The SPLC Was Funding the "Hate" It Claimed to Be Fighting
Plus: how to respond to the Left's character assassination attempts and an exclusive interview on the state of right-wing media.
Sometimes it feels as though week after week brings bad news, but this past week, something happened that’s worth celebrating: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the infamous left-wing, anti-conservative smear machine, has been indicted by a grand jury and is now facing federal criminal charges.
The SPLC is famous for its “Hatewatch,” a list they maintain of supposedly hateful figures and groups on the Right. Some of these groups are legitimately bad—the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and other white nationalist groups—but others are completely mainstream right-wing organizations, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Here’s what happened: Over the course of ten years, essentially since the emergence of the “alt right” in 2015 up until the beginning of Donald Trump’s second administration in 2025, the SPLC was allegedly pumping millions of dollars in donor funds through various shell corporations and sham entities to the precise organizations that they were putting on their “Hatewatch” list, including the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and some of the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.
In short, the SPLC was astroturfing, enabling, and funding the white nationalist movement, putting the white nationalist movement on its “Hatewatch” list, and then using the white nationalist movement’s supposed threat, which they were propping up, to fearmonger and fundraise from donors across the country. According to some reports, the SPLC now has about $1 billion in its war chest—an enormous sum, raised, in part, through deception.
This is a very powerful technique of the organized Left. They create phantasms of the radical Right, and then raise money, engage in activism, seek publicity, and attempt to shape political narratives and policy decisions based on phantasms that they themselves created. They use their self-created monsters as vehicles to lump normal right-wing actors—like me—into ugly, smear-by-association campaigns.
The SPLC’s tactics worked in the past because establishment conservatives at, say, universities or think tanks, didn’t want to go out on a limb and protect the more radical groups from the SPLC machine. That’s understandable in the case of groups like the KKK or American Nazi Party, which deserve no defense. But the SPLC’s strategy began to crack because its definition of hate became so expansive that it conflated the most unsavory characters with normal conservative intellectuals and activists. When they began conflating classical liberals and mainstream social conservatives with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the Right was finally able to push back.
When I was in the thick of the fight against critical race theory earlier this decade, I remember having some fear of the SPLC, because I had seen what had happened to others they had targeted in the past. I remember having this sense that when they began publishing defamatory articles about me, I had better fight back hard, because these people were trying to knock me off the board altogether—ruin my reputation and take away my ability to support my family.
