For decades the Southern Poverty Law Center was a mixed bag. On the plus side, it produced valuable research reports about the far right and brought lawsuits that helped shut down several important white supremacist groups, including United Klans of America, White Aryan Resistance, and Aryan Nations. On the negative side, it collaborated with the FBI, promoted a shallow and system-supporting anti-“hate” analytic framework, hoarded donations, and fostered a toxic and discriminatory workplace environment.
It gets worse. An April 3, 2026, Substack article by former SPLC Senior Investigative Reporter Michael Edison Hayden details how in recent years the SPLC has harassed and fired employees involved in labor union activities and has largely abandoned its anti-far right watchdog role. The SPLC, he writes, became “too wary of MAGA’s litigiousness and vengefulness to continue confronting the movement. Instead, they wanted to shift into a lane that attracted less attention. This problem isn’t unique to the SPLC. It’s happening at nonprofits across the country and in newsrooms as well.… The misleading and, at times, corrupt discourse around antisemitism has also had a chilling effect, in part because Democrats…helped enable a genocide. This is happening even as antisemitism is becoming worse than I have ever seen it. You can’t talk about the moral corruption of fascists with a clear voice when you yourself are morally corrupt.”
But hunkering down hasn’t protected the SPLC from MAGA’s wrath. Today, Trump’s Justice Department indicted the Center on fraud charges, the Associate Press reports, alleging that
“the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with more than $3 million paid to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. Prosecutors allege some of the money was used by extremists to carry out other crimes, but court papers did not include specific examples.”
In a follow-up to his previous article, Michael Edison Hayden comments on this development cautiously: “I’ll leave open the possibility that investigators have uncovered something serious that isn’t yet public. But the DOJ appears to be focusing on something old and obscure in order to make MAGA’s long-standing rhetoric about the SPLC as a ‘criminal enterprise’ seem real.” Far rightists have been demonizing the SPLC for years, and now they’re cheering the Trump administration for cracking down on their old enemy.
As Hayden comments, the SPLC’s effort to lie low in the face of Trump authoritarianism appears to have failed.
Photo credit:
Southern Poverty Law Center headquarters, Montgomery, Alabama, 2007. Photo by Nameofuser25, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.