Trump DOJ Indicts Southern Poverty Law Center for Manufacturing Racism

The Southern Poverty Law Center spent decades labeling conservatives, churches, and parents' groups as hate organizations.

Now a federal grand jury has handed the SPLC a taste of what it spent 55 years dishing out.

What Todd Blanche revealed at Tuesday's press conference should end the SPLC forever – and it involves the KKK, $3 million of donor money, and the deadliest white nationalist rally in modern American history.

SPLC Indicted on 11 Federal Counts for Secretly Funding KKK and Nazi Groups

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts – including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The charge at the center of everything: between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to members of the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and the American Front.

"The SPLC was not dismantling these groups," Blanche said. "It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."

To hide the money trail, the SPLC set up a network of shell companies with names like Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, and Rare Books Warehouse – all fictitious. Cash was passed from the SPLC through two sham accounts, then loaded onto prepaid cards and handed directly to extremist group members.

"The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence," Blanche added.

The SPLC Paid a Charlottesville Organizer $270,000

The single most damning detail in the indictment goes straight to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – the event that killed one person and injured dozens more.

According to Blanche, one SPLC-paid informant was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the rally. That informant attended the event at the SPLC's direction and helped coordinate transportation for attendees.

The SPLC paid that person more than $270,000 over eight years.

One informant affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023.

FBI Director Kash Patel was equally direct. "They used the fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network – thousands of Americans – to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups," Patel said.

Patel added that the SPLC set up fictitious entities specifically to deceive banks and financial institutions. "The financial institutions that we rely on as everyday Americans were deceived in believing that money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center," he said.

The indictment alleges the scheme ran from 2014 through 2023 – and that a Biden-era DOJ killed an earlier investigation into it. The Trump administration revived the case.

https://twitter.com/TheJusticeDept/status/2046704517119377577

How the SPLC Hate Map Targeted Christians and Conservatives for Decades

For conservatives, the SPLC indictment is not a surprise. It is a confirmation.

The SPLC's hate map has listed the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, and dozens of other mainstream Christian and conservative organizations alongside actual neo-Nazis and Klan chapters. In 2012, a gunman targeted the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. after finding it on the SPLC's hate map. He planned to kill everyone in the building.

In 2019, a federal judge ruled that the SPLC's hate group label does not depend on objective data or evidence – describing the designation as "an entirely subjective inquiry."

House Republicans held hearings in December 2024 establishing that the SPLC coordinated with Biden's administration to target conservative Americans and strip them of their First Amendment rights. Kash Patel cut the FBI's relationship with the SPLC last October, calling it a "partisan smear machine."

Now the indictment makes clear what was happening behind the curtain. The SPLC was collecting donor money from Americans horrified by racism, funneling it to actual racists, then publishing reports on the racism those same racists were committing – to raise more money to do it all over again.

Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson put it plainly: "Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism."

They were funding it instead.

The case has been assigned to Judge Emily Marks, a Trump appointee in the Middle District of Alabama.

The SPLC spent 55 years pointing fingers at the rest of America. The grand jury just pointed one back.

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Sources:

• "Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering," U.S. Department of Justice, April 21, 2026.
• Tyler O'Neil, "SPLC indicted on 11 counts over alleged payments to extremist group members," Fox News, April 21, 2026.
• Tyler O'Neil, "Conservatives respond as SPLC continues to brand them 'hate groups' despite terror attack, defamation claims," Fox News, March 9, 2022.
• "Comer Probes Southern Poverty Law Center's Influence Over Federal Employees," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, December 11, 2023.
• Tyler O'Neil, "Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center," Heritage Foundation commentary.