They tracked California hate groups. Now, Trump’s DOJ charges fraud

Experts who track far-right extremism have observed a resurgence in California in recent years.

There are nearly 100 “hate and anti-government” groups in the state, including anti-vaxxers, apocalyptic militias and old-school neo-Nazi organizations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s most recent publicly available data.

The Alabama-based nonprofit, also known as SPLC, has been one of the few nonprofits with a deep interest in California’s fringes for years. But now, after the Trump administration announced federal charges against the center for alleged fraud, it’s unclear how its work will continue.

The Justice Department alleges that SPLC defrauded donors by funneling cash to informants within hate groups.

An indictment dated April 21 alleges a litany of crimes, including “wire fraud, making false statements to a federally insured banking institution, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.”

The lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration’s legal center misled donors about where their money was going. The organization has long worked to gather intelligence on extremist groups, but federal prosecutors say the SPLC failed to properly disclose that it paid active members to leak information.

The indictment alleges that “some of the donated funds will be used by the SPLC to pay senior leaders of violent extremist groups and others”; this includes payments allegedly “used in the commission of state and federal crimes.”

This week, the legal advocacy organization responded by asking the court to unseal the grand jury transcripts; He says it would show that the Justice Department lied or failed to present exculpatory evidence, including records of direct collaboration with the FBI to report crimes that paid sources helped uncover.

“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC used its confidential informants to provide useful information to law enforcement,” attorney Addy R. Schmitt said in a petition to unseal the transcripts. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants are helping law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”

Legal experts called the indictment “absurd.”

“This is just another example of a larger trend that the administration is doing everything it can to aid the far right, including hate groups,” said Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University.

Segall called it “irresponsible and incredibly unlikely” to suggest that the nonprofit works to benefit hate groups rather than expose their activities.

Neither the Southern Poverty Law Center nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment.

The fight has already tied up the finances of the advocacy group: Financial firms Loyalty and Pioneer According to the New York Times, he told investors they would not donate to the organization as long as the federal charges are pending, and the indictment all but guarantees an expensive court fight.

The case also comes at a time when other protections against violent extremism have been weakened and federal investigative resources have been diverted elsewhere under the Trump administration.

“There used to be a lot of eyes on this,” said Kathleen Blee, a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s not watched much anymore, and that’s a really bad situation.”

Some are particularly concerned about California, which has long been a hothouse for extremist groups.

“These types of groups have deep tentacles in Southern California,” said Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University and an expert on hate groups in the state. “There was a significant presence of white supremacist philosophy dating back to white settlement in the region, which in some ways was seen as a white supremacist utopia.”

This hostility appears to be resurging. California Department of Civil Rights latest annual hate report “Record levels of hate crimes, targeted violence and related aggression” were recorded.

Groups the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified in the state include the mother-centered, pro-gun Mamalitia and an anti-Semitic group calling itself the Committee for Open Discussion on the Holocaust.

“None of these groups will say they are white supremacists,” Simi said. “Everyone is engaged in denial, which makes it easier to track and classify. [difficult].”

Efforts to track groups whose hatred may escalate into violence are further complicated by the uncertain, ever-changing nature of extremism on social media.

For decades, extremist groups have recruited in part by offering mutual aid to their members, many of whom may have been neglected or abused and struggle with addiction and untreated mental illness, Simi said. Traditional hate groups offer both community and an outlet for violence, he said.

Simi said this profile is no longer valid. Instead, hate often comes through a social media algorithm.

“A lot of the ideas that these groups support have really become mainstream and normalized,” the academic said. “It’s a much larger portion of the air we breathe.”

Blee said: “You can find the most lurid, harsh, far-right, far-right, racist, misogynist, antisemitic, Islamophobic ideas and conspiracy stories in your most casual look at X or many other social media. There are all kinds of seductive ways to get people’s attention, but you can also stumble across them by accident.”

Just this week, many Californians opened their official state voter guides to encounter a page-long anti-Semitic op-ed by gubernatorial candidate Don J. Grundmann of Santa Clara. The letter included accusations that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been killed by an Israeli bomb and that Jews were plotting to enslave American Christians; Grundmann attempted to support this claim by mistranslating the Hebrew word for “nations” as “cattle.”

“Anti-Semitism has been a very fundamental part of far-right extremism for as long as we think of far-right extremism as an organized movement in the United States, which is since the 1870s,” Blee said. “It creates a conspiratorial mentality that brings with it other kinds of hatred. Jews are like conspirators.”

He and others worry that these ideologies are now spreading unchecked, with far-right memes and white nationalist messages spreading across WhatsApp, Telelgram and other online forums.

“Who does the monitoring now?” Simi said. “Not the federal government.”

Experts said they fear Californians will be left with a false sense of security without an organization like the SPLC to shed light on hate groups operating in the shadows.

“People don’t walk around with Klan helmets and swastikas on their cheekbones, so people think it’s gone,” Blee said. “But it has evolved into something much harder to see, much more widespread and more impactful. It’s part of normal culture.”