Apr. 22, 2026, 7:53 PM EDT

ByMichael Edison Hayden

As one of the most high-profile employees of the Southern Poverty Law Center for five years — and as someone who has been outspokenly critical of the organization — I never once heard of the program that allegedly involved paying sources within the Ku Klux Klan, National Alliance and Aryan Nations until the Justice Department published its indictment this week.

What I did hear, frequently, was people in the MAGA movement saying we were some kind of criminal syndicate — part of a sustained propaganda effort to delegitimize the work we did tracking and labeling extremist groups.

Although I find the notion of paying extremists distasteful, even unethical, the indictment feels like the culmination of years of pro-Trump activists consuming and amplifying that kind of propaganda. And, the SPLC, for its part, has called these charges “false allegations.”

One quote from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s press conference about the charges against the SPLC stood out to me as particularly absurd:

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” he said on Tuesday afternoon.

Imagine, for a moment, believing the SPLC — or any other civil rights organization — needed to fraudulently manufacture racism to sell it in today’s America. Just two months ago, the president shared an artificial intelligence-generated video depicting his Black predecessor and his predecessor’s Black wife as primates. In early 2025, the Trump administration suspended refugee admissions from majority non-white countries while investing in a special program to fast-track white South African Afrikaners into the United States. Racism is not a rare commodity in this country to be manufactured — it’s cheap and easy to find.

A closer look at the indictment raises more red flags. For one, the KKK, National Alliance and Aryan Nations have been largely defanged for years. You rarely hear those names now unless you’re a historian focused on the white supremacist movement. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of criminal wrongdoing on its own, but it does show that this DOJ, in 2026, had to reach back as far as 2013 to find a relatively obscure SPLC program — one that, as a former spokesperson, I had never even heard of.

Another issue is the indictment’s suggestion that the SPLC played a role in planning the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, based on the claim that an informant was “part of a leadership group.” The idea that an informant could have planted the seed for a gathering of white supremacists of that magnitude is completely implausible. We don’t need to speculate about the origins of that deadly event: Unite the Right was effectively a sequel to a similar rally in Charlottesville in May 2017, driven by widespread outrage within the movement over the removal of Confederate statues. Unicorn Riot preserved reams of Discord logs attesting to it.

So, leaving open the possibility that something comes out in the trial that I don’t know about yet, these charges look like a piece of political theater to shore up a wayward MAGA base beleaguered by the scandal around Jeffrey Epstein and an increasingly unwieldy debacle in Iran. It’s a MAGA base that understands the SPLC as one of the primary villains in its propaganda stories and enjoys seeing it suffer.

But if the DOJ argues that paying informants furthers hate, and that this makes the use of paid informants fraudulent, won’t the SPLC’s lawyers simply demonstrate how those efforts contributed to these groups no longer being around? If the SPLC propped up the National Alliance to defraud donors, why is it essentially defunct? Why does the once robust Aryan Nations group no longer exist?

If you’ve read this far and assumed I have an incentive to support my former employer, I don’t. I have a different life now — with a book out, a podcast and teaching. After producing some of the SPLC’s more notable investigative stories from 2018 to 2023, I’ve repeatedly criticized them in media appearances.

As chronicled in my book, “Strange People on the Hill,” the SPLC settled with me out of court after I raised allegations of racial discrimination and union busting against them. I have also publicly accused the organization of deliberately taking a lower profile during President Donald Trump’s second term — hoping to evade the kind of targeting that is befalling it now. The SPLC has done many things over the years, good and bad. It has been invaluable in tracing how MAGA brought fringe racist ideas into the mainstream conservative movement. It has also been clumsy, reactionary and, at times, foolish. This program involving paid informants may indeed be one of those clumsy and foolish chapters.

But to understand why a weaponized DOJ might choose this particular case amid all of the white-collar crimes it isn’t pursuing in America today, you first need to understand the narrative that’s been built around the SPLC for years — and how useful it has become to the corrupt men who run this country.

Apr. 22, 2026, 7:51 PM EDT

A Virginia judge on Wednesday blocked the certification of a redistricting referendum that allows the state to redraw its congressional and legislative maps, less than 24 hours after voters approved the measure.

The rulingissued by Tazewell County Circuit Court, halts state officials from finalizing the results of the ballot measure, which sought to overhaul Virginia’s redistricting process.

This latest move prevents the Virginia Department of Elections and other officials from implementing the new redistricting referendum unless it is overturned by a higher court.

Other states attempting similar redistricting moves have faced lengthy legal battlesleaving the ultimate outcome uncertain.

Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley ruled Wednesday that the redistricting referendum violated parts of Virginia’s Constitution, including how such amendments must be approved and submitted to voters.

Hurley said the proposal had not been properly authorized by the General Assembly before being submitted to voters. The judge also called the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and did not accurately describe the measure to voters.

The attorney general’s office said in a statement that it plans to immediately appeal the decision.

“As I said last night, Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have veto power over the People’s vote,” Attorney General Jay Jones said in a statement. “We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”

Redistricting has long been a contentious issue in Virginia, as in many states, with debates often centered on partisan gerrymandering and the fairness of electoral maps.

The move was considered a victory for Democrats and could offer a potential boost for the party as they head into the midterms because the proposed redraw could expand their advantage to 10-1.

For now, the judge’s order leaves Virginia’s redistricting process unchanged and raises new questions about the viability of reform efforts moving forward. Both sides are likely to press ahead with a prolonged legal fight.

The Virginia Supreme Court paused an earlier rulingby Hurley ahead of the referendum, which allowed Tuesday’s vote to move forward while it reviews the case, which remains pending.

Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.