As one of the most high-profile employees of the Southern Poverty Law Center for five years — and as someone who has been outspokenly critical of the organization — I never once heard of the program that allegedly involved paying sources within the Ku Klux Klan, National Alliance and Aryan Nations until the Justice Department published its indictment this week. What I did hear, frequently, was people in the MAGA movement saying we were some kind of criminal syndicate — part of a sustained propaganda effort to delegitimize the work we did tracking and labeling extremist groups. Although I find the notion of paying extremists distasteful, even unethical, the indictment feels like the culmination of years of pro-Trump activists consuming and amplifying that kind of propaganda. And, the SPLC, for its part, has called these charges “false allegations.” One quote from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s press conference about the charges against the SPLC stood out to me as particularly absurd: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” he said on Tuesday afternoon. Play BREAKING: New York Times reports FBI investigated journalist who wrote about Kash Patel’s girlfriend April 22, 2026 / 09:48 Imagine, for a moment, believing the SPLC — or any other civil rights organization — needed to fraudulently manufacture racism to sell it in today’s America. Just two months ago, the president shared an artificial intelligence-generated video depicting his Black predecessor and his predecessor’s Black wife as primates. In early 2025, the Trump administration suspended refugee…
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