When Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), came to speak at Claremont McKenna College in the 1990s, I was a student there. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember the gun sticking out of his sports coat. It was a .357, something Clint Eastwood would carry in Dirty Harry. We had heard that this was the man who had taken on the KKK in the heart of Alabama, and the gun made the legend real.

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a sweeping federal indictment against the SPLC, accusing it of funding the very terror groups it claimed to be fighting.

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. It was not the Department of Justice, not a political appointee, not a press conference, but a grand jury of American citizens that sat in judgment.

According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the United Klans of America, the Aryan-Nation-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and other white supremacist organizations. These are the very same groups the SPLC was raising hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy. The money was allegedly funneled through shell companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” and loaded onto prepaid cards to conceal its source from the financial institutions the organization used.

One recipient, identified in the indictment only as F-37, was a member of the online leadership group that organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. On August 12 of that year, a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Heather Heyer, 32 years old, was killed. Dozens more were injured. Fields is now serving life in prison. F-37 helped put that rally together. He made racist postings. He coordinated transportation for attendees. He did all of this, according to the indictment, at the direction of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And from 2015 to 2023, the SPLC paid him roughly $270,000, all while publicly condemning the very event he helped organize.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

FBI Director Kash Patel put it simply: “The money never lies, and they got caught.”

Nothing has been proven yet. The SPLC will have its day in court. Its interim CEO has called the charges false and politically motivated. The organization says the payments were part of a confidential informant program designed to gather intelligence on violent groups, and that the program’s secrecy was necessary to protect those informants. Those are defenses a jury will evaluate.

But what strikes me most about this indictment is not the fraud itself. It is the why behind it. Why would an organization founded to fight racism need to pump up racism? Why manufacture the very evil you claim to oppose?

The answer is white guilt. And to understand it, you have to understand what white guilt actually is.

White guilt is not a feeling. Most people treat it as one, rejecting it with some variation of “I never owned slaves.” Both responses describe an emotion. Both miss the mechanism entirely. You cannot feel actual guilt for sins you did not commit.

White guilt is instead the cultural and institutional atmosphere that Americans live inside, whether they feel it or not. It is the language permitted in public life and the language that ends careers. It is the criteria by which institutions measure their own virtue rather than their actual outcomes. It is the moral authority that determines whether you are on the “right side of history” or stand condemned as a racist.

My father, Shelby Steele, has spent 40 years on this question. To paraphrase him, white guilt, at its core, is the vacuum of moral authority that was created when America finally confessed to four centuries of racial evils in the 1960s. That confession ended legal discrimination. But it also left whites accused of racism, whether they had personally discriminated or simply lived in a nation that had. Even though many whites had bravely confronted these racial evils, including members of my own family, the end result was a collective loss of moral authority. They were stripped of their innocence, the very innocence that would become the most coveted thing in American institutional life to this day.

This was not innocence in the legal sense, but moral innocence, the status of being on the right side of the nation’s deepest wound. As my father wrote in his 1988 Harper’s essay, “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” — “Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power. Now to be innocent, someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other’s backs.”

The driving force in American society became not true compassion for the oppressed, but the desperate need to prove that you are not the oppressor. Whoever can most credibly claim innocence of the nation’s racial sins, or claim to represent those who suffered, gains the moral authority that translates into institutional power, political influence, and cultural dominance. Innocence became the currency. The SPLC understood this better than almost anyone.

The SPLC did not begin as the institution now facing these charges. Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dees and Joe Levin, with civil rights legend Julian Bond as its first president, the SPLC took on genuine fights. Growing up, my parents told me stories over the dinner table about how the organization integrated state troopers, challenged unfair electoral districts, and sued the Klan after violent attacks. That early work, using the law to make the promises of equality real, especially in the heart of the Deep South, is why I was excited to meet Dees. It makes what followed all the more devastating.

