For years, when a Maine politician wanted to lend borrowed credibility to a partisan smear, or when a Bangor Daily News reporter wanted an authoritative-sounding quote to confirm the premise of their story, they would cite the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an 11-count indictment charging that same SPLC with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donor money between 2014 and 2023 to individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
One of those internal “field sources” — known at the SPLC as “the Fs” — was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America. Another was paid more than $1 million while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance. A third helped coordinate transportation for the Charlottesville rally at the SPLC’s direction. To move the cash without telling donors, prosecutors say the SPLC opened bank accounts under shell companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” loaded prepaid cards, and quietly distributed donor dollars to Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The scheme was lucrative. According to public tax documents, SPLC saw their donations skyrocket from $51 million in Oct. 2016 to more than $133 million in Oct. 2017, an increase in revenue of more than $81.5 million.
Liberal news outlets were more than happy to cite the SPLC as a legitimate arbiter of what speech and political conduct should be allowed in polite society. Just yesterday the Bangor Daily News published an article invoking the disgraced leftist nonprofit to tar conservative influencer Libs of TikTok as “an extremist.” In 2024, almost every outlet in Maine joined forces with SPLC to promote a hoax claiming neo-Nazis were building a paramilitary camp in rural Maine.
The SPLC was more than a speed-dial acquaintance for every BDN reporter and Democratic politician in Maine. The group also had formal partnerships with government agencies that allowed it to shape priorities and policies.
FBI Director Kash Patel, who already severed the bureau’s ties with the SPLC last October and called it a “partisan smear machine,” said the group “engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.”
Maine Democratic officeholders treated the SPLC as a credentialing agency
State Sen. Joe Baldacci (D-Bangor), who drafted LD 2130 — a bill broadening Maine’s definition of “civil disorder” and expanding attorney-general authority to shut down “paramilitary” training activity — introduced the legislation in direct response to the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog posts about Pohlhaus.
Baldacci told The Daily Beast and Maine Public the same lines he told the SPLC’s own house organ: that Maine had “a problem with Nazis coming to set up a military-style camp.” His legislative findings, his press conference talking points, and his public statements were built on a foundation of SPLC-sourced “intelligence” — the same “intelligence” the DOJ now alleges was produced by a program that was simultaneously paying Klansmen on the side.
Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey testified in favor of Baldacci’s bill, citing the same SPLC-originated factual predicate.
While the SPLC was being treated as an authoritative source by Maine legislators and the Bangor Daily News, the same organization was, according to federal prosecutors, running a long-running fraud against its own donors and paying neo-Nazis — the very people it was holding up as justification for Maine legislation.
The SPLC’s interim CEO Bryan Fair says the organization will “vigorously defend” itself.
While the Bangor Daily News was co-producing content with a group that funds Klansmen and neo-Nazis, The Maine Wire was reporting on the Springfield story differently.
In August 2023, I wrote that the co-owner of the 10.6-acre Springfield plot, Fred Boyd Ramey, was not some Mainer, not some longtime ideologue of the radical right, and not even really a neo-Nazi in the sense the Bangor Daily News and the SPLC wanted readers to imagine. Ramey was a former Democrat activist — the founder of a $100,000-plus super PAC called “Truckers for Yang” that had supported Andrew Yang’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign. Ramey had a rap sheet of felony convictions across Kansas, North Dakota, and Missouri, and under federal law he likely could not lawfully possess firearms on a so-called “paramilitary training ground.” None of that appeared in the SPLC-synchronized coverage.
In light of the indictment released Tuesday, Ramey’s rap sheet looks eerily similar to the records of the SPLC’s paid “informants” within white nationalist groups.
The Maine Wire was also the first and only outlet to actually visit the alleged paramilitary training camp that every outlet in the state devoted breathless, sensationalized coverage to in 2023 and 2024.
In reality, Moores Road was not a training ground or a compound. It was an abandoned camper and a single tent. The “armed white supremacist training ground” that launched statewide legislation, a Bangor Daily News series, and Joe Baldacci’s sternest TV hits was nothing but a hoax and scam, promoted and hyped by SPLC and allies in the left-wing press.
By October 2023, Pohlhaus had quietly sold the 10.6 acres for $39,000 to a buyer in Malden, Massachusetts. He moved to Montana, then to Kentucky. He is currently, according to national reporting, a 38-year-old unemployed tattoo artist in Louisville who travels around the country with a handful of followers in red shirts looking for reporters to film him.
You got to wonder if SPLC was involved in January 6th.
Maybe the FBI didn’t organize it, SPLC did instead….