...here's an excerpt from the linked article...
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The rise of the so-called alt-right, and a deadly rally organized by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, showed that racist extremism remained a tangible threat. But old concerns within the S.P.L.C. came to the fore again in 2019, when Mr. Dees was fired, and a number of top executives quit, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and racial discrimination within the organization. Mr. Dees denied wrongdoing, but acknowledged that a female employee had filed a complaint against him in 2017, stating that his actions had made her feel uncomfortable.
Conservatives took notice. For years they had bristled as the S.P.L.C. put groups that opposed L.G.B.T.Q. rights and immigration on its hate list. The Center for Immigration Studies earned a spot, the S.P.L.C. argued, as a result of its “repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience.”
In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies sued Richard Cohen, then the president of the S.P.L.C., in federal court, saying that the organization had violated civil racketeering statutes in trying to “destroy C.I.S. by ruining it financially.” The lawsuit was rejectedby the courts.
That same year, Senator Tom Cotton wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, asking the agency to consider revoking the law center’s nonprofit status.
“Recent news reports have confirmed the long-established fact that the S.P.L.C. regularly engages in defamation of its political opponents,” Mr. Cotton wrote. “In fact, the S.P.L.C’s defining characteristic is to fund-raise off of defamation.”
The effort was unsuccessful, but the pressure from Republicans has only ramped up since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. In October, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced that the bureau would no longer cooperate with the S.P.L.C., calling it a “partisan smear machine.”
That same month, Elon Musk posted on social media that the group was “guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk,” the co-founder of Turning Point USA who had been killed a month earlier. Mr. Musk cited another post that noted that Mr. Kirk had recently been featured in the S.P.L.C.’s Hatewatch newsletter.
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In December, a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House held a hearing on the group. The chair, Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, opened it by calling the S.P.L.C. “one of the most politically motivated, financially lucrative and ideologically extreme nonprofits in America,” and argued that it had been allowed to “wield extraordinary influence over federal civil rights policy, federal law enforcement training and the private sector mechanisms that increasingly dictate who is permitted to participate in civic life.”
But the Trump era appears to have been good for the group’s fund-raising. The S.P.L.C.’s latest federal tax documents on file with the government show that it had total assets of more than $822 million at the end of 2024 — more than double its total assets in 2016, the year of Mr. Trump’s first election.
In his news conference this week, Mr. Blanche said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.
But there was little in the indictment that showed that the group had meant to help the extremist groups. In a video message just before the indictment was announced, Bryan Fair, interim president and chief executive of the S.P.L.C., said the group no longer used informants, but began working with them in the “shadow of the height of the civil rights movement,” when extremist violence was common.
“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” he said.
In a statement on Wednesday, Marc Morial, president and chief executive of the National Urban League, argued that the indictment was about “intimidation,” not accountability.
“It is about silencing organizations that have spent decades confronting hate, protecting vulnerable communities and advancing justice under the law,” he said.
A number of liberal commentators also noted this week that the use of informants was a common practice in the 1960s and 1970s. The strategy was perhaps most famously used by the F.B.I. – to infiltrate civil rights and other activist groups.
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Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/us/southern-poverty-law-center-doj.html