Washington, D.C. — The U.S. House Judiciary Committee convened on May 20 to hold a hearing titled “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate.”

The hearing was a follow-up to the grand jury indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on April 21, where the organization was charged with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.”

One month after the announcement, right-wing politicians and media figures have produced endless content using the indictment to bolster a conspiratorial worldview – its premise is that the left has been inventing and funding right-wing hate groups to victimize them.

“They called them field sources, individuals the Southern Poverty Law Center paid to gin up hate,” Committee Chair U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican said in his opening statement during the hearing. “The very hate they told their supporters they were fighting.”

In a May 26 filing, the SPLC described this as a vindictive prosecution similar to that of immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They also cited whistleblower reports that the prosecution was rushed.

Jordan claimed the SPLC paid “$270,000 to the guy who helped put together the [2017 Unite the Right rally] where a young lady was killed.”

The quip implies the source was paid the money for that event alone when he was paid the total $270,000 over a nine year period – $30,000 annually – and leaves out the fact that the information the source fed to SPLC during the leadup to the rally was forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

UR Special Coverage: Unite the Right on Trial in Charlottesville [2021]

Jordan used the other informants as examples for his claim, despite the fact that little is actually known about them or their role in their respective organizations.

None of that matters, of course, because of an expansive right-wing effort from day one to fluff up the government’s dubious case with endless conspiracy theories and misinformation. In this conspiratorial cosmology, the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is central.

The indictment frames the case as though the SPLC defrauded its donors by using the money it receives “to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”

Immediately thereafter, the indictment clarifies that these leaders and organizers are field sources. In the list of field sources provided in the indictment, only three of them can be described as holding active leadership roles, and two of those were within small, obscure groups.

As we covered first-hand, the 2017 Unite the Right rally, which resulted in Heather Heyer’s murder by James Alex Fields, shocked the conscience of the country and forced the public to confront a quickly growing white supremacist menace in the streets, a moral crisis that was only amplified when President Trump said the following Saturday, “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

Unicorn Riot obtained hundreds of thousands of chat messages from Discord servers (available here) proving the involvement of dozens of organizers and hundreds of participants from many U.S. states. As researcher Michael Hayden noted, supported by the chat logs, “The idea that an informant could have planted the seed for a gathering of white supremacists of that magnitude is completely implausible.” These chats also exposed figures like former State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert and National Guard soldier Brian Brathovd who were actively intertwined in the racist movement.

With the SPLC indictment, the White House and its allies are attempting to rewrite this event as the synthetic machinations of a tiny number of paid informants, much as they tried with the January 6, 2021, right-wing attack on the U.S. Capitol. (See our coverage linked to the fallout here.)

According to Rep. Jamie Raskin, not a single SPLC donor has come forward to claim that the organization defrauded them. Raskin is the leader of Democrats on that committee.

“Everybody can see what’s happening with this outrageous, scandalous prosecution in Alabama and outrageous, scandalous persecution here on Capitol Hill,” Raskin said during the hearing.

Raskin is wrong: it’s clear that not everybody can see what is happening, since many are led by their own biases to accept the deluge of misinformation at face value.

According to November, 2025, polling from YouGov, most U.S. adult citizens who had heard of the civil rights organization had a favorable opinion of it. Among Republicans, roughly 51% of those polled who were familiar with the group and viewed it somewhat, or very unfavorably. For those polled who voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, that number increases to 55%.

In more recent polling conducted by Rasmussen in the aftermath of the indictment, 37% of U.S. voters believe prison time is likely or very likely for the leaders of the SPLC. However, as reporter Will Sommer noted it isn’t always illegal to pay people for information; private investigators and media organizations like TMZ do this regularly.

Those polling numbers bear out in the ability of right-wing media personalities to milk the indictment for content and build a false narrative that so many seem to accept.

SPLC Misinformation on Unite the Right Pumped by Right-Wing Media

The first move to spread misinformation with the indictment occurred almost immediately on April 21, when the president’s former personal lawyer and acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an evening broadcast that reached millions of viewers that the SPLC was funding hate groups and that there was no evidence the group shared any of the information received from paid informants with law enforcement.

“The very entities that this group was raising money to go against are the very entities that they were taking the money in and paying to these entities and these individuals associated with those groups,” Blanche told Ingraham.

The SPLC was quick to refute these claims, specifically citing that they indeed shared information gathered from informants on the risk presented by the Unite the Right rally with the FBI, a pattern aligned with the organization’s use of informants in general. For many years it has been disclosed that SPLC paid people for information about the organizations that it investigated and pursued lawsuits against. The organization also raised concerns on whether this claim was used to get the indictment through the grand jury.

“The SPLC deserves to know whether the same or similar false statements were made in secret to the grand jury,” the organization said in a press release.

