I was suspicious of the SPLC. I was right to be. | Opinion

I've been suspicious of the Southern Poverty Law Center for some time. The SPLC, a nonprofit founded in 1971, was built to combat hate and discrimination. The mission sounds worthy enough. But then the group began publishing its annual "Year in Hate and Extremism" report, identifying hundreds – sometimes more than 1,000 – "hate groups" across the United States.

In 2019, it labeled Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent conservative legal organization, a "hate group." Calling a firm that focuses on First Amendment and religious liberty cases a hate group is like calling a defense attorney a criminal for representing the accused.

For many conservatives, that was a bridge too far, and it eroded their trust in the SPLC.

I thought I might have been onto something. It turns out the situation could be even more serious.

Charges against Southern Poverty Law Center are damning

On April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the SPLC on 11 counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges that between 2014 and 2023, the organization secretly funneled more than $3 million in donations to people tied to extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.

If proven, the charges would paint a damning picture. Rather than simply monitoring and exposing hate groups, the SPLC might have gone further – into direct financial entanglement with the very extremists it publicly condemned. That raises the possibility of a self-reinforcing cycle, one that could distort the public's understanding of extremism in America.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement, "The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their activities from the public.”

Patel said the Southern Poverty Law Center vowed to dismantle violent extremist groups but instead paid their leaders, even using funds to facilitate state and federal crimes.

It might be tempting to downplay these allegations by casting the SPLC as just another nonprofit paying informants, something law enforcement agencies do. But that comparison doesn’t hold.

Paying informants would be highly unusual for a 501(c)(3) whose stated mission is combating hate. And even if that framing were accurate, it raises a fair question: What investigations or prosecutions, if any, have actually resulted?

SPLC indictment raises questions about Charlottesville

One of the most serious claims in the indictment involves the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one person was killed and others were injured.

According to the indictment, an SPLC informant identified as “F-37” joined the online chat group that planned the rally, attended at the SPLC’s direction and helped coordinate transportation for other attendees – suggesting the organization had a paid source involved in key aspects of the event’s planning.

The document says informants, referred to internally as “field sources” or “Fs,” were paid clandestinely between 2014 and 2023. It further alleges that F-37 made racist postings under SPLC supervision and received more than $270,000 from the organization over eight years.

Former President Joe Biden has said he ran in 2020 in part because of the violence in Charlottesville, condemning neo-Nazis, White supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan – and blaming President Donald Trump for emboldening them.

The indictment does not claim the SPLC caused the rally. But if an informant who helped plan it was paid nearly $300,000, that is something donors, and the public, had a right to know.

The SPLC says it will defend its work. Its explanation for how that money was spent will matter.

The SPLC's tagline – "Apathy is not an option" – feels different in light of the indictment. It reflects an organization deeply committed to confronting hate. But if the allegations are borne out, they raise harder questions about how that mission has been pursued.

If the perception of a country overrun by hate groups proved useful to the SPLC, the indictment raises the possibility that the line between exposing extremism and amplifying it got blurred.

Whatever its civil rights legacy, the SPLC now faces questions about whether it drifted into something more overtly political – and whether, in the process, it lost sight of the line it set out to police.

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.