In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center put a bullseye on our backs.
We at the Population Research Institute were smeared as “radical right extremists” who, for opposing population control and gender ideology and defending the natural family and unborn life, were accused of promoting “harmful ideologies.”
We were lumped together with our friends at the World Congress of Families—guilt by association—and added to their “Hate Map,” alongside neo-Nazi organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.
So it was with great interest that we learned that the SPLC has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Alabama on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
What was the fraud?
According to the indictment, the radical leftist organization was defrauding donors by telling them that it was fighting the Klan when in fact it was funding the Klan.
All told, the SPLC sent over $3 million in donor funds to the KKK, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation and other racial extremists.
It is hard to imagine a more cynical racket. The SPLC was helping to stoke the very hate that it claimed to be fighting. Imagine an insurance salesman who burns down houses at night so he can sell more home insurance the next day.
Remember the infamous 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville that was supposedly organized by “white supremists?” Well, it turns out that one of its leaders was paid $270,000 by SPLC to attend and help fan the flames.
When SPLC donors find out that part of their donation was going to fund the Klan and neo-Nazi groups, I doubt they will be writing any more checks.
It is one thing to exaggerate a problem to entice donors to open their wallets, as some groups do. But it is quite another to actually pay the leaders of extremist groups to create incidents that can then be used to fleece unsuspecting donors.
The SPLC cast a wide net. Anyone who disagreed with any tenet of leftist ideology—and we at PRI disagreed with virtually all of them—would be attacked. And, in our case, these attacks resulted in real hatred being directed towards us in the form of letters and emails.
We fell afoul of the SPLC for our work in defunding the UN Population Fund because of its involvement in China’s one-child regime of forced abortions and sterilizations.
They smeared us again for warning of the coming demographic winter due to falling birth rates, saying that such warnings—based on objective studies of falling birth rates—were “intimately rooted in white supremacy.”
They attacked us also because we defended the right to life of unborn children, labeling us “anti-abortion.”
And because we were defending to right of parents to protect their children from gender ideology and transitioning, we were labeled “anti-LGBT”.
These attacks—and the threats that followed—didn’t deter us from our pro-life, pro-family mission, but they did convince us to double the locks on our office doors and devise a contingency plan in case anyone tried to act on their threats.
SPLC will have its day in court and a jury will decide if the charges in the indictment are true.
But if the charges are true—and the Department of Justice looks to have assembled a compelling body of evidence—the group that attacked anyone and everyone as “hateful” may turn out to be the biggest hate monger of all.
If so, they will have sown the seeds of their own destruction.
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This article was published in the Epoch Times on April 29, 2026.
