On April 21, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced an eleven-count indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. Furthermore, Blanche accused the SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” pointing in particular to $3 million dollars allegedly funneled to individuals associated with eight white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Unite the Right, and even the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club (an Aryan Nations affiliate). In turn, SPLC interim leader Bryan Fair released a video response defending the organization’s prior use of paid confidential informants and emphasizing that actionable intelligence was shared with local law enforcement and the FBI.

Nevertheless, the indictment has ignited a maelstrom of financial conspiracy theories online, with Elon Musk going so far as to refer to the watchdog organization as a “crime syndicate” and countless others suggesting that the SPLC used these funds to artificially inflate the threat of right-wing and white supremacist terrorism. The use of informants and infiltrators is undoubtedly one of the most fraught debates in the field of counterterrorism and counterextremism: when does infiltration become complicity? How much contact with violent movements is too much? How reliable are informants? Controversial though the practice may be, confidential informants far predate the SPLC and, even by the FBI’s own estimate, have been among the most effective tools for dismantling extremist violence from within.

During Reconstruction (1865-1877), confidential informants were integral to disrupting the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan across the South. Informants were dispatched to the most violent counties, usually to investigate the murders of state officials or prominent freedmen at tremendous personal risk. Arkansas Governor Powell Clayton recounts in his memoir that he dispatched Albert H. Parker, a former Confederate soldier turned paid informant, to infiltrate a Klan den in Searcy, Arkansas, and investigate the attempted assassination of State Senator Stephen Wheeler. On the orders of Searcy’s Grand Cyclops, Parker was murdered during the course of his investigation, his body discarded in a well. Ironically, the confession of one of his remorseful executioners was what helped secure arrest warrants for the Searcy Klan leadership. 

In South Carolina, where a tide of Klan violence threatened to reignite the Civil War, actionable intelligence was crucial for securing federal intervention. At President Ulysses S. Grant’s behest, Major Lewis Merrill built a highly sophisticated network of informants and by 1871 had furnished the federal government with sufficient evidence to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (as permitted by the Ku Klux Klan Act) across nine counties. The federal prosecutions that followed relied heavily on insider testimony from former Klansmen and informants to secure convictions amidst immense local sympathy for the white supremacist terrorists. 

Nearly a century later, the Civil Rights era Klan was similarly disrupted by informant testimonies. In 1994, Delmar Dennis, a Klansman-turned-informant, gave the testimony that led to the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. During his tenure as an informant, Dennis had also provided crucial information on the internal workings of the Mississippi Klan to law enforcement. Dennis’s handler, FBI Special Agent Donald Cesare, remarked that by his estimate, the entire Mississippi Klan had been “stunned and irrevocably shattered by his testimony.” Cesare also noted that during his time working with Dennis, he paid him nearly $250,000. 

As outlined in a recent monograph, Tom Landrum joined the Klan in Laurel, Mississippi, with the express purpose of becoming an FBI informant. Unlike Dennis, Landrum was unpaid, but the information he provided would secure the conviction and imprisonment of members of the White Knights who, in 1966, assassinated local NAACP chapter leader Vernon Dahmer while firebombing his house.

Thomas Martinez, a former member of a Washington-based white supremacist terrorist group called The Order (active 1983-1984), may be one of the most impactful informants in recent memory. His testimony led to the conviction of fifteen people involved with the organization, including Gary Yarborough, the former security chief of the Aryan Nations and conspirator in the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg. At the time of The Order’s disruption, members had committed a string of robberies and murders, accrued a war chest of almost $1 million dollars, and were preparing to wage outright war against the United States government. Until his passing in 2025, Martinez contributed tirelessly to academic and grassroots efforts to counter violent extremism.

As for the crux of the issue and the indictment: these tactics are not free. Informants cost money. Monitoring them costs money. Safeguarding the security of informants costs even more money. Furthermore, recent scholarship evaluating the U.K. context suggests that informants reporting on right-wing domestic extremism being motivated primarily by financial reasons, in contrast to their left-wing counterparts who were motivated by ideology. In the U.S., federal agencies have hitherto been happy to compensate, paying informants (across lines of effort including drugs, arms, and terrorism) $548 million from 2011–2018, dwarfing SPLC’s $3 million from 2014–2023. This financial reality is easily weaponized as accusations that anti-extremist organizations––or even the federal government––are “funding” the very movements they seek to dismantle. But, as history shows, paying informants has often been the practical cost of penetrating closed and violent networks. 

None of this is to suggest that informant programs are beyond criticism by virtue of their precedent. Rather, the historical view lays plain that the use of informant and infiltration efforts has never been undertaken to “manufacture racism.” From Reconstruction to the modern white power movement, infiltration has been useful because violent extremist organizations are, by design, secret, insulated, and often protected by local sympathy or fear. In that sense, the use of informants has been a recurring cost of doing business in domestic counterterrorism, one that America has repeatedly paid when the stakes demanded it.