Several days after the indictment was publicized, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to fold the misinformation around the indictment into his claim about the 2020 Presidential Election.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD,” the president wrote. “This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

The White House has been trying to dismantle the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue since last April. On Fox News the day after President Trump’s nocturnal Truth Social post, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to the “Charlottesville Hoax” as one of the most egregious smear campaigns against the president since he entered politics, connecting it to the SPLC and Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

“If you recall in 2020, Joe Biden launched his campaign for president on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax,” Leavitt said, talking with Fox News host John Roberts. “It was a total lie.”

Two days after his post, Trump appeared on 60 Minutes to further build on this narrative. (60 Minutes, and CBS News, its parent organization, has been more friendly to the Trump Administration since the Skydance-Paramount merger last year.) 

“Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law [sic], that was a Southern Law deal, too, and it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake,” Trump said. “It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”

The “hoax,” as they have labeled it, originally referred to Biden and others denouncing Trump for having said of the Unite the Right protesters and counter-protesters that there were “fine people on both sides.” For those who dismissed it, the president’s following caveat that he wasn’t talking about the white supremacists cleared everything up.

While Trump did seem to condemn the more hateful elements on the far-right side, the problem with his remark comes from the simple fact that those people made up the entirety of that side, according to Mother Jones Washington D.C. Bureau Chief David Corn in his blog “Our Land.”

“It conveyed a false moral equivalency and provided, to a degree, acceptance of this hatefest,” Corn wrote. “Trump was essentially saying, ‘It wasn’t all bad.’”

Now, with the addition of the indictment, the “hoax” has morphed into what purveyors of conspiracy theories liken to a false flag event perpetrated by a far-left deep state working against the president.

The right-wing desire to portray militant far-right radicals as feds or some kind of false flag operation is not new. In fact, it’s been a constant retort of media figures whenever groups like Patriot Front show up for rallies with uniforms and face masks. 

In her April 24 livestream, right-wing grifter and Trump confidant Laura Loomer – like others in the right-wing media space – went all out on this idea, including an escalation of the narrative, adding that not only was the Unite the Right informant paid by the SPLC but so was everybody else who attended.

“This is further evidence that the 2020 election was completely rigged and completely stolen,” Loomer said. “Because now we’re finding out that all these people that attended this rally for the most part who said they were committing acts of violence, they’re feds, they’re Nazis, they’re actual KKK members who were working with and getting paid by the SPLC.”

Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld in an April 22 broadcast directly pushed the connection between Charlottesville and Biden’s 2020 election, referring to SPLC as a fear machine that manufactured hate groups to ensure future funding, the exact sentiment brought into the House Judiciary Committee by Rep. Jordan on May 20.

“The entire narrative of Biden’s candidacy was based on a hoax created by a left-wing group, then protected by the media, who did not investigate who these people were,” Gutfeld said.

Like others, he implies that the tiki-torch carrying mob was somehow actually connected to SPLC. To support this claim, he said that “the same mob” managed to track down “January 6th grannies” while failing to identify the Charlottesville torch march attendees.

The goal of all of this? According to Gutfeld, it’s so they can label deportation advocates as racist and ensure the next Star Trek has an all-trans cast.

Far-right conspiracist writer Jack Cashill, who writes for nearly 5,000 subscribers on Substack and whose X account is followed by such MAGA luminaries as Michael Flynn, Rob Schneider and Laura Loomer, made a post on his Substack echoing Gutfeld’s ruminations titled “So Did the SPLC Buy the Tiki-Torches for Charlottesville?”

“Joe Biden knowingly launched his 2020 presidential campaign on a hoax … likely knowing that his hoax was based on a deeper hoax, one that the United States Department of Justice exposed on Wednesday.”

The writer builds out the conspiracy, implying that the Charlottesville field source was paid $270,000 in a single, lump sum payment that could have paid for all of the tiki torches used by marchers. The media and the Democrats then smeared Trump by taking his “very fine people” remarks out of context. Biden then used this hoax to coast into the White House, ignoring everything else that was happening in 2020.

Since the indictment’s release, conspiracists like Cashill have run wild with theories buttressed solely by the 14-page indictment.

On May 11, Cashill made another post on his Substack pondering whether the Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed 168 people in 1995, was in fact a failed sting operation conducted by the SPLC. 

In an opinion piece published after the indictment was released, Fox News columnist David Marcus continued to promulgate this hyper-conspiratorial reading of the Charlottesville case, stating as a matter of fact that every neo-Nazi who challenges racial progress is in the pocket of the SPLC.

Like the much more obscure Cashill, Marcus implies that the “very bad people” in Charlottesville that weekend – “the tiki torch-carrying bigots and the SPLC” – were working together, as though every single marcher was receiving paychecks from the civil rights organization.

The “very fine people” hoax, Marcus adds, is “too central to anti-Trump mythology.”

On the April 22 episode of Tim Pool’s TimCast, Pool took a USA Today headline reading “The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades” to be an admission that the SPLC was a federal agency itself, adding to the mix that one of the organization’s shell companies to fund informants was called the Center Investigative Agency, or “CIA.”

