President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud and bank fraud. According to the DOJ, the SPLC paid millions of dollars to individuals associated with groups like the Ku Klux Klan, only to raise money off of supposedly pervasive hate in America. Daily Signal Senior Editor Tyler O’Neil, author of a book on the SPLC titled “Making Hate Pay,” joined the “Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss.
This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity.
Bradley Devlin: The Southern Poverty Law Center has been in the news lately. Just a little. There has been an indictment that has been handed down by the Department of Justice after it put its argument in front of a grand jury against the SPLC.
You’ve been covering this, of course. You’ve been covering the organization for a long time, but you’ve been covering this specific indictment since it came out in April.
What is in this indictment? What are the allegations?
Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, I mean, this has very shocking allegations. And, you know, they’re shocking in one sense in that you have this organization that’s associated with the civil rights movement that has allegedly been paying members of the Ku Klux Klan, been reimbursing people for materials used in cross burnings, paying for KKK hoods.
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I mean, this is the sort of thing you can’t make up. This is like a Babylon Bee headline. I mean, we even saw in the superseding indictment this last week that an SPLC employee was literally in bed with a neo-Nazi informant. So, that’s how far off the reservation this group has gone.
But all these claims are essentially to say the SPLC is engaged, allegedly engaged, in wire fraud. It claims to be fighting racism and white supremacist groups. But the money that it uses to raise from donors to supposedly fight those groups, it actually funnels back into those activities, and this is, according to the indictment, a way of propping up hate so as to keep the donors, the donor money flowing.
Bradley Devlin: So, how much money has the SPLC spent on these types of informants in the last few years?
Tyler O’Neil: So, the indictment goes from 2010 to 2023 and says it’s $4.1 million. Now, that’s a small chunk of change looking at the SPLC’s overall assets, upwards of $800 million, and their endowment of something like $740 million.
But it still represents a pretty sizable investment of money in what the DOJ suggests is this scam to prop up the very hate the SPLC claims it exists to oppose.
Bradley Devlin: Right. I’m sure it’s a money multiplier situation, where you spend a million dollars on some kind of KKK—
Oh, yeah … activism as the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that ostensibly fights for racial justice and then you’re able to make $100 million off of whatever insane incident is precipitated by that funding.
So, of course, there’s been a lot of pressure on the Trump administration, particularly since the death of Charlie Kirk, to go after some of these left-wing organizations that use its dollars to propagate chaos, whether that’s Antifa or, as we’re finding out, potentially the Southern Poverty Law Center too, right?
This is what’s in the indictment. These allegations are they are propping up this type of activity on the extreme right rather than the extreme left. But as a left-wing group, like there’s been a lot of pressure on the Trump administration to go after these wing groups. Why do you think the SPLC came under the fire of the Trump Justice Department?
Tyler O’Neil: Yeah, I mean, let me count the reasons.
Bradley Devlin: Yeah.
Tyler O’Neil: One of—the biggest reason—so, the SPLC claims, they have this big filing where they’re saying, “This is vindictive prosecution. The Trump administration doesn’t like what we say, and therefore they’re going after us in court.”
Now, you know, there is a superficial plausibility to that, partially because we saw in the Biden administration this repeated use of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I think we all remember the anti-Catholic memo where the Richmond FBI [office, working with other FBI offices, comes up with this memo saying that radical traditional Catholics are a threat to America. And their main source for this is the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the SPLC is very useful for the Left because it gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy.
Now it puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a hate map with Klan chapters, suggesting, it claims that this map reveals the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.
That infrastructure just so happens to include groups like Turning Point USA, and the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom.
These are very mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that are put on the map essentially for the sin of disagreeing with the SPLC. But in the Biden DOJ, what we saw was the SPLC brought in to train prosecutors on the anti-LGBTQ+ movement to work with Kristen Clarke, who is the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Biden DOJ.
And so, thankfully, under President Trump, we have a new sane Department of Justice that comes out and says, “Look, we’re not working with the SPLC anymore.” You had FBI Director Kash Patel make a very important statement after the assassination of Charlie Kirk that the FBI will not rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center under his watch.
And so, that is used as evidence by the SPLC to say that this is a vindictive prosecution.
