The SPLC Is Absolutely Corrupt. The Democrat Response Is: Shut Up

While it is an honor to testify before Congress, it can also be frustrating. House members will ask you yes-or-no questions, without allowing you to elaborate. They want to prove their own points, and sometimes they prevent you from making yours.

I testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Wednesday, and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked me if I was familiar with the name Michael Donald.

I knew the exact point he was going to make — that when a Ku Klux Klan group horrifically lynched Michael Donald in 1981, the SPLC represented Donald’s bereaved mother, Beulah Mae, and sued that Klan group into bankruptcy.

It’s one of the SPLC’s favorite stories, and it is indeed noble — the first half, anyway.

But that’s not the whole story, and when I tried to tell the full story, Hank Johnson cut me off.

That’s his prerogative — he got five minutes to question me, and it is not my place as a witness to interrupt him.

The story matters because the SPLC built its massive fundraising engine off the clout it earned by rightly suing chapters of America’s most notorious hate group into bankruptcy. Today, the SPLC has weaponized its reputation. It publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters — a map the SPLC says reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

This “hate map” kills two birds with one stone: it demonizes conservatives who oppose the SPLC’s agenda, and it also exaggerates the amount of hate in America, which helps the SPLC fundraise off supposedly combating this “hate.”

A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on fraud charges based on the claim that the SPLC was actually propping up Klan groups by directing money to members. The SPLC did not deny the payments, but said it was paying “informants” to prevent violent threats before they happen. The indictment suggests, however, that these “informants” weren’t just tipping off the SPLC but acting on the SPLC’s direction in ways that strengthened the groups.

Hank Johnson wanted to bring up the Michael Donald case to highlight the SPLC’s noble history and to suggest the indictment puts the Trump administration on the side of “hate.”

THE REST OF THE STORY

I’m glad Hank Johnson brought up Michael Donald. A Klan group l*nched Donald in 1981, and the SPLC rightly represented his bereaved mother in court. But that’s not the whole story…

The story’s second half shows SPLC corruption.https://t.co/bpMUAIRrFi pic.twitter.com/A3v8vl8nRD

— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 21, 2026

As I wrote in my first book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” (first published in 2020 and updated this month), the Michael Donald case highlights some of the very corruption that would ultimately lead the SPLC to become a far-left smear factory.

Contrary to popular belief, the SPLC wasn’t founded during the civil rights movement, but afterward. Also, contrary to popular belief, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin didn’t found the SPLC to go after the Klan or white supremacy — they founded it as a public-interest law firm to represent poor people in the South.

In fact, when Dees redirected the SPLC’s efforts to focus almost entirely on opposing the Klan, the legal team quit en masse in 1985. SPLC lawyers said suing the Klan into bankruptcy wasn’t the SPLC’s original mission, that it was too easy — they compared it to “shooting fish in a barrel” — and that Dees prioritized this because he focused on fundraising more than helping the less fortunate.

In 1987, a jury held the United Klans of America liable for Michael Donald’s death and ordered the group to pay $7 million in restitution to Beulah Mae Donald, in a clear victory for justice.

Yet this wasn’t the 1920s Klan or the 1950s Klan. By the 1980s, anti-black racism had significantly declined, and the United Klans of America had little in the way of assets. The group owned a building and sold it for a little over $50,000.

Beulah Mae Donald received that money, but what did she do with it? She gave $37,500 to the SPLC, which had given her a loan for her home. Meanwhile, the SPLC went to its donors and raked in millions.

Beulah Mae Donald tried to make a documentary about her story, but Morris Dees edged her out.

Don’t get me wrong: representing Beulah Mae Donald was one of the high-water marks of the SPLC’s storied career. But Dees’s focus on fundraising and his desire for the spotlight taints even this noblest of SPLC stories.

I tried to sum up this story in a few words while responding to the honorable representative from Georgia, but Hank Johnson cut me off.

The real truth about Beulah Mae Donald is just too inconvenient for his narrative — just like the full truth about the SPLC’s corrupt demonization of conservatives is inconvenient for Democrats beclowning themselves by trying to defend it.

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Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”