump’s Justice Department appears ready to deliver it.