the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 18, 2026
On April 21, the U.S. Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes. The crux of the accusation is that the SPLC used donations to pay informants in white supremacist groups, and that some of the money the SPLC gave them went to fund the hate it claimed to be combating.
The SPLC made its name investigating and organizing legal cases against groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC also publishes information on various hate groups—it lists over 1300 in the United States.
In addition to the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations, the SPLC calls out groups that push the idea of “white genocide” or other ridiculous claims that white people are the “real victims” of racism. It also calls out groups that spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, or organize anti-immigrant militia groups, as well as those that spread hate against gay, lesbian, or transgender people.
The government’s prosecution of the SPLC is unprecedented. It gets no funding from the government, and no donors have accused the group of defrauding them. The SPLC did run an operation to cultivate informants in some of the hate groups it studied, and up to 2023, paid some of those informants for the information they provided. The Justice Department makes vague reference to “crimes” that this money was used to fund but lists nothing specific. And paying informants is a standard practice of the Justice Department itself! The SPLC even shared information it got from these informants with the FBI, which then used it to bring a number of prosecutions, including under Trump.
The Justice Department’s claims that “there is nothing political about this indictment” could not be further from the truth. In recent years, Republicans have become increasingly critical of the group for “unfairly” calling Christian and other conservative organizations extremist hate groups. Never mind that these groups increasingly spout the kind of hate that the SPLC calls out!
In reality, the attack on the SPLC is a defense of the far-right groups and ideas that the SPLC targets. The capitalist class has an increasing interest in defending those who promote racism, the targeting of immigrants, the scapegoating of transgender or gay people, and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. And they have an interest in going after groups like the SPLC that expose those hate groups and their ideas.