Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz
I have given the Southern Poverty Law Center $340 a year since 2014.
That is $3,400. Ten years. Automatic withdrawal. I set it and forgot it, the way you forget a subscription to a meditation app you stopped using in February.
I did not donate to fight hate. I donated to stop thinking about hate. Those are different products. The SPLC sold the second one.
I found out last Monday. Eleven federal counts. Wire fraud. Bank fraud. Money laundering. The indictment is 47 pages. I read every one. I read them the way you read a biopsy result when the doctor's voice changes mid-sentence.
Here is what my $340 a year bought:
The SPLC paid informants inside the Ku Klux Klan. They paid informants inside the neo-Nazi National Alliance. They did this for forty years. They called them "the Fs." Field sources. Internal codename. It sounds like a file folder designation because it was a file folder designation.
One informant received over one million dollars between 2014 and 2023.
Let me say that differently. In the same calendar years I was setting up my automatic donation to fight white supremacy, the Southern Poverty Law Center was cutting checks to a man inside the National Alliance. He was being paid more per year than I make. He was inside a neo-Nazi organization. My money and his money came from the same account.
I paid them to fight the people they were paying. Somewhere in Montgomery, a line item balanced perfectly.
They sent me a thank-you card. It is still on my refrigerator. It has a stock photo of diverse children holding hands and it says "Because of you, hate has no safe harbor." It is next to my daughter's finger painting of a horse and a Thai takeout menu from a place that closed during COVID. The card cost eleven cents to print. The informant inside the National Alliance cost a hundred and eleven thousand dollars a year. Same fund.
The shell accounts were named "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse." I need you to sit with "Rare Books Warehouse." Someone at the SPLC — someone with a title and a parking space and a benefits package funded by people like me — sat in a conference room and said "What should we name the shell company we use to pay neo-Nazis?" and someone else said "Rare Books Warehouse" and everyone in the room nodded. There were blueberry muffins. There is always blueberry muffins. Somewhere in that conference room there was a whiteboard that said "Q3 FIELD SOURCE DISBURSEMENT" in blue dry-erase marker, and under it "Fox Photography" with a checkmark next to it. I know this because I know how conference rooms work. The muffins are always blueberry.
Another informant was paid $270,000. He was in the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" planning chat. He was in the chat where they planned the rally where Heather Heyer was murdered. The SPLC knew he was in the chat. The SPLC was paying him to be in the chat.
After Charlottesville, the SPLC sent me a fundraising email. The subject line said "This Is Why We Fight." I screenshotted it and posted it to Instagram with a black square. Seven people liked it. One of them was my therapist.
I opened the email. It said the events in Charlottesville proved why the SPLC's work was more important than ever. It had a red donate button. I clicked the red donate button. I felt like I was doing something.
I was doing something. I was replenishing the fund that paid the man who sat in the chat where they planned Charlottesville.
The fundraising email did not mention the informant. The fundraising email did not mention "Fox Photography." The fundraising email did not mention that the SPLC had a man inside the planning and chose to use him as an intelligence asset rather than, say, calling the police. The fundraising email said "fighting hate requires resources." I provided resources. The resources fought hate by funding it.
My donation subsidized both sides of the same transaction. I was the float.
I put the bumper sticker on my car. The one that said HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. I put it on a 2016 Subaru Outback, Wilderness Green Metallic, which is the most SPLC-donor car in the history of motor vehicles. Hate had no home in my car. Hate had a condo in Montgomery, Alabama, a shell account called Fox Photography, and a direct deposit schedule.
My partner asked me once — this was 2018 — "Do you actually know what they do with the money?"
I said "They fight hate."
She said "How?"
I said "They track hate groups and take them to court."
She said "Have they taken anyone to court recently?"
I changed the subject. I changed the subject the way you change the subject when you realize the answer is no but the bumper sticker is already on the car and you used it as your profile picture on two platforms.
My tax preparer asked about it. April 2019. She said "Oh, the SPLC, good for you." I got thirty-seven dollars back on my taxes. The informant inside the National Alliance got a hundred and eleven thousand. We both filed in April. Mine went to H&R Block. His went through Fox Photography. The IRS treated both of us like philanthropists.
The SPLC's endowment is $732 million. I need you to hold that number. Seven hundred and thirty-two million dollars. In an endowment. For a nonprofit that fights hate. That is more money than the GDP of ten sovereign nations. Hate is, apparently, a growth industry. The SPLC found the arbitrage: you can monetize both the existence of hate and the appearance of fighting it simultaneously if your donors never check the ledger.
I never checked the ledger.
Morris Dees — the founder — was fired in 2019. Sexual harassment. Internal complaints going back decades. Two dozen employees signed a letter. The letter said the SPLC had a "systemic culture of racism and sexism." Inside the organization that defines racism and sexism for the rest of America. They hired a new president. She released a statement about "transformative accountability." The informant payments continued.
They settled a defamation lawsuit with Maajid Nawaz for $3.375 million. They had labeled him an "anti-Muslim extremist." He is a Muslim. He is a Muslim who runs a counter-extremism think tank. The SPLC put him on the same list as the Klan. Then they sent me a fundraising email about the dangers of the Klan.
The hate map. I should talk about the hate map.
The SPLC publishes a hate map. It is the most cited source on extremism in America. It labeled the Ku Klux Klan a hate group. Correct. It labeled the National Alliance a hate group. Correct. It also labeled Moms for Liberty a hate group. It labeled Turning Point USA a hate group. It put parents who yell at school board meetings in the same taxonomic category as organizations that advocate for racial genocide.
When you label everything hate, hate means nothing. When hate means nothing, the actual Nazis become noise. When the actual Nazis become noise, you need informants to find them. When you need informants, you pay them. When you pay them, you fund the thing you said you were fighting. When you fund the thing you said you were fighting, you send a fundraising email about it.
