The US Justice Department has charged the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with wire fraud over its funneling of more than $3 million to white supremacist and extremist groups, including the organizers of the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ Charlottesville rally in 2017.
In an indictment handed down by a grand jury in Alabama on Tuesday, the SPLC was charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the Justice Department and the FBI, the organization misled donors by soliciting money to “fight” extremists, then covertly funneling the money to the leaders of these same extremist groups.
🚨HAPPENING NOW: Justice Department announces indictment against Southern Poverty Law Center (“SPLC”). Our indictment alleges SPLC secretly funneled MORE THAN $3 MILLION in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups. pic.twitter.com/Ifpda94f7D
— U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) April 21, 2026
Given the SPLC’s stated mission of “fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to help create a multiracial democracy,” the indictment – if proven – reveals stunning hypocrisy at the heart of the organization.
What is the SPLC?
Founded as a civil rights law firm in 1971, the SPLC has grown into one of the US’ leading liberal NGOs. It has won civil lawsuits for victims of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) violence, agitated for immigrant, LGBT, and prisoners’ rights, and its database of “hate” organizations is considered authoritative by mainstream media outlets.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the SPLC focused its attention on white-supremacist and Klan-adjacent groups, one of which firebombed the organization’s Alabama offices in 1983. The SPLC’s more recent activities have proven controversial: the organization was accused of anti-white racism when a senior staffer, Mark Potok, was filmed with a ‘countdown clock’ to whites becoming a minority in the US taped to his desk; and the SPLC’s listing of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as a “case study” in “hate and extremism” led the FBI to cut its ties with the center after Kirk’s assassination last year.
What does the SPLC indictment allege?
According to the indictment, donors were told that their money would be used to help “dismantle” the extremist groups listed in the SPLC’s database. What they weren’t told was that this money was actually being funneled to these groups via fictitious business entities, and that the SPLC would in some cases order the groups to continue stoking racial hatred. The list of recipients includes:
- A member of the online chat group that planned the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville – $270,000 between 2015 and 2023
- An affiliate of the neo-Nazi National Alliance – $1,000,000 between 2014 and 2023
- The Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America – unknown amount
- An officer in the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club – $300,000 between 2014 and 2020
- The Chairman of the National Alliance – $140,000 between 2016 and 2023
- The leader of the National Socialist Party of America – $70,000 between 2014 and 2016
- The National President of American Front – $19,000 between 2016 and 2019
- The wife of an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Kluk Klan – $3,500 at an unknown time
Two of these individuals – the National Alliance chairman and National Socialist Party of America leader – were listed by name on the SPLC’s “extremist file” web page at the time of the payments. The president of American Front was, at the time, a convicted felon over his taking part in a cross burning.
Another individual was allegedly paid $160,000 by the SPLC, which he then disbursed “to various violent extremist group leaders including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” the indictment alleges.
Did the SPLC secretly organize the Charlottesville rally?
A 2017 torchlit march attended by hundreds of right-wingers, militia members, ‘alt-right’ activists and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended in tragedy when participant James Alex Fields rammed his car into a crowd of left-wing protesters, killing one person and injuring 35.
Democrats and the mainstream media tied President Donald Trump to the spectacle. Trump, who expressed support for some of the participants, spent the remainder of his first term in office repeatedly disavowing “the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
