The Demand for Racism Has Exceeded the Supply

April 21, 2026

Clayton Wood from Confusion to Clarity

The SPLC indictment confirms what many suspected for years. The hate industry needed the hate to exist.

Today a federal grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at a podium with FBI Director Kash Patel and said the words out loud.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Read that sentence again. Manufacturing extremism was their business model (when not lying and smearing groups who aren’t extremists).

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid at least $3 million to eight people, including affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations, and other extremist groups.

The SPLC created bank accounts for fictitious entities, including companies with names like Fox Photography and Rare Books Warehouse, to funnel donor money to these individuals, concealing the payments from the banks that processed them and from the donors who funded them.

The breakdown is specific and damning: more than $1 million to an affiliate of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. More than $300,000 to an affiliate of the Aryan Nations. More than $270,000 to a member of the Unite the Right rally leadership in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. More than $140,000 to the former chairman of the National Alliance. More than $73,000 to former Ku Klux Klan members. More than $19,000 to the president of American Front.

The Charlottesville detail is the one that shocks me the most. The SPLC’s paid source was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally. That source attended the event at the direction of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation for several other attendees.

One person died at Charlottesville. Dozens were injured. The nation convulsed for months. The rally was used to define an era, to raise money, to destroy reputations, to end careers, to justify sweeping social and corporate policies. And the organization simultaneously raising tens of millions of dollars to fight the groups involved had a paid operative in the leadership chat group helping coordinate attendance.

The indictment states directly that the SPLC’s paid informants engaged in the active promotion of racist groups while the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

The Business Model Explained

The SPLC has a simple and extraordinarily lucrative operation. It identifies hate groups, publicizes them dramatically, raises enormous sums of money to fight them, and uses its hate group designations as a cudgel against mainstream conservative organizations it finds politically inconvenient. Catholic legal groups, mainstream evangelical organizations, immigration restriction advocates, all appearing on the same list as the KKK.

After Charlottesville, Apple and JP Morgan donated millions to the SPLC. Between November 2016 and October 2017 alone, the SPLC gained $140 million in total assets.

Now consider: the organization was paying the people whose activities generated those donations. The outrages that opened checkbooks were being subsidized by the checks those checkbooks funded. This is not a scandal at the margins of the SPLC’s operation. This is the operation.

The question is not whether the SPLC knew the hate was being kept alive partly through their payments. The indictment answers that. The question is whether they understood that the hate was also the product they were selling.

The Hate Map Was Always a Revenue Map, and It Already Got People Shot

The SPLC’s hate group designations have been used by federal agencies, corporate HR departments, media organizations, and tech platforms as a reference for who qualifies as dangerous. Being placed on the hate map has ended funding relationships, cost organizations their banking access, and justified de-platforming campaigns against mainstream conservative and Christian groups.

In August 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Washington DC headquarters of the Family Research Council with a backpack containing a Chick-fil-A bag and a loaded firearm. He opened fire and wounded a security guard before being subdued. When investigators asked him how he had identified the Family Research Council as a target, he told them: the SPLC’s hate map. The SPLC had designated FRC, a mainstream Christian policy organization, as a hate group for its opposition to same-sex marriage. Corkins told the FBI he intended to kill as many people as possible.

Corkins was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. The SPLC issued no meaningful reckoning. It continued publishing the hate map. It continued designating mainstream conservative and Christian organizations alongside actual neo-Nazi groups. It continued raising money on the authority of those designations.

Today’s indictment reveals that while the SPLC was placing organizations like the Family Research Council on a list that inspired a man to walk in and open fire, the SPLC was also cutting checks to actual neo-Nazi group members through shell companies named after photography studios and rare book dealers.

The organization wielding the power to put mainstream Americans on a list with the Klan was simultaneously funding the Klan. That is not a metaphor. It is what the indictment says.

For the Last Decade, Demand Has Exceeded Supply

The 1960s did not have this problem. The racism was real, documented, legal in many cases, and required no manufacturing. The civil rights movement confronted genuine and pervasive injustice, and the courage it took to do so was extraordinary precisely because the opposition was real and violent.

That era is not this era. For at least the last decade, the demand for racism in America has chronically exceeded the supply.

We have watched this play out so many times it has become its own genre. Nicholas Sandmann, a sixteen year old boy in a red hat who stood still while a man beat a drum in his face, accused of smirking with racist aggression by a media apparatus that ran the story without asking a single question. Jussie Smollett, who paid two men he knew to stage a hate crime on a Chicago street at 2 a.m. on one of the coldest nights of the year, in a neighborhood with almost no white residents, and was believed by politicians and journalists who needed the story to be true. The rolling catalogue of nooses that turned out to be door pulls, of slurs that turned out to be self-inflicted, of attacks that turned out to be fabricated.

Each one followed the same arc. Initial explosion of coverage and moral condemnation. Careers damaged, corporate repentance demanded, policies proposed, shakedowns started, and donations raised.

Followed by quiet correction, minimal accountability, and complete absence of reflection about why so many people were so eager to believe.

The eagerness is the tell. When the evidence for an alleged hate crime is implausible on its face and prominent people still rush to amplify it, the explanation is not gullibility. It is incentive. The incentive to have the story be true runs straight through the fundraising model, the political messaging, the media coverage economy, and now, it turns out, the organizational structure of the most famous anti-hate institution in America.

What Accountability Looks Like

The SPLC will argue in its defense that these were confidential informants, that the program saved lives, that gathering intelligence on violent extremist groups is legitimate and necessary work. That argument deserves to be heard in court. Informant programs are a real and legally recognized tool of law enforcement.

But the indictment says they never told the donors. They set up shell companies to hide the payments from the banks. They raised money by telling donors they were dismantling the groups they were funding. And their paid source at Charlottesville was not observing from a careful distance. He was in the planning chat group and coordinated transportation for people attending a rally where someone died.

Every media organization that ran SPLC hate group designations as authoritative owes its readers a reckoning. Every corporation that wrote a check after Charlottesville believing it was funding the opposition to the people involved in that rally needs to understand what the indictment alleges about who was actually being funded. Every government agency that used SPLC designations in its threat assessments and training materials needs to audit those decisions.

And every politician who cited the SPLC’s authority while dismissing concerns about its targeting of mainstream conservative and Christian organizations needs to explain what authority they were actually citing.

The SPLC raised money for decades on the premise that it stood between American society and organized racist violence. Today’s indictment alleges it was standing on both sides of that line simultaneously, collecting from people who feared the darkness while paying the people who kept the lights off.

For the last decade, the demand for racism in America has exceeded the supply. Now we know at least some of that demand was being met with a corporate card, routed through a shell company called Fox Photography, signed by people who told their donors they were doing the opposite.

Don’t look away from the racist racket that is the SPLC, the reckoning is overdue, and I hope it ends the credibility of a failed group who have stirred hate while claiming to stop it.

Clayton Wood

From Confusion to Clarity

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Pictured is the hero who was shot protecting FRC, targeted for an attempted mass murder because to the bogus “hate maps” created by the SPLC