You didn’t need a legal case to know that the Southern Poverty Law Center, to stay alive, badly needs the perils it claims to deplore. The federal indictment, which charges the nonprofit with wire fraud, false statements and conspiracy to conceal money laundering, alleges that the Montgomery, Ala.-based group paid hefty sums to “informants” supposedly operating inside extremist groups. Millions of dollars allegedly went to these “field sources”—Klan members, neo-Nazis—even as the SPLC labeled the same organizations dangerous extremists on its website.

One of the indictment’s claims, if borne out, so perfectly captures the cynicism of radical politics in the 2020s that you’d call it far-fetched if you read it in a novel by Christopher Buckley. The indictment alleges that one source “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC.” This person, say prosecutors, “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” Between 2015 and 2023, the nonprofit paid this informant $270,000.

The SPLC’s lack of compunction amazes, but its intrigues flow from the nature of the activist nonprofit enterprise. Like almost all advocacy organizations, the SPLC faces the temptation to exaggerate the urgency of its mission and the extent of its accomplishments. Donors respond to big claims and menacing specters. Hence the SPLC’s desperate effort to defame people and organizations on the political right—Charles Murray, Prager University—as promoters of ” hate” and “extremism.” The war for America’s soul may go well or poorly, but the money’s got to keep flowing.

Which is why that Unite the Right rally was the best thing ever to happen to the SPLC. A gathering of, at most, 500 young nincompoops high on racist humbug metamorphosed, in the minds of anxious Americans—and with the media’s help—into a mass movement of brownshirts ready to seize the country’s institutions and overthrow its government. Donations to the nonprofit ballooned in the year after the rally.

The SPLC didn’t create the Charlottesville rally, though its machinations probably helped at the margins. The import of the episode, though, lies in the fact that the nonprofit’s leaders plainly felt it had an interest in making the threat of white racial bigotry appear to hold more sway over American life than it does. “Interest” in the crassest, monetary sense.

The modern liberal outlook, to borrow the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue’s metaphor, must have dragons to slay. When the dragons diminish in size or die out altogether, the civic-minded liberal naturally wants to invent bigger ones, if only to have things to worry about. As with every such mental pathology, this one offers financial rewards to determined exploiters.

The late Jesse Jackson based a lucrative career on the fiction that America in the 1980s and ’90s still excluded black Americans from opportunity in the way the South had under Jim Crow. The static

history of racist America he helped to propagate allowed Jackson, in the 2000s and 2010s, to threaten large companies with boycotts on the grounds that they hadn’t done enough to mitigate racism. His attacks would conveniently cease when the companies agreed to donate to Jackson’s political operation.

Al Sharpton followed the same path. Only Mr. Sharpton, unapologetic perpetrator of the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax, spun the perception of perennial racism into a decadeslong media career. Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and other “antiracist” theorizers attained celebrity status by persuading millions of well-meaning people to fear and loathe nonexistent monsters.

The District of Columbia teems with nonprofits dedicated to the proposition that one thing or another menaces the citizenry. Human Rights Campaign, to take one example, regularly informs its followers and donors that gay, “trans” and “gender-expansive” Americans suffer from routine violence and bigotry at the hands of their countrymen. In 2025, HRC brought in $46 million in contributions.

Climate catastrophism has grown into a global grift, with poor countries demanding billions in “reparations” from nations with functioning markets, but consider climate alarmism’s role in American politics. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and related government bodies have doled out grants to climate- related nonprofits that return the favor by churning out apocalyptic reports about an always-imminent climate crisis. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act supersized that effort. In 2023, the Biden administration came up with what it called the American Climate Corps, to “mobilize the next generation of clean energy, conservation and resilience workers”: that is, to send millions of public dollars sluicing through climate nonprofits around the country.

To its credit, the Trump administration canceled the program, but similar funding streams proliferate across federal and state agencies. A cynical observer might feel inclined to use the word “racket”: Environmental agencies fund activist groups, which make apocalyptic claims more credible, thus enabling the agencies to demand more funding and regulatory authority from government budgetwriters. Now that’s what I call sustainability.