Forty years of this. The org chart had a department for it.
The FBI severed its relationship with the SPLC. Kash Patel called them a "partisan smear machine." I am not in the habit of agreeing with Kash Patel. But when the FBI says your informant program is too compromised for the FBI — the FBI, whose own informant programs are legendarily compromised — you have achieved a kind of operational distinction.
I told my friends to donate. I told my mother to donate. For Christmas 2017, I gave my college roommate Mark a gift membership. Forty dollars. I told him it was the gift that fights back. Mark put it in his holiday letter. "Peter got me an SPLC gift membership!" Exclamation point. He was proud. I was proud. The neo-Nazi was solvent.
It was the gift that fights back by sending forty dollars to an organization that was simultaneously paying a man inside a neo-Nazi cell and labeling PTA parents as equivalent threats.
The donation was a personality. The personality you purchase when you want credit for caring without the inconvenience of doing anything.
I put it in my Instagram bio for two years. "SPLC donor." Next to a sunflower emoji and a link to my Goodreads. I said it at dinner parties. I said it the way people say they drive a Prius.
At Thanksgiving, my uncle — the one who watches Fox News and forwards emails about immigrants — saw my t-shirt. The one that said TEACHING TOLERANCE. He said "What's that about?" I gave him the full pitch. He laughed for forty-five seconds. He said "You're paying them to do WHAT?" He was closer to the truth than I was and he'd never read a single page of anything.
The tolerance was a shell company called Fox Photography. The teaching was a filing cabinet in Montgomery with a folder labeled "F" containing pay stubs for a man who attended cross burnings on company time.
I looked at my bank statement after I read the indictment.
I have fourteen recurring donations.
The SPLC is one. The ACLU gets $25 a month. I do not know the ACLU's endowment. I have never looked. I assume they fight for civil liberties the way I assumed the SPLC fought hate. I assume this the way you assume the pilot has a license.
The Sierra Club gets $15 a month. I don't know what the Sierra Club does with $15 a month. I have a Sierra Club tote bag. I use it to carry groceries from a store that sells water in single-use plastic bottles. The tote bag has a tree on it.
Doctors Without Borders. $20 a month. I set it up in 2016 after seeing a photograph of a child in Aleppo. I cried. I clicked a button. I have not thought about Aleppo since 2017. The $20 continued. That is the product. Not the doctoring. Not the borders. The not-thinking-about-it-after-2017.
I have seven tote bags from organizations whose executive directors I cannot name. I have a closet that functions as a moral resume. Every bag is a receipt for a feeling I had once and never verified.
The SPLC is the one that got caught. Fourteen recurring donations and the SPLC is the only one where I know what happened to the money, and what happened to the money is neo-Nazis. I don't know what happened to the other thirteen. I subscribe to being a good person the way I subscribe to streaming services. Monthly. Automatically. I audit neither. The difference is that when Netflix cancels a show, no one ends up in a planning chat for a rally where someone dies.
I want to walk you through the accounting one more time.
My automatic donation: $340 per year. Their informant payments: $3 million over the same period. Their endowment: $732 million. Their settlement to the man they falsely labeled an extremist: $3.375 million. Morris Dees's severance: undisclosed. The number of active hate groups they tracked in 2024: 595. The number of those groups that contained SPLC informants: classified, but the indictment says at least two. The number of hate groups that would have existed without SPLC funding: also classified, and I think about that every day. One thank-you card on the refrigerator. Thirteen other recurring donations I will not look into because looking into one was enough.
The hat trick is that I can't stop donating. Not because I believe. I stopped believing when I read page 23 of the indictment, the paragraph about the shell accounts, the one that said "Rare Books Warehouse." I stopped believing in the middle of a sentence. But the automatic withdrawal is a metaphor and the metaphor is my entire political identity. If I cancel, I have to explain to myself what I was doing for ten years. If I keep paying, I don't. If I cancel all fourteen, I have to become a person who does things instead of a person who pays for things. I have never been that person. The SPLC knew I would never be that person. That is why the product worked.
I tried to cancel. The website has a page called "Manage Your Giving." It has an "Increase Your Gift" button. It does not have a cancel button. There is a phone number. The phone number goes to a voicemail that says "We are experiencing higher than normal call volume due to recent media coverage." Eleven federal counts. "Recent media coverage."
You understand. You understand because you have fourteen recurring donations too. Or seven. Or three. You understand because you have a tote bag from an organization you believe in the same way I believed in the SPLC — which is to say automatically, monthly, without verification, and with a bumper sticker. The right side is a product. The SPLC sold it for $732 million. I bought it for $340 a year. The spread between those two numbers is where the informants live. But the informants are not the point. The point is that I would have paid the $340 even if I'd known. Especially if I'd known. Because the $340 was never about the informants or the hate or the map or the court cases. The $340 was about the feeling. The feeling was the product. The SPLC just got caught selling it with neo-Nazis in the supply chain.
I am the donor. I am the fundraising deck. I am the red button that says DONATE NOW. I am the Charlottesville email. I am the bumper sticker. I am the black square on Instagram. I am the tote bag. I am the closet full of moral resumes. I am every person who ever said "I gave to the SPLC" and felt the warm feeling and never once asked what the money actually did. I am every person who gives to anything and feels the warm feeling and never once asks.
Here is what the money actually did.
$340 a year. Ten years. One neo-Nazi. One million dollars. One shell company named after a camera store that does not exist. One thank-you card on the refrigerator next to a horse that my daughter painted in 2019. Thirteen other donations I will never audit.
I am still on automatic withdrawal.
The next charge is June 1st.