Rather than meet the post-1960s reckoning through color-blind standards, genuine accountability, and the equal application of American principles, many whites chose the easier path: the performance of perpetual atonement. Instead of investing in the genuine development of black Americans, they became professional fighters against racism, the only remaining way to purchase the innocence that the vacuum of moral authority had taken from them.

From suing real Klan violence, the SPLC institutionalized white guilt. It built a vast donor base by mapping extremists and labeling an ever-growing list of dissenters as “hate” that must be fought. Conservatives like Charlie Kirk, who never committed violence, found themselves listed alongside actual white supremacists. Far from the days of fighting the Klan, the SPLC was now slaying windmills. The mission expanded not because the threat grew, but because the machine required an enemy. The emergency could not be allowed to end.

Perhaps we should have seen this corruption earlier in 2019 when Morris Dees himself was fired. The official reason was unspecified misconduct. Staff members sent letters to management describing “decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment” inside the organization, founded to fight those exact things. One letter was signed before Dees’s firing was announced; a second, sent after the firing, accused leadership of being “complicit in” decades of such misconduct and demanded an investigation into an alleged cover-up. An outside review was commissioned, but its conclusions were never made public.

The grift formula, once you see it, is simple. You inflate the threat, sound the alarm, position yourself as the brave slayer of hate, and collect hundreds of millions from donors desperate to feel they are on the right side of history. The donor gets innocence. The corporation gets its ESG credential. The foundation gets its social justice bona fides. And the SPLC gets paid.

Real black communities bear the cost of this bargain. Real black families in real cities, especially those in the underclass, live with the consequences of institutions more interested in the performance of anti-racism than in the far more difficult and unglamorous work of developing individuals into productive members of society. The SPLC raised hundreds of millions in the name of protecting the vulnerable. The real product here was donor innocence.

If these charges hold, this is not merely fraud. It is white guilt at its most predatory.

The vacuum of moral authority that the civil rights reckoning created was supposed to produce genuine accountability, genuine repair, genuine progress. Many Americans truly sought that. They were eventually outmaneuvered by those who saw white guilt not as a wound to be healed but as a resource to be mined. And if the grand jury’s indictment is proven true, that industry did not just fail to reduce racism. It paid racists to keep racism alive, because alive racism was worth more to the machine than a color-blind society could ever be.

But this false innocence is not a simple lie. A lie knows itself to be false. False innocence is a moral credential claimed without moral action. It is innocence purchased through performance rather than earned through character. It is the DEI certificate that substitutes for actually caring about black lives. The hate list that substitutes for actually reducing hate.

This false innocence is more than a personal corruption or failing. It has become the air that we breathe. The man who says he feels no white guilt may be telling the truth about his feelings. But ask him if he would say, openly and without hesitation, everything he actually believes about race in America. In certain rooms, in certain institutions, around certain people, he already knows the answer. The cost is real. He is living inside the world of white guilt, whether he feels it or not. The machine does not require his confession. It requires only his silence.

This is what makes false innocence genuinely evil in the precise sense. It has corrupted the conditions under which honest people can speak honestly. It has made false virtue more valuable than the actual remedies. It has turned moral authority into a commodity that the loudest performers collect and the most honest people forfeit. And when an organization like the SPLC allegedly takes that logic to its endpoint by manufacturing the very hatred it claims to fight, because hatred is the raw material the innocence machine runs on, you are looking at the very heart of the white guilt machine.

I still think about Morris Dees and his gun at Claremont McKenna. If the indictment’s allegations are proven, the gun was the whole point. The prop that made the performance credible. The danger that made the donors open their wallets. The legend that kept the white guilt machine running. The windmills had to keep turning. So someone had to be paid to tilt at them.

The SPLC’s story is not an outlier. It is white guilt in America, followed to its logical conclusion.

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Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker. He writes at Man of Steele on Substack.

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The SPLC Institutionalizes White Guilt By Manufacturing The Very Hatred It Claims To Fight