The Southern Poverty Law Center, which built a multimillion-dollar empire by labeling Christian organizations as hate groups, now stands federally indicted for secretly funding the leaders of actual hate groups, including Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The DOJ alleges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Unite the Right, the National Alliance, the National Socialist Movement, the National Socialist Party of America, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and the American Front.
The payments were made through fictitious entities, including “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” and the SPLC never disclosed this informant program to donors. One informant received more than $1 million while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance; another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, who had previously severed the bureau’s relationship with the SPLC, calling it a “partisan smear machine.” The SPLC reported over $800 million in assets as of 2024. Interim CEO Bryan Fair called the allegations false, saying the SPLC’s sources had “risked their lives” and provided information to the FBI that “saved lives.” The indictment does not allege that funds went directly to the hate groups themselves, only to affiliated individuals.
The indictment is the latest development in a long record of the SPLC using its “hate group” designation against Christian organizations, a pattern that produced real-world violence, a nationwide Catholic surveillance program, and the systematic exclusion of Christian ministries from donor platforms. The irony is that the vast majority of African Americans the SPLC purports to defend are themselves Christians, particularly in the South.
The SPLC designated the Family Research Council (FRC) as a hate group in 2010. In August 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II entered FRC’s Washington headquarters armed with a 9mm pistol and multiple magazines. He told the FBI, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
Prosecutors said his mission was to kill as many people as possible; a security guard was shot but stopped the attack. Corkins pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism while armed and was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2013. FRC President Tony Perkins stated that Corkins “was given a license by a group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, who labeled us a hate group because we defend the family and we stand for traditional, orthodox Christianity.” A decade after the attack, FRC remained on the SPLC hate map.
The SPLC also designated the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, an organization founded in 1994 by Christian leaders, including James Dobson, Bill Bright, and D. James Kennedy, which has since secured 64 victories before the United States Supreme Court. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote in the Wall Street Journal that placing ADF alongside KKK chapters was “not only wrong, it’s malicious.”
In 2015, the SPLC listed Dr. Ben Carson, an African American neurosurgeon, as an extremist for opposing same-sex marriage, placing him alongside KKK and neo-Nazi groups. The SPLC was forced to apologize and remove him from the list after public backlash.
In January 2023, the FBI’s Richmond Field Office produced an internal memo identifying “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential domestic violent extremists, drawing on SPLC designations as a primary source.
The memo listed specific groups, including Catholic Apologetics International and the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It treated adherence to the Latin Mass and opposition to abortion as indicators of potential radicalization.
Newly released documents confirmed the memo was circulated among multiple FBI divisions, viewed by over 1,000 employees, and endorsed by field offices in Buffalo, Milwaukee, Louisville, Los Angeles, and Portland. Internal emails show that then-Deputy Director Paul Abbate ordered the memo deleted from FBI systems, and that another official deleted access logs identifying who had viewed it.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said he found at least 13 FBI documents produced between 2009 and 2023 that used what he called “anti-Catholic terminology” and relied on SPLC information. Twenty state attorneys general criticized the FBI for citing the SPLC, apparently without independent vetting.
By June 2025, the SPLC had added Focus on the Family to its hate map. FRC President Jim Daly said the SPLC “always finds a way to hate Christians” and called the designation “potentially violent rhetoric.”
The 2024 hate map listed 96 organizations in the “anti-LGBTQ” category, applied to groups that promote parental rights, religious liberty, and opposition to gender ideology. The SPLC also designated the American College of Pediatricians as a hate group.
Former SPLC Intelligence Report editor-in-chief Mark Potok said in a speech, “I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.” Former Intelligence Project director Heidi Beirich said “there is a price to be paid” for organizations she adds to the list.
In May 2025, the SPLC published its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism 2024″ report, which included a section titled “Turning Point USA: A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024,” placing the organization in its “Dismantling White Supremacy” series. Kirk responded on television, warning the designation would put his organization “in the crosshairs” and citing the FRC shooting as evidence.
He said, “They’re literally putting high school chapters of ours on a hate group list next to the KKK and neo-Nazi groups… Remember that there was a shooter who went to the Family Research Council years ago, inspired by the SPLC list.”
On September 10, 2025, less than four months after the designation, Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, while speaking at a Turning Point USA campus event attended by approximately 3,000 people.
He was struck by a single bullet fired from a rooftop approximately 142 yards away and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. The day before the assassination, the SPLC’s Hatewatch newsletter published an article naming Kirk and Turning Point USA as extremists.
The suspect, Tyler James Robinson, 22, surrendered to authorities on September 11. Prosecutors charged him with aggravated murder and said they would seek the death penalty.
Text messages Robinson allegedly sent to his roommate said he had planned the shooting for just over a week and had “enough of his hatred.” Robinson allegedly told his father he killed Kirk because “there is too much evil and the guy spreads too much hate.” Bullet casings carried inscriptions including “Hey fascist! Catch!”
Utah Governor Spencer Cox stated there was “clearly a leftist ideology” and that Robinson had been radicalized online through “the Reddit culture and these other dark places of the internet.” Investigators did not establish a direct link to the SPLC designation in the charging documents, unlike the FRC case, where Corkins explicitly cited the hate map in his FBI confession.
In December 2025 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, TPUSA Executive Vice President Andrew Sypher said Kirk’s warning had “proved prophetic.”
House Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy stated: “As with FRC, in the aftermath of Charlie’s assassination, there have been no retractions, no accountability, and no acknowledgment of the risks inherent in branding mainstream political figures as existential threats.
These incidents, separated by 13 years but linked by the same targeting architecture, underscore a sobering reality. The SPLC’s designations don’t merely stigmatize. They can serve as ideological permission slips for individuals already willing to commit political violence.”
The SPLC also used its designations to exclude Christian organizations from donor platforms. Amazon’s AmazonSmile program relied on the SPLC to determine charity eligibility, barring designated Christian organizations while groups including Planned Parenthood and the Satanic Temple remained eligible. In 2017, D. James Kennedy Ministries filed a federal lawsuit against the SPLC, Amazon, and GuideStar USA after Amazon denied its AmazonSmile application based on the SPLC designation.
The ministry sued for defamation, religious discrimination, and trademark violation. Ministry president Frank Wright stated: “Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as ‘hate’ groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter.”
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed dismissal, ruling that “hate group” was too ambiguous a term to be provably false and that the ministry had not adequately alleged actual malice. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. In 2020, House Judiciary Republicans sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos requesting a briefing on how AmazonSmile made eligibility determinations based on SPLC information.
The SPLC has also filed litigation opposing religious school funding, including a 2025 challenge to Tennessee’s universal voucher law and a motion to intervene against the Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, a Christian charter school seeking public funds to provide biblical education. Courts ruled the “hate group” label constitutionally protected opinion, a legal shield the indictment now calls into question. An organization facing charges of financial fraud and manufacturing extremism served for years as a primary intelligence source used by federal law enforcement to target Christian organizations.
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