Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, on Tuesday issued an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC funneled more than $3 million of donors’ money to members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Movement—groups it simultaneously condemned in fundraising letters and press releases. To move the money, the SPLC allegedly used fictitious business names.

 

For many of us who spent years on the receiving end of the organization’s lists and labels, the indictment itself was no surprise. What surprised us was that it took until 2026 to arrive.

 

I was placed on an SPLC blacklist in October 2016. The document was called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” My name appeared beside Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was.

 

It was published at the peak of a jihadist campaign of terror against the West. The ISIS caliphate still held territory across Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was issuing hit lists of writers and cartoonists in its English-language magazine. In January 2015, two of AQAP’s followers walked into the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered 12 people, some of them cartoonists whose offense was drawing. Ten months later, a coordinated ISIS cell killed 130 at Paris’s Bataclan theater and the cafés around it. Terror attacks in Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and Manchester soon followed.

 

This was the climate in which the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of “anti-Muslim extremism.” The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri shot him, cut his throat, and pinned a five-page letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a fatwa against me. I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy; for writing about Islamist-driven antisemitism and the subversive actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the West; for drawing attention to practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation; for arguing that Muslim women deserve the same protections under the law as other women.

 

The SPLC considers all of this beyond the pale, and accused me of using “the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims.”

 

Thus, an organization founded to combat bigotry chose to place me on a list together with others whose lives were already under threat from the same movements, just for having the audacity to combat Islamist bigotry.

 

Nawaz sued the group, and won. In June 2018, the SPLC settled for $3.4 million and issued a written apology. The field guide vanished from its website. No apology was ever extended to me or to the others unfairly placed on that list.

 

But ruining reputations was, and remains, only one of many offenses.

 

In 2000, the journalist Ken Silverstein published a long investigation in Harper’s Magazine describing the SPLC as the wealthiest civil rights organization in America, one whose fundraising had grown to dwarf its legal work. CharityWatch later gave the organization an F for stockpiling donations it did not spend on its stated mission. Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience. That should have ended it. Instead, the donors kept giving, and the lists kept growing.

 

The donors deserve a closer look than they have ever received. Every moral panic became a fundraising opportunity, and the SPLC’s biggest benefactors arrived not in moments of sober reflection but in moments of maximum political heat. After the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally in August 2017, the organization’s revenue more than doubled—from roughly $50 million the prior fiscal year to $132 million by October 2017. Apple gave $1 million. JPMorgan Chase pledged another $500,000, along with an equivalent gift to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). George and Amal Clooney, through their Clooney Foundation for Justice, gave $1 million and urged others to follow. Three years later, after the death of George Floyd, another donation cycle opened, this time with even more corporate enthusiasm. OpenAI, Google, and a long roster of Fortune 100 companies added the SPLC to their giving portfolios. We now know, if the indictment is proved, where some of that money went: to the leaders and organizers of the very Klan and neo-Nazi groups the SPLC’s fundraising materials say it exists to fight.

 

The scandal raises urgent questions about the integrity of the SPLC’s broader work, particularly its influential Hate Map, which began as a tool for tracking armed militias and skinhead gangs. Over time, it expanded to include mainstream conservative and religious organizations such as the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, and the Center for Immigration Studies. In August 2012, a man named Floyd Lee Corkins walked into the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C., carrying a gun. A security guard named Leo Johnson stopped him and was shot in the process. Corkins told the FBI he chose his target using the SPLC’s map. The organization never acknowledged what its list had set in motion.

 

To understand how a once-respected civil rights law firm became what it is now, it helps to step back from the SPLC itself and look at a pattern. In 1984, a former KGB operative named Yuri Bezmenov described what he called the four stages of ideological subversion: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. In the first stage, institutions—schools, media, churches, courts, civic associations—are compromised from within by people who adopt their language while inverting their purpose. New leaders begin to steer them off course (destabilization), and fight with the old guard to assert control (crisis). By the normalization phase, the inverted institution has become the enforcer of the new orthodoxy, and most observers can no longer remember what it was originally for.

 

I believe this is the only honest frame for what happened to the SPLC. The organization was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

 

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

 

Subversion is real. Bezmenov was describing something we can now see with our own eyes. The SPLC’s case shows that the process unfolds not only through external conquest but through internal corruption. Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment. The subversion was complete.

 

Now the SPLC has become the first major American advocacy organization to be indicted for it. What makes this case special is that, for the first time, we have evidence—bank records, fake company names, field-source receipts—to show that the inversion was operational. And if it was operational inside the SPLC, there is no reason to assume the deception stopped at the SPLC’s doors. Every major civic institution that traded its founding mission for the prestige of enforcing multiculturalist orthodoxy deserves the same scrutiny, the same audit and, when warranted, the same indictment.

 

The SPLC’s interim chief executive, Bryan Fair, claims the allegations are politically motivated and vows to defend the organization vigorously. He is entitled to his day in court, which is more than the SPLC ever offered the people it destroyed. Although an indictment is not a conviction, and the charges may not survive a jury, the institution itself has already been tried—and found wanting—by a long public reckoning conducted over many years by former employees, liberal journalists, and charity watchdogs, and by those who watched the SPLC look the other way when antisemitism surfaced within the movements it claimed to oppose.

 

There is a lesson here for donors and journalists alike. Those who claim the loudest to fight hatred deserve scrutiny proportional to their claims. America’s self-appointed authority on hatred will now have to explain its own. I have been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

 

 

This won't stop left wingers from lying that the SPLC only paid for information.