SPLC’s Double Game: Funding extremists while spending millions to swing Southern elections

At the same time it was funding elements of extremist, racist groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center was doling out hundreds-of-millions of dollars to drive voters to the polls across several Southern states it claimed were trying to suppress minority votes.

For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has positioned itself as the nation’s preeminent watchdog, which maintained a controversial "Hate Map" that increasingly labeled benign conservative organizations and religious groups as hate groups.  

But a bombshell federal indictment returned by a grand jury in Alabama last week suggests the organization was playing a far more cynical double game: allegedly manufacturing the very extremism it claimed to be fighting to keep its fundraising machine humming.

According to federal prosecutors, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million from 2014 to 2023 to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.

The DOJ alleges the SPLC utilized a network of shell companies – with names like "Center Investigative Agency" and "Fox Photography" – to disguise payments to individuals associated with those groups. 

While the SPLC claims these were legitimate payments for undercover informants to monitor threats, the FBI and DOJ allege the funds were used to ensure that "hate" remained visible enough to justify the SPLC’s mission and purpose. 

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an April 21 statement following the 11-count indictment for wire fraud and money laundering. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”

South Carolina Rep. William Timmons, a Republican who sits on the House Oversight Committee, said that the federal government should reconsider the requirements for nonprofit status for groups such as SPLC to make it easier to scrutinize how they use their donations. 

“[A]ll these entities have disclosure requirements of filing that they have to do. And I think it's just been so opaque because it's so tedious and difficult to understand and to actually investigate,” Timmons told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday. 

“[W]e need to have our eyes on this. We need to make sure that we're protecting our government, our society, our people, and I think that we have gotten wise to this, and we're on the right track. ... I think that we're going to continue to uncover more and more nefarious activity by a lot of different people. And we’ve got to make sure that we're, one, uncovering it, but two, holding them accountable and making sure that there's a deterrence to things like this happening in the future."

The "Vote Your Voice" Play

While the SPLC was allegedly subsidizing the leaders of racist movements in the shadows, it was aggressively moving some of its massive financial reserves to try to swing Southern politics. 

The organization’s "Vote Your Voice" initiative pledged $100 million from its endowment through 2032 to boost voter turnout and registration in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. 

The SPLC framed the massive expenditure as a necessary defense against "anti-democratic" state officials whom they claimed were suppressing the votes of "historically excluded" communities. In the wake of the 2020 elections, many Southern states had moved forward with plans to reform voting processes and were in the process of drawing new congressional districts based on the 2020 census.

“Our Vote Your Voice program began as a robust effort to increase voter registration and turnout, particularly in communities of color who would most benefit from a true inclusive democracy in the South,” said then-SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang in 2021. 

“However, to ensure a government exists that truly is by the people and for the people, we must expand our efforts to push against the anti-democratic statements and actions of many state and local officials in the Deep South."

Huang argued the states were employing “voter suppression tactics” to make it harder for all voters to vote, but especially “low-propensity voters of color.” The organization painted the reforms as a response to the “historic turnout” in the 2020 general election. 

However, critics warned that the initiative is less about civil rights and more about partisan engineering, considering the SPLC funding went to groups largely dedicated to turning out strong Democratic voting blocs. 

“The reason I’m so disappointed is that it’s not an attempt to contact all voters, or to make sure that all voters participate in the process,” said then-Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill at the time. It is a targeted effort to ensure that liberal special interest groups that have been targeted by the SPLC are identified and motivated to go to the polls.”

SPLC did not respond to a request for comment. In response to the indictment last week, SPLC said it would “vigorously defend” itself against what it described as false allegations. 

"Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do," interim CEO and President Bryan Fair said in a statement. "The actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights Movement becomes a reality for all." 

Flush with Cash

The scale of the SPLC’s wealth has long been a point of contention for investigative watchdogs. As of late 2024, the organization’s consolidated financial statements showed nearly $790 million in net assets.

The conservative, nonprofit watchdog group Capital Research Center has long argued that the SPLC has deviated from its original mission and now uses its massive war chest to stoke division and paint benign conservative groups as vectors of hate.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization that has so succeeded in pushing bigots out of the mainstream, that now over 40 years after their founding, they need to constantly find new bigots inside the mainstream to fight against,” the group wrote in 2023. “When there aren’t many left, that means dangerously expanding who is called a bigot.”

The recent indictment alleges that even as the SPLC publicly decried "white supremacy,” it was bankrolling the very figures who could provide the inflammatory social media posts and public controversies the SPLC needed to trigger a constant stream of donations, making it wealthier than many colleges and universities. 

It appears that SPLC reaped lucrative financial benefits from using “informants” inside hate groups. In one instance cited by prosecutors, the SPLC allegedly directed a source to promote the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and coordinate transportation for attendees – only to later use that same event as a fundraising hook to warn donors about the growing threat of extremism.

The source, identified as “F-37” in the indictment, was part of the “online leadership chat group that planned” the August 2017 event. 

"[F-37] attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00,” the indictment reads. 

After the rally, SPLC reported a surge in revenue. In 2016, a year prior, SPLC reported net assets and public donations at $51 million. The following year, by October 2017, SPLC reported $133 million. This rapid change was driven in part by contributions from public figures like George Clooney and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Fox News Digital reported.  

The rally, which occurred amid the controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments by local governments, took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11-12, 2017. At least 30 people were injured when protesters clashed with counter-protesters and one person was killed by a motorist about a half-mile from the protests.

President Donald Trump faced withering criticism from the left for not responding immediately to the incident and later for saying there were “very fine people, on both sides,” describing those on both sides of the debate about the statues. 

President Joe Biden also invoked the Charlottesville rally as the primary justification for his 2020 presidential campaign. 

"In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime," Biden said in his 2019 video announcing his run for president. He spent the campaign frequently saying that “democracy is at stake" and warning that then-President Trump wanted to end it.