Earlier this week, the Trump administration unveiled a politically motivated indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long drawn the ire of conservatives for its decades of work tracking and exposing right-wing extremism.
In the wake of the indictment alleging that the SPLC had committed financial crimes by making payments to informants working in various extremist groups, right-wing members of Congress, organizations, and activists have wasted no time in attacking the SPLC and its allies.
But the indictment has also created a rift within the right-wing movement, as activists have started accusing other activists of being paid by the SPLC to make the right look bad.
For instance, Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist Nick Fuentes has long been dogged by allegations that he is a "fed" or some other sort of infiltrator being paid to undermine the right-wing movement. In the wake of the SPLC indictment, Fuentes was forced to respond to claims that he is an SPLC informant.
The new line that I worked with the SPLC is the laziest fed-jacketing narrative yet.
I was 18 when I went to Charlottesville.
The SPLC doxed my house in 2022 which led to me almost getting murdered, got me censored, doxed my interns and got friends of mine fired from their jobs— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) April 23, 2026
In a desperate attempt to deny that their movement is filled with racist, sexist, and antisemitic extremists, many on the right are seizing on the SPLC indictment to claim that just about anything that makes the movement look bad is really an SPLC false flag operation. They are focusing, in particular, on the deadly "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 during which a neo-Nazi named James Fields drove his car into a group of anti-racism protesters and killed Heather Heyer.
The DOJ's indictment alleges that one SPLC informant was part of an "online leadership chat group" that helped plan the Charlottesville rally, which is all the right needed to convince itself, or try to convince others, that "Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC."
Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 22, 2026
But the right-wing effort to paint the Charlottesville rally as a SPLC op is generating outrage from the white nationalists who actually organized the rally, such as Augustus Sol Invictus.
I was one of the speakers at Unite the Right. I was at the torch march the night before. I wrote the Charlottesville Statement with Richard Spencer. My credentials here are indisputable.
I have spent the past three years of my life dealing with a criminal trial and all its… https://t.co/gVOWA1Xzum— Augustus Invictus (@EmperorInvictus) April 23, 2026
Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who was among the speakers at the rally and was part of a group of plaintiffs who were ultimately ordered to pay millions in damages for the violence that occurred that day, appeared on "The Backlash" program on Wednesday to blast all the "dumb" conservatives who are using the SPLC indictment to dismiss the Charlottesville rally as a leftist operation.
"Conservatives are dumb and they come to the wrong conclusion and they come to a very self-serving conclusion, which is that anyone who isn't the Daily Wire or Matt Walsh or what have you, anyone who isn't in a movement conservative is somehow a puppet," Spencer told program host David Reilly, who is himself a right-wing antisemite who lost his job after attending the rally. "The fact is this indictment does not even suggest that and it's just a very self-serving thing for conservatives to now say, 'Oh, I knew it was a hoax or something.'"
"Charlottesville was not a hoax," Spencer insisted. "Conservatives get off, they've been getting off for years on just declaring that, 'They're feds, the liberals fund them so that they make us look bad,' and blah, blah, blah. They just will do this endlessly. What happens with these things is we learn new information—and I hope that we'll learn important information with this case—and you wake up a year later and somehow we're dumber, like, we have a worse conception of the event. We're not able to criticize it productively, precisely because conservatives are retards."
