When Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), came to speak at Claremont McKenna College in the 1990s, I was a student there. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember the gun sticking out of his sports coat. It was a .357, something Clint Eastwood would carry in Dirty Harry. We had heard that this was the man who had taken on the KKK in the heart of Alabama, and the gun made the legend real. On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a sweeping federal indictment against the SPLC, accusing it of funding the very terror groups it claimed to be fighting. A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. It was not the Department of Justice, not a political appointee, not a press conference, but a grand jury of American citizens that sat in judgment. According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the United Klans of America, the Aryan-Nation-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and other white supremacist organizations. These are the very same groups the SPLC was raising hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy. The money was allegedly funneled through shell companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” and loaded onto prepaid cards to conceal its source from the financial institutions the organization used. One recipient, identified in the indictment only as F-37, was a member of the online leadership group that organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. On August 12 of that year, a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Heather Heyer, 32 years old, was killed. Dozens more were injured. Fields is now serving life in prison. F-37 helped put that rally together. He made racist postings. He coordinated transportation for attendees. He did all of this, according to the indictment, at the direction of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And from 2015 to 2023, the SPLC paid him roughly $270,000, all while publicly condemning the very event he helped organize. “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” FBI Director Kash Patel put it simply: “The money never lies, and they got caught.” Nothing has been proven yet. The SPLC will have its day in court. Its interim CEO has called the charges false and politically motivated. The organization says the payments were part of a confidential informant program designed to gather intelligence on violent groups, and that the program’s secrecy was necessary to protect those informants. Those are defenses a jury will evaluate. But what strikes me most about this indictment is not the fraud itself. It is the why behind it. Why would an organization founded to fight racism need to pump up racism? Why manufacture the very evil you claim to oppose? The answer is white guilt. And to understand it, you have to understand what white guilt actually is. White guilt is not a feeling. Most people treat it as one, rejecting it with some variation of “I never owned slaves.” Both responses describe an emotion. Both miss the mechanism entirely. You cannot feel actual guilt for sins you did not commit. White guilt is instead the cultural and institutional atmosphere that Americans live inside, whether they feel it or not. It is the language permitted in public life and the language that ends careers. It is the criteria by which institutions measure their own virtue rather than their actual outcomes. It is the moral authority that determines whether you are on the “right side of history” or stand condemned as a racist. My father, Shelby Steele, has spent 40 years on this question. To paraphrase him, white guilt, at its core, is the vacuum of moral authority that was created when America finally confessed to four centuries of racial evils in the 1960s. That confession ended legal discrimination. But it also left whites accused of racism, whether they had personally discriminated or simply lived in a nation that had. Even though many whites had bravely confronted these racial evils, including members of my own family, the end result was a collective loss of moral authority. They were stripped of their innocence, the very innocence that would become the most coveted thing in American institutional life to this day. This was not innocence in the legal sense, but moral innocence, the status of being on the right side of the nation’s deepest wound. As my father wrote in his 1988 Harper’s essay, “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” — “Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power. Now to be innocent, someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other’s backs.” The driving force in American society became not true compassion for the oppressed, but the desperate need to prove that you are not the oppressor. Whoever can most credibly claim innocence of the nation’s racial sins, or claim to represent those who suffered, gains the moral authority that translates into institutional power, political influence, and cultural dominance. Innocence became the currency. The SPLC understood this better than almost anyone. The SPLC did not begin as the institution now facing these charges. Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dees and Joe Levin, with civil rights legend Julian Bond as its first president, the SPLC took on genuine fights. Growing up, my parents told me stories over the dinner table about how the organization integrated state troopers, challenged unfair electoral districts, and sued the Klan after violent attacks. That early work, using the law to make the promises of equality real, especially in the heart of the Deep South, is why I was excited to meet Dees. It makes what followed all the more devastating. Rather than meet the post-1960s reckoning through color-blind standards, genuine accountability, and the equal application of American principles, many whites chose the easier path: the performance of perpetual atonement. Instead of investing in the genuine development of black Americans, they became professional fighters against racism, the only remaining way to purchase the innocence that the vacuum of moral authority had taken from them. From suing real Klan violence, the SPLC institutionalized white guilt. It built a vast donor base by mapping extremists and labeling an ever-growing list of dissenters as “hate” that must be fought. Conservatives like Charlie Kirk, who never committed violence, found themselves listed alongside actual white supremacists. Far from the days of fighting the Klan, the SPLC was now slaying windmills. The mission expanded not because the threat grew, but because the machine required an enemy. The emergency could not be allowed to end. Perhaps we should have seen this corruption earlier in 2019 when Morris Dees himself was fired. The official reason was unspecified misconduct. Staff members sent letters to management describing “decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment” inside the organization, founded to fight those exact things. One letter was signed before Dees’s firing was announced; a second, sent after the firing, accused leadership of being “complicit in” decades of such misconduct and demanded an investigation into an alleged cover-up. An outside review was commissioned, but its conclusions were never made public. The grift formula, once you see it, is simple. You inflate the threat, sound the alarm, position yourself as the brave slayer of hate, and collect hundreds of millions from donors desperate to feel they are on the right side of history. The donor gets innocence. The corporation gets its ESG credential. The foundation gets its social justice bona fides. And the SPLC gets paid. Real black communities bear the cost of this bargain. Real black families in real cities, especially those in the underclass, live with the consequences of institutions more interested in the performance of anti-racism than in the far more difficult and unglamorous work of developing individuals into productive members of society. The SPLC raised hundreds of millions in the name of protecting the vulnerable. The real product here was donor innocence. If these charges hold, this is not merely fraud. It is white guilt at its most predatory. The vacuum of moral authority that the civil rights reckoning created was supposed to produce genuine accountability, genuine repair, genuine progress. Many Americans truly sought that. They were eventually outmaneuvered by those who saw white guilