Our long national nightmare of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) smearing innocent Americans for profit may finally be coming to an end.
On April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, handed down an 11-count indictment charging the organization with wire fraud, false statements to federally insured banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The government charges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money to paid informants tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America—the very extremists it claimed to be heroically battling. It allegedly hid the payments behind shell entities with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” While raking in hundreds of millions from triggered donors, the SPLC was purportedly subsidizing the hate it sold as an existential threat.
This indictment is not a partisan hit job. It is the long-overdue exposure of a racket that weaponized its “hate map” to brand mainstream conservative organizations as social lepers. The consequences to its targets were devastating: lost banking relationships, severed corporate partnerships, canceled events, and reputational destruction. Families, churches, and policy groups were financially isolated and socially exiled, all so the SPLC could keep the donations flowing.
My own organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), knows this playbook intimately. For years, the SPLC has listed FAIR on its “hate map” for the supposed crime of defending the rights of the American people from the harmful effects of reckless immigration policies. While politicians in both parties have spent decades eroding those rights—through porous borders, sanctuary policies, and the intentional demographic transformation of the country—FAIR has simply insisted that immigration policy should serve Americans first. That stance earned us the SPLC’s scarlet letter: “hate group.” No violence. No extremism. Just advocacy for American workers, taxpayers, and sovereignty.
The SPLC’s internal rot makes the hypocrisy even more scandalous. In 2019, founder Morris Dees was fired amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. Former employees described a workplace rife with racial and gender discrimination, retaliation against women and people of color, and a toxic culture that stretched back decades. One group of staffers wrote that leadership had been “complicit in decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment.” A former insider, writing in The New Yorker, described the SPLC’s fundraising operation as a “highly profitable scam”—a marketing machine that preyed on liberal donors by inflating threats and manufacturing moral panic.
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Yet none of this stopped the media or the Biden administration from treating the SPLC’s word as gospel. Legacy outlets like CNN faithfully reproduced the SPLC’s “hate map,” using it to smear conservative Christians, parental-rights groups, and immigration reformers as the moral equivalent of Klansmen. The Biden Justice Department went further, partnering with the SPLC by scheduling regular meetings, granting early access to law-enforcement data, and even allowing SPLC staff to train federal prosecutors. Internal memos cited the group when targeting “radical traditional Catholics” and other disfavored Americans. While the SPLC was allegedly cutting checks in secret to actual extremists, the highest levels of the federal government and the press corps elevated it as the gold standard of credibility.
The cost went far beyond damaged reputations. The Family Research Council faced a 2012 shooting at its offices by a gunman who cited the SPLC map. Parental-rights organizations like Moms for Liberty were lumped in with neo-Nazis, leading to debanking threats and vendor boycotts. PragerU and countless others lost access to financial services and public platforms. All because the SPLC’s “hate” industrial complex needed villains to justify its $700-million-plus endowment and lavish salaries.
The indictment gives credence to what critics have said for years: the SPLC did not fight hate—it monetized it. It conjured an epidemic, profited from the fear, and destroyed lives and livelihoods in the process. Its “hate map” was never a public service. It was a blacklist designed to generate profits and enforce ideological conformity.
Whatever the outcome of the current charges, the remedy is clear. Every corporation, bank, media outlet, and government agency that once deferred to the SPLC must now treat it as radioactive. Defund it. Delist it. Refuse its data, its “experts,” and its seal of approval. The SPLC should become a pariah in polite society—never again trusted as a source on extremism, civil rights, or anything else. Its donors should demand refunds. Its enablers should apologize to the organizations they helped smear.
The Southern Poverty Law Center spent decades telling America who the haters were. A federal grand jury believes the SPLC manufactured much of that hate for its own benefit. It is time to retire the map, repudiate the myth, and hold the profiteers accountable. American democracy—and simple decency—demand nothing less.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, D.C.
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