But if I’m looking at this situation, and I know what I know about the SPLC, and I think most Americans can understand this is an organization that vilifies conservatives and Christians and goes to various sectors of polite society and says, “You need to de-bank, you need to blacklist, you need to de-platform any of these organizations.”
And the SPLC is the center of demonizing conservatives and Christians in our civil discourse right now. And so the FBI distancing itself from the SPLC is a important step in the right direction to restoring trust with the FBI.
So, there’s a very weird sort of Orwellian nature to this, where the SPLC is taking that positive step of removing bias, a horrible bias from the FBI, and saying, “This proves bias against us,” when they’re facing criminal charges.
Bradley Devlin: So, what you’re kind of laying out here, the reason that the DOJ went after the SPLC for this type of activity, right, is they saw the goods, they had a strong enough argument to get a grand jury to indict, etc., etc.
But the SPLC, in a way, is a victim of its own success, that it was so ingrained and so prominent amongst the Left and amongst left-wing organizations, amongst left-wing governments when the Left is in control of government, that it made itself kind of an obvious and easy target for the Trump administration looking to act against these left-wing purveyors of discontent and chaos.
Tyler O’Neil: Yeah. I’d say obvious. I’m not entirely sure I’d say easy.
Bradley Devlin: No, I mean, they have deep pockets.
Tyler O’Neil: Yeah. Not only do they have deep pockets, they have very smart lawyers. I’ve been going through the filings from the SPLC, and they’re very smart in stringing together a strong argument in fighting back against what the DOJ says.
Bradley Devlin: So the vindictive prosecution thing, you think is a little far-fetched, but—
Tyler O’Neil: Yes …
Bradley Devlin: —there is an argument here for the SPLC to defend itself. And unpack that for us a little bit. I know I interrupted you here. But what are the strengths and weaknesses of this case being brought against the SPLC?
What are the SPLC lawyers drawing attention to beyond just this is vindictive, when they actually get down to the brass tacks the meat and potatoes of the lawsuit?
Tyler O’Neil: So, that’s the interesting thing. They don’t really get down to the brass tacks and the meat and potatoes of the specific claims.
What they do, their overall narrative is, “We didn’t fund the Klan. We didn’t fund them. We were funding informants who were trying to take down the Klan.”
And of course, that argument also has a superficial plausibility. The SPLC got attacked. Their offices were firebombed in the early 1980s, and that’s one of the things that led them to create this informant program.
There are also cases where SPLC claims information from the program led to criminal indictments against members of extremist groups. This organization called Atomwaffen Division is one that they constantly bring up because there they got one of the members convicted under previous DOJ for actually planning a violent attack.
But the substance of the indictment, the real purpose here why the DOJ is going after them, is not those uses of the informant program that arguably made sense.
It’s the other ones. It’s where the SPLC seems to have put more money behind an informant in a way that also propped up the hate so that they could fundraise off of it.
So, you have multiple situations where an SPLC informant is, you know, this is unbeknownst to donors, unbeknownst to the audience, that this person is an informant. The SPLC has an extremist file drawing attention to this person in the white nationalist movement and saying, “Look, this person is evil.”
Meanwhile, that person is on the SPLC payroll. That, you know, sets off alarm bells to me. And there are other situations where the SPLC is accused, in the indictment, of giving money, paying for a cross burning. I mean, reimbursing people. This is how it works.
Bradley Devlin: The receipts submitted. Wood, nails. Kerosene. Yeah.
Tyler O’Neil: Kerosene.
Bradley Devlin: One lighter.
Tyler O’Neil: Exactly. And the SPLC apparently paid that bill. And you know, when looking at this indictment and saying—
Bradley Devlin: —the expense file is construction. Yeah, it’s the construction. And then in the kerosene section, it’s destruction.
Tyler O’Neil: Yeah. There you go. So yeah, it—I mean, they’re like an arsonist or like a fireman who moonlights as an arsonist. Yeah. Or like an exterminator who plants rats in his neighbor’s house to justify his own services. That’s what the indictment is claiming. And to that specific claim, the SPLC has, to my knowledge, never really given a response.
They’ve pleaded not guilty, and they’ll get their day in court, and I’m very curious to see, when they actually have to get down to brass tacks, how they defend those things
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Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.
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