I rarely do this but I am going to quote James Taranto’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on the federal case against the Southern Poverty Leadership Council (SPLC) in full, not necessarily because I agree with him but because I think it is highly informative.
Perhaps the most contentious statement of Donald Trump’s career has been his assertion in August 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the agitation in Charlottesville, Va. Mr. Trump was right in more ways than he realized—at least one person was on both sides. Meet F-37, a figure in the indictment a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Ala., handed up last week against the self-styled antiracist nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.
“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event . . . and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” the grand jury alleges. “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.”
F is for “field source,” the SPLC’s term for inside informants it paid to gather intelligence on white-supremacist groups. According to the indictment, “between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds to Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups.” Among these, the indictment says, were F-9, who got a cool million over a decade for activities that included stealing documents from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and F-39, whom the SPLC paid $6,000 to take the rap for F-9’s theft.
The SPLC raises money and sustains its relevance by stoking the perception that white supremacy is pervasive and influential. I have argued since 2008 that this aligns the center’s interests with those of supremacist groups. My point received insider validation from a 2019 New Yorker article by journalist Bob Moser, whom the SPLC hired as a writer in 2001. “Though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups,” Mr. Moser wrote. He and his colleagues came up with a mordant slogan: “The SPLC—making hate pay.”
If the indictment’s allegations are true, the SPLC’s fundraising efforts went beyond hyping hate groups to providing them material support. Several of the field sources were allegedly leaders of the organizations on which they were informing, including F-unknown, “the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America”; F-30, who “led the National Socialist Party of America”; and another F-unknown, a Ku Klux Klansman of unspecified sex who was “married to an Exalted Cyclops.” F-9, the million-dollar document thief, was a fundraiser for the National Alliance. There’s no way he found a more generous patron than the SPLC.
Supporting white supremacy through lawful means is constitutionally protected speech. It may be a scandal, but it isn’t a crime. The prosecutors’ theory, however, is that the SPLC criminally defrauded its donors “through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for”—that is, by promising to spend the contributors’ money to oppose racism, then supporting it instead. The center also allegedly used fictitious business entities to pay the informants and is charged with money laundering and lying to a federally insured bank in connection with those transactions.
In a video statement, the SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, neither denied nor admitted the criminal accusations but implied that they were politically motivated: “The federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach.” He acknowledged that the SPLC had used paid confidential informants and said that although the practice was necessary “to protect the safety of our staff and the public,” it has ended. (The events alleged in the indictment all occurred in 2023 or before.)
Mr. Fair added that “we frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.” The SPLC repeated that claim in a motion filed Tuesday in federal court, which seeks an order that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche retract a “false and unfairly prejudicial statement” to the contrary that he made in a TV interview.
Mr. Fair doesn’t explain what function the informants served for the SPLC. Even the center’s supporters are at a loss about that. Columnist Clarence Page writes that “a key question will be whether prosecutors can distinguish SPLC’s informant practices from those long used by law enforcement.” The distinction is obvious: The SPLC is a private organization, not a law-enforcement agency. Mr. Page’s framing sidesteps the central question.
Making sense of all this requires a look at the SPLC’s history. When the center was founded in 1971, it mainly did legal work for clients who were indigent or had civil-liberties complaints. “A decade or so later,” Mr. Moser reported, it “began to abandon poverty law . . . to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan.” The center filed lawsuits aimed at bankrupting Klan organizations, unsympathetic defendants that made easy targets.
In explaining the SPLC’s concern for its employees’ safety, Mr. Fair noted in his video that the center’s offices were firebombed in 1983. That was during the heyday of the anti-Klan litigation campaign. But those lawsuits tailed off after the 1990s as the center increasingly focused on what it calls “tracking hate.”
Around the time the SPLC began the litigation campaign, it launched a project called Klanwatch to monitor and report on KKK activities. Klanwatch ultimately grew into “the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list,” Mr. Moser wrote.
According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023 the field sources contributed information to at least three SPLC publications: Intelligence Report, “a magazine-like periodical”; Hatewatch, a blog; and Intelligence Project Dispatch, “a monthly online publication issued by the Hatewatch Staff.” This seems to have been the informants’ main function in recent decades. The SPLC’s principal activity has been gathering information and presenting it to the public in printed and online media. That is known as journalism.
Here’s what SPLC journalism looks like: The indictment alleges that “a high-level SPLC employee” used the documents F-9 stole from the National Alliance as the basis for a Hatewatch story. A former chairman of the same group, F-42, “was featured on the SPLC’s ‘Extremist File’ webpage.” The center denounced F-42 as an extremist with one hand and paid him $140,000 with the other, according to the indictment.
To observe that the SPLC practices journalism isn’t to give it a seal of approval. To the contrary, it is to insist that the center’s work be judged by the ethical standards of journalism. In America at least, respectable journalists don’t pay sources for information—much less hire sources to obtain information illegally, as the SPLC allegedly did with F-9. We don’t deliberately deceive our readers, as the SPLC allegedly did by attributing F-9’s theft to F-39 and by publishing an exposé of F-42 that concealed the most interesting and pertinent fact about him—that he was on the SPLC payroll.
Journalists like Mr. Page don’t understand the SPLC because such clarity would reveal that this journalism scandal implicates their own organizations. Mr. Moser noted in 2019 that the SPLC’s hate-group list “remains a valuable resource for journalists.” News outlets frequently pass along other SPLC work with a gloss of expert authority. They couldn’t do that if they acknowledged the center for what it actually is—a competitor, and a particularly disreputable one.
Racism is vile. By “racism” I mean conduct such as discrimination or violence directed at people because of their race; such actions are both immoral and, in many cases, unlawful. Distinct from that is the belief that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another. That belief is equally reprehensible, but under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution it is generally protected when expressed, however offensive it may be. Similarly, expressing support for individuals or organizations that hold such views is ordinarily protected speech, unless it crosses into material support for unlawful acts.
As I understand the allegations concerning the Southern Poverty Law Center, they are not that the organization itself engaged in racist conduct or advocacy but that it may have defrauded donors, specifically, that it provided funds to individuals within racist organizations (for example, as informants) in a manner inconsistent with how its activities were represented to contributors. That is a different question entirely.
Whether fraud occurred turns on familiar elements: whether there was a material misrepresentation or omission, whether it was made knowingly, whether donors reasonably relied on it, and whether they were harmed as a result. The key issue, therefore, is not simply whether the organization paid informants, but whether it accurately disclosed the nature and extent of those activities. If donors understood that such payments were being made as part of the organization’s work, then the case for fraud is weak; if they were misled about that point in a way that would matter to a reasonable donor, the case becomes stronger.
