If ever there were a sign that America’s “woke” era is coming to a close, the downfall of the Southern Poverty Law Center would be it. Though the SPLC long predates contemporary politics, it spent the last 20 years grossly inflating the definition of “hate” to turn good-faith skeptics of cultural progressivism, open borders, and radical Islamism into a shadowy and well-funded conspiracy of bigotry. In a shocking indictment, the Justice Department is alleging the SPLC actually funded this conspiracy, to the extent it even existed at all. It should not be forgotten that major corporations and legacy media outlets were the group’s useful idiots along the way.

The SPLC exploited its reputation as an organization that actually began decades ago by helping to dismantle lingering Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. Gradually, as it started to put itself out of business, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees began lumping mainstream conservative groups into the Left-wing nonprofit’s lists and maps of “hate” organizations. In doing so, it tied them into the same categories as virulent racists and antisemites for expressing orthodox Christian views on issues such as gay marriage.

Journalists occasionally questioned the group’s practices. A long Washington Post investigation eight years ago, for example, reported, “The SPLC was founded in 1971 to take on legal cases related to racial injustice, poverty and the death penalty. Then, in the early 1980s, it launched Klanwatch, a project to monitor Klan groups, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. Their hate seemed self-evident. But eventually the SPLC began tracking — and labeling — a wider swath of extremism. And that’s when things became more complicated.”

The Post story cast serious doubt on how the organization determined what constituted “hate”. All the way back in 2000, though, liberal journalist Ken Silverstein tried to sound the alarm in Harper’s. Reflecting on his reporting in 2010, Silverstein wrote that the SPLC “is essentially a fraud and that it has a habit of casually labeling organizations as ‘hate groups.’ (Which doesn’t mean that some of the groups it criticizes aren’t reprehensible.) In doing so, the SPLC shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.”

For years, the legacy media took the SPLC’s lead and routinely cited the group as a credible and neutral source when covering conservative nonprofits like the Family Research Council and Heritage Foundation, as I wrote back in 2017. It helped Dees rake in gobs of money while undermining conservative groups who ran into speech suppression on a large scale, fundraising snags, and even violence due to absurd SPLC blacklists.

Worse yet, the SPLC-to-media pipeline normalized ideological definitions of “hate”, leaving many Americans labeled alongside the KKK for following their church’s teachings or questioning Islamism after 9/11. For example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the world’s preeminent opponents of hatred and extremism, once ended up on an SPLC blacklist. The SPLC’s influence in ensuring that these definitions — labeling anyone who disagrees with extreme cultural progressivism as “hateful” — leaked from academia into mainstream institutions cannot possibly be overstated.

The grift was already beyond shameful before the DOJ took the group to court this week after finding receipts apparently showing the SPLC helped fund legitimate bigotry under the guise of infiltrating hate cells. But it’s even worse now. As the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, “The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.” This includes allegedly paying an organizer of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of one woman and a flood of corporate cash into the SPLC’s coffers.

Apple, JPMorgan Chase, and George Clooney rushed to donate to the SPLC after Charlottesville. Joe Biden cited the event as one of the reasons he decided to run for president. Even after the abrupt firing of Dees in 2019, the SPLC’s influence never really went away. As recently as 2024, the group reported nearly a billion dollars in assets and $129 million in revenue. Those are shocking figures.

The DOJ’s indictment could halt all of that in its tracks. More importantly, the country is beginning to move on from marginalizing critics of cultural progressivism as bigots and simply making substantive arguments against those positions.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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