The Southern Poverty Law Center spent 55 years calling everyone else a racist.
Then a federal grand jury indicted them for secretly writing checks to the Ku Klux Klan.
Joy Reid went on her podcast Friday and called it "absolutely insane."
What the DOJ Actually Found
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel stood before cameras April 21 and laid it out flat.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money to individuals associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America, and other violent extremist groups.
The group called these payments "field sources."
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/2046723825774289375?s=20
They used shell companies with names like "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse" to hide the money trail.
One informant – a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance – received more than $1 million over ten years while simultaneously being listed on the SPLC's own "Extremist File" page.
Another informant was a member of the leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
The SPLC paid him $270,000 and directed him to attend the rally.
The same rally where a woman died.
"The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence," said Blanche at the press conference.
"Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked."
Joy Reid's Defense
Reid connected Trump's move against the SPLC to his broader "animus" toward organizations that track white supremacists.
She recycled old Chris Wray testimony about racially motivated extremism.
She invoked Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Richard Spencer, and David Duke – her usual carousel of villains – to frame the prosecution as retaliation against a group that made Trump's allies uncomfortable.
What she never addressed: the SPLC was funneling donor money through fake companies to active Klan members and neo-Nazis.
Not to fight them.
To pay them.
https://twitter.com/NJBeisner/status/2048928369635639508?s=20
While publicly fundraising off the promise to destroy those exact groups.
The Organization Already Had One Scandal Under Its Belt
This wasn't the SPLC's first leadership crisis.
In 2019, the organization fired co-founder Morris Dees and removed him from the board under allegations of misconduct and a toxic workplace culture.
Last year, 92 percent of SPLC staff voted no-confidence in CEO Margaret Huang.
She resigned in July 2025.
The SPLC then laid off about 80 employees – roughly 25 percent of its workforce – in the weeks before Huang's departure.
An organization that had spent decades positioning itself as the moral arbiter of American political life couldn't keep its own house in order.
The Biden DOJ investigated the informant program and declined to bring charges.
https://twitter.com/DefiantLs/status/2048950326636732896?s=20
Trump's DOJ revived the investigation and brought 11 counts – six of wire fraud, four of bank fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
What This Is Really About
The Left's argument is that paying extremists for inside information is standard counterterrorism tradecraft.
That's the FBI's job – not a nonprofit's.
The FBI has legal authority, oversight mechanisms, and congressional accountability for its informant programs.
The SPLC has a donation page.
Telling donors you're fighting the KKK while cutting checks to the Imperial Wizard is not "intelligence gathering."
https://twitter.com/Arkadalo/status/2049091255595049226?s=20
It's fraud.
And here's what seals it: some of the SPLC's own donors have said publicly they knew the group was paying informants inside extremist organizations.
That defense actually makes the wire fraud case harder to prosecute.
But it also confirms the SPLC was running a decade-long covert program, paying white supremacists through shell companies, and never disclosing any of it in their fundraising materials.
Joy Reid called that "insane."
She's right.
It is insane.
Just not in the direction she meant.
Sources:
- "Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering," U.S. Department of Justice, April 21, 2026.
- "SPLC CEO stepped down after staff revolt as DOJ probe now targets group," Fox News, April 24, 2026.
