George Orwell once quipped that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue.” For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center profited handsomely from telling its donors that it was resisting a rising wave of bigotry and hatred that never seemed to crest. Large corporations gladly enforced consequences against an ever-expanding list of mainstream conservative organizations that the SPLC insisted, without evidence, were “hate groups” akin to the Ku Klux Klan.
On April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, called the SPLC’s bluff, returning an 11-count indictment against it. The indictment alleges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor funds to “field sources” holding leadership roles with the same violent extremist groups it publicly claimed to oppose, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance.
To move that money, the SPLC allegedly opened bank accounts using a number of fictitious entities. Perhaps the most striking allegation concerns a single informant, identified only as “F-37,” who was a member of the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. According to the indictment, F-37 attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, helped coordinate transportation for other attendees, and made racist social-media posts under the SPLC’s supervision. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC allegedly paid F-37 more than $270,000. That number pales, however, when compared to the SPLC’s increase in revenue from 2016, when it raised $58 million, to 2017, when it raised $136 million in the wake of the Charlottesville riot.
The SPLC and its allies have come out swinging and spinning, rebranding the indictment as a form of conservative lawfare. The ACLU accused the Trump administration of “weaponizing institutions” to “silence its critics.” The NAACP called the indictment a “chilling attack on civil rights advocacy.” The League of Women Voters called it “a declaration of war on the civil rights movement.” And Democrat Senator Cory Booker called it “part and parcel of Trump’s assault on free speech, on nonprofits, and on anyone who dares to disagree with him.” Taking a slightly different tack, Norm Eisen, the founder of Democracy Defenders Action, has argued that the SPLC’s activities are no different from law enforcement’s use of informants, “the stock and trade of the FBI itself.”
That collective framing ignores basic countervailing facts, including that the investigation into the SPLC began years ago and that the FBI doesn’t raise tens of millions of dollars from riots incited by its informants. However, it is entirely consistent with the SPLC’s long-running reliance on narrative at the expense of fact.
A “Highly Profitable Scam”
The SPLC has, for years, played fast and loose with donor money in ways that have drawn sustained criticism from watchdogs, former employees, and independent journalists across the political spectrum.
Charity Watch, an independent charity evaluator, has given the SPLC an “F” rating for hoarding donor money rather than deploying it. As of fiscal 2024, the SPLC held $822 million in assets against annual expenses of $129 million. Many of those assets are held in offshore accounts. The group holds $130 million in such accounts, including in the Cayman Islands, and has made $57 million of “investments” in Central America and the Caribbean. Nonprofit experts have understatedly called this a “huge red flag.”
Accompanying these questionable financial decisions have been a parade of internal scandals: senior leadership departures over harassment and racial-discrimination allegations, the mass firing of roughly a quarter of its workforce in 2024 amid union-busting accusations, and assertions by a former employee that the group was operating as a “highly profitable scam” that was “ripping off donors.”
The DOJ’s indictment, therefore, should be unsurprising to anyone following the SPLC’s multi-year trajectory of scandal and mismanagement. And yet, public reporting shows that since 2016, the SPLC has consistently raised well over $100 million in revenue and maintained significant influence within corporate America.
The SPLC’s fundraising prowess is a testament to its donors’ apparent willingness to believe things they know to be untrue to advance a narrative they wish to be true.
The Economics of “Hate”
Since 1990, the SPLC has produced an annual census of “hate groups” that, in its words, “attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” While at one time this would have been widely understood to target groups that discriminate on the basis of race, the modern Left—in keeping with Carl Trueman’s warning about the rise of expressive individualism—has long since elevated such malleable concepts as sexual orientation and, more recently, gender identity into its intersectional understanding of class dynamics.
As a result, the SPLC expanded its “hate map” to mainstream conservative and religious organizations that hold déclassé beliefs like sex is a God-given and immutable trait and that women deserve to be protected from men who want to compete on women’s sports teams and enter women’s private spaces. Thus, groups like Moms for Liberty, The Family Research Council, and Turning Point USA. Parents Defending Education and Alliance Defending Freedom became equated, under the SPLC’s bizarre logic, with the Klan.
Despite the hate map being widely criticized—even federal courts have dismissed the SPLC’s “hate group” designations as not based in fact—vast swaths of corporate America have long looked to it to guide their decision-making. For instance, according to reporting by the Daily Signal, the software company Benevity, which offers services that connect corporate employees with nonprofits to contribute time and money, allows clients to screen charities using the SPLC’s hate map. The Daily Signal further reports that over 250 companies—including Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, McDonald’s, Netflix, PayPal, Salesforce, and Starbucks—have used Benevity’s tool to exclude conservative groups from accessing donations that in 2023 totaled $3.2 billion.
Benevity and the clients it serves are successful companies run by intelligent professionals. Their success was presumably not furthered by relying on disreputable sources or indulging in fantasy. Why turn, then, to the SPLC?
Reality’s Revenge
At the conclusion of the movie Inception, the character Dom Cobb, a professional “dream extractor” played by Leonardo DiCaprio, awakens from a mission to be reunited with his children. Or did he? As the camera cuts to black, he spins a top that seems to wobble—an indication that he has truly awakened—but it never falls. The audience is left with a question: was Cobb living in reality or fantasy?
When asked about the scene, director Christopher Nolan observed when speaking to Princeton’s 2015 graduating class that Cobb “didn’t really care anymore,” whether he was living in a dream or reality, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid.” He acknowledged, however, that audiences “groan” at the lack of resolution, because, in his words, “It matters to people because that’s the point about reality. Reality matters.”
Life often imitates art. In a recent speech delivered at an event sponsored by the University of Austin, Ben Shapiro described our modern politics as resting on the foundation of “emotivism”—the belief that politics is a contest between warring tribes who, lacking any common bond in faith or fact, merely wish to destroy each other. His remarks are worth quoting at length:
The foundations upon which our institutions were built have rotted away. They are now rooted in power rather than truth. And power, which has no regard for truth, is all about narrative. If you look at how the media covers stories, they’re no longer interested in facts and evidence. Instead, they reverse engineer everything to fit the narrative.
The turn toward narrative over truth explains the SPLC’s ability to wield power long after, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has observed, its mission was subverted to serve partisan ideological ends. The SPLC offers, reverse engineers, and may even pay for a narrative that fits the preconceptions of its elite supporters. That narrative—that America is replete with groups filled with “hatred” that must be placed beyond the pale of polite society—suits a polarized political moment where synthesized “realities” serving personal quests for moral superiority carry more weight than fact-based truth. The reality, however, is that the SPLC has long pedaled a false narrative that served as a permission structure to harm its political opponents on the right and as a catalyst to line its own pockets.
Regardless of whether the DOJ’s indictment results in a conviction, it serves the essential function of forcing a conversation about facts, not narrative. As Orwell wrote about those who believe things they know to be false: “Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” The SPLC just collided with the solid reality of the American justice system.
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