Bryan Fair runs the Southern Poverty Law Center, and on Tuesday he sat in front of the House Judiciary Committee and could not answer a simple question. Representative Chip Roy asked how many of the roughly 1,500 groups on the SPLC’s hate map are extremist Islamic organizations. Fair would not give a number, and said the group does not target anyone over religion. Representative Lance Gooden pressed the same gap from the other side: Turning Point USA and the Family Research Council sit on the map, and antifa and the pro-abortion group that has been firebombing churches do not.

The man whose organization spent decades deciding who counts as a hater could not defend the list out loud. And he sat there the same week his own group faces a federal indictment for allegedly paying the actual haters.

A civil-rights group accused of funding the Klan

A federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023 the group secretly moved more than $3 million in donor money to people tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, a Unite the Right organizer, and the American Nazi Party. To hide the payments, the indictment says, the SPLC ran the money through fake companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” One source drew more than a million dollars. The man who helped organize the 2017 Charlottesville rally drew more than $270,000. Prosecutors added an allegation this month that some of the donor money bought materials for cross burnings and Klan robes.

These are allegations. The SPLC denies them, has moved to dismiss, and goes to trial in October. The pattern around the charge does not need a verdict.

The map was the product

The SPLC sells a map. Its hate map and its annual “Year in Hate” report, which this week counts 1,263 groups, are the product that made the group rich. Its filings reported $786.7 million in net assets, much of it parked offshore in Cayman Islands accounts. A former staffer who quit in 2019 called it a “highly profitable scam” that was “ripping off donors.” The names on the map are not all Klansmen. They include Turning Point USA, the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, and pro-life Catholics.

The list does not just miss; it hits the wrong people, and the SPLC has paid for it. In 2016 it listed Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim reformer who built his career fighting Islamist extremism, in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” Nawaz sued. The SPLC paid him $3.375 million and apologized in writing: “we were simply wrong.”

The designation fed real institutions. The FBI’s later-withdrawn memo targeting traditionalist Catholics in Richmond relied in part on SPLC material. The bureau’s director severed its ties last fall and called the group a “partisan smear machine.”

The map has a body count

A target list aimed at the right has twice become the map a gunman carried.

In 2012 Floyd Corkins walked into the Family Research Council with a gun and a bag of ammunition. He told the FBI he found his target on the SPLC’s website, which lists “anti-gay groups.” He pleaded guilty to an act of terrorism, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years. The Family Research Council is still on the map.

In 2017 James Hodgkinson opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball practice and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise. Hodgkinson had liked the SPLC on Facebook, next to the other groups that fed his politics. That is association, not a hate-map trail like the one Corkins left. He is still the second shooter in a decade with the SPLC in his history.

The SPLC also put Turning Point USA in its hate report, and after founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, that listing drew fresh scrutiny. The accused killer acted alone, by the charging documents. The map did not pull the trigger, but it keeps aiming at the same people.

The people burning churches never made the list

The groups that have actually been attacking churches are missing from Fair’s map. Jane’s Revenge claimed strikes on pregnancy centers and churches after the 2022 leak of the Dobbs abortion ruling, part of more than 100 such attacks that trackers have logged and that produced four convictions in a federal civil-rights conspiracy. Antifa is not on the map. The Islamic extremist groups Chip Roy asked about are not on it either.

Fair’s reply was that the SPLC does not judge groups by religion. The SPLC also paid $3.375 million for calling a Muslim reformer an anti-Muslim extremist, and now its president cannot find one real Islamist on a list of 1,500 names. It sees extremists where they are not and misses them where they are, because the map measures politics, not hate.

The press printed the map. Now it defends the mapmaker.

For years the national press treated the hate map as data. NPR filed the indictment under the heading that “the center has been targeted by Republicans” and folded it into worries about a weaponized Justice Department. The same outlets that printed the map as gospel now have more to say about a process foul, that the Justice Department emailed reporters an unsigned draft of the superseding indictment and the SPLC wants the prosecutors sanctioned, than about the allegation that a civil-rights group bought Klan robes with donor money. When the watchdog becomes the story, the watchdogs look away.

For thirty years the SPLC sold its map as a public service and built a $786 million fortune doing it. The checks, the indictment says, went to the Klan. And when the man who runs it sat in front of Congress, he could not say why the people burning churches never made the list. Strip the branding, and what is left is a racket with three-quarters of a billion dollars in the bank and a target list.