“This is why they eliminated Alex Jones and InfoWars,” Pool said, alluding to Jones’ long-standing belief that the Unite the Right rally was made up of federal agents or people on the SPLC dole. “Conspiracy theorists appear to have been correct about most things.”

Back on Capitol Hill

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Republican from Wyoming, appeared on the former Mumford & Sons member Winston Marshall’s right-wing podcast on May 11 to play into the conservative movement’s reaction to the indictment.

“The fraud is that they’re creating the very problem that they’re claiming to solve,” Hageman said. “They’re the ones creating the racism. They’re the ones funding the KKK. They’re the ones funding the Unite the Right rally. They’re the ones that are funding these so-called radicals, but it’s all SPLC.”

Hageman is a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee and was present during the hearing about SPLC on May 20. During her time to question the four witnesses present, she added nothing new to the conversation but directed most of her questions at the Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil, who was more than happy for the opportunity to boost his message to Congress.

In 2020, O’Neil wrote a book on the subject titled “Making Hate Pay,” published through an imprint of the Christian-conservative outlet Post Hill Press. The Hillsdale College graduate’s book is centered on the organization’s scandals surrounding its co-founder, Morris Dees, and “unscrupulous fundraising strategies.”

During the hearing, the most prominent criticism of the SPLC from O’Neil and other witnesses was the organization’s inclusion of “good conservative groups” on its Hate Map, lumping them in with the Klansmen and neo-Nazis they believe the organization has been funding. The result of this kind of association, according to O’Neil, resulted last year in the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk after the SPLC added his organization, Turning Point USA, to its Hate Map.

“There is culpability in knowing that this list, this ideological labeling leads to violence,” Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins told the hearing.

Perkins and the Republican members of the hearing took issue with the FRC’s inclusion on the SPLC’s Hate Map, which the civil rights group justifies with a thorough and well-sourced article on its website. FRC engages in demonizing members of the LGBTQ+ community and frequent Islamophobia. The strategy among these witnesses has been attacking SPLC while portraying groups like FRC as “good conservative groups.”

During a 2025 House Judiciary Committee hearing titled How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars to Advance a Radical Agenda, O’Neil appeared as a witness to give testimony and made false statements about the SPLC indicative of this strategy.

While being questioned by Rep. Jordan, O’Neil incorrectly said the federal government cited the SPLC in an FBI memo that Jordan characterized as having referred to traditional Catholics as extremists. 

The memo, issued by the FBI’s Richmond office in 2023, cited the SPLC only as a source for a list of relevant hate groups included in an appendix, and far from condemning “traditional Catholics” it assesses the possibility that violent extremists could arise from “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology.

The memo even defines what it means by radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology, which is “characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-Immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.”

Radical traditional Catholic ideology does not include every traditional sect of the church as O’Neil and Jordan imply, but rather real groups such as Catholic Apologetics International that perfectly fit the definition provided by the memo.

White Supremacist Organizers Reject Conspiracy Theory on SPLC

Of those who appeared in-person at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, none was more responsible for its organization than white supremacist and Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler. Kessler himself was the event’s key organizer, centering it on the preservation of a Jim Crow-era statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a flash point in a perceived erasure of white culture in America.

In an interview with the Gateway Pundit on April 23, Kessler said he believes the SPLC’s informant was not a major figure in the right-wing movement but rather a random “nobody.” In the interview, he characterized the rally as a “groundbreaking free speech event” because “at the time, no one was standing up for white people in popular culture the way they are now.”

Kessler, who is now suing Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes for insinuating that he was the SPLC informant, downplayed all of the accusations being made by right-wing media against the event, telling the Gateway Pundit that he was not surprised to hear there was some level of infiltration while maintaining the event’s real saboteurs were the Virginia and Charlottesville governments.

One of the rally’s most prominent figures, white supremacist Richard Spencer, has been a vocal critic of the right-wing response to the SPLC indictment. The former movement figurehead characterized the case in an X post as “a convenient conspiracy theory or limited hangout served up by the government to allow conservatives to indulge in victimization.”

In a May 6 episode of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room, Spencer made his feelings on the matter even more clear in conversation with McInnes.

“Conservatives are dumb, and they come to the wrong conclusions,” Spencer said. “And they come to a very self-serving conclusion, which is that anyone who isn’t Daily Wire or Matt Walsh or what have you, anyone who isn’t a movement conservative, is somehow a puppet.”

The comments respond to a sentiment pushed by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who said in one of his Daily Wire broadcasts shortly after the indictment that “we’re going to find out that there are a fair number of alleged conservative figures, the most embarrassing and ridiculous ones, who’ve been getting paid by the forces they pretend to oppose.”

Disclosure: In 2019 Unicorn Riot co-published a story with SPLC and received a grant for $3,000 from the organization to investigate the online footprint around the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand.

Dan Feidt contributed to this report for Unicorn Riot.

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