William Jacobson used to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center in the late 1970s, because he thought it was going after violent, racist groups in the right way. Jacobson, now a clinical law professor at Cornell University and director of its securities law clinic, lost track of the center in the 1980s and it didn’t reappear on his radar until he started the website Legal Insurrection in fall 2008.

Jacobson’s first post about the Southern Poverty Law Center on the conservative site came in 2009, when he described it as a “victim of its own success.”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center once served a vital role in shutting down Klan groups and dangerous white supremacist groups. Morris Dees endured death threats and was a heroic figure in the struggle for civil rights,” Jacobson wrote at the time.

But “the reason to be of the SPLC no longer exists. The Klan and other such groups are virtually non-existent,’ he wrote in the post. “The threat to society is from two sources, lone wolves or very small groups of people, as to which the SPLC cannot be effective, and Islamic extremists, as to which the SPLC appears not to care.”

The sticking point, for Jacobson, was the center labeling a conservative scholar, Carol Swain, then of Vanderbilt University, an “apologist for white supremacists” for her review of a film. Nothing in the review “or prior writings, possibly could be considered legitimate fodder to brand her an ‘apologist for white supremacists,’” he wrote in 2009.

“That’s when I started to look at them and said, ‘Well maybe they’re not the people I knew in the late 1970s,’” he told JNS. “They lost their way, they morphed into a more generalized political operation that was weaponized against right-of-center people, against Christians.”

Swain told JNS that “I could say that there are a lot of things that probably hurt my career and led me to leave academia early, but having the Southern Poverty Law Center label you, a black woman, as an ‘apologist for white supremacy,’ it sort of makes you like kryptonite for any universities that would be looking to hire you.”

Conservatives have a “real fear” about being “falsely accused of being a racist group” and listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” and having their reputations ruined, Jacobson told JNS.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development, are among those that the center called “extremists.”

“You’re now being put on a list which has some very violent people,” Jacobson told JNS. “I’m not saying there are no violent racist groups out there. What I’m saying is, why didn’t they focus on those groups instead of Ben Carson, instead of Rand Paul, instead of Family Research Council, instead of Moms for Liberty?”

“You can’t justify having Dr. Ben Carson on a list next to violent Nazis,” he said. “The SPLC became a very effective tool at silencing people.”

‘They just lost their way’

Founded in 1971 by Alabama lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr., the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit in Montgomery, fought the Ku Klux Klan and against what remained of Jim Crow, according to Stefan Padfield, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and principal of its free enterprise initiative.

“Most conservatives, when I hear them talk about the SPLC, they will often refer to the fact that it started out as a good organization doing good work,” Padfield told JNS. “Going after actual racist organizations, going after actual racist legislation, that’s all to the good.”

A “somewhat of a recent convert” to conservatism, Padfield used to think that the center was a “great organization.” But now, those who aren’t “in lockstep with leftist ideology” have a “chance the SPLC is going to label you a ‘hate group’ or a ‘hater,’” he said.

“Somewhere along the way, whether it was something to do with the supply for racism outstripping the demand for racism, they concluded they needed to create some or whatever, they just lost their way,” Padfield told JNS.

A grand jury returned Montgomery returned an indictment on April 21 alleging that the Southern Poverty Law Center “secretly funneled” more than $3 million in donations to people associated with the Klan, United Klans of America, Unite the Right, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party) and American Front between 2014 and 2023, the U.S. Justice Department said.

The Justice Department alleges that the center committed wire fraud, made false statements to a federally-insured bank and is guilty of conspiracy to conceal money laundering. It also accused the center of using donor money to “fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups” and paying informants “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.”

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” stated Todd Blanche, acting U.S. attorney general. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”

The center denied the allegations and said, on April 28, that it filed two motions in federal court in response to what it called “false statements” from the Justice Department.

Padfield told JNS that the indictment is “quite significant, because it confirms a lot of things that people on the right certainly have been suspicious of for quite some time.”

“To the extent that they want to try to say, ‘Oh how could we have known this is a bad actor?’ this goes back years,” he said. “That’s just not going to fly, and this indictment, just basically to some extent, puts the bow on that.”

Even if the center’s claims are true, that the informants it paid provided information that saved lives, “there’s still a question of how many people did they get killed, literally, by funding these hate groups, by promoting events where violence erupted, by literally and-or figuratively putting targets on people’s heads, who they labeled as ‘hateful’ or ‘hate groups’ or ‘individuals associated with hate groups,’” according to Padfield.

Bryan Fair, interim president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, stated that the information that the center “shared with the FBI over the last 40 years saved lives.”

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair stated.

“When threats and other unlawful activity were revealed, the SPLC immediately passed that information to law enforcement officials, local, state and federal and assisted in efforts to prevent violence and stop criminal activity,” he wrote. “We strongly deny the allegations in the indictment and their falsity is already being exposed in our court filings.”

“The government is blatantly mischaracterizing our efforts to successfully fight hatred and violent extremism, something we have done for decades,” he added.

Padfield told JNS that informants are typically used “to get to the leaders” and “take down the bad group.”

“Here, it looks like you’re basically paying the leaders, and so it starts becoming a very different scenario,” he said. “I think this is largely what the indictment points to.”

“Rather than paying low-level informants, so you can get at the leaders and take down the organization, it’s almost like you’re propping up the organizations, supporting the leaders,” he told JNS.

‘Invites reprisals’

Daniel Pipes, a historian and founder of Middle East Forum who is Jewish, told JNS that the center, which has accused him of being “anti-Muslim,” is “morally corrupt.” But he sees things differently from some of the center’s other critics.

Pipes worries about the precedent that the federal government is taking, “targeting persons or organizations it disapproves of, whether they are federal employees, media corporations, law firms, universities, think tanks or activist organizations.”

“This both erodes trust in the justice system and invites reprisals when the other team takes office,” he told JNS.

Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that the center “has always been extremely anti-Israel regularly and wrongly placing decent, mainstream but strong pro-Israel groups and pro-Israel people on their politicized hate list.”

Jacobson, the Cornell professor, told JNS that the center is arguing that it was just paying informants, but the indictment is “much more specific” and “substantive.”

“It names names, at least by initials or identifying people by category, and I think what is alleged is in the course of deceiving donors as to how funds were being used, they committed specific crimes: bank fraud, wire fraud, things like that,” he said.

One place where there has been lively debate about how authoritative the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia, one of the most visited sites on the internet.

Despite the indictment against the center, Wikipedia editors continue to consider it “generally reliable,” even as they dub the Anti-Defamation League “generally unreliable” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Discussions about the possibility of changing the center’s reliability rating after the indictment ended without any changes.

“A grand jury’s review means nothing beyond the case going to trial, and Wikipedia is not beholden to the Trump admin,” stated an editor, who closed a discussion on the center’s reliability.

Klein, of ZOA, told JNS that Wikipedia’s decision to keep seeing it as “a legitimate source of information further validates SPLC’s ugly, bigoted, biased anti-Israel record.”

“Wikipedia is a tendentious, unreliable, politicized left-wing group that should not be listened to or taken seriously,” Klein said.

Padfield, of the Heritage Foundation, which Wikipedia blacklists as a source, told JNS that the site has “no credibility on the right.”

“They’re basically in the same camp as the SPLC,” he said.

Pipes told JNS that “when it comes to political matters, especially those connected to Israel, aggressive leftist editors” on Wikipedia “skew the content to the point of distortion.”

“Unfortunately, the website’s leadership has so far ignored this problem,” he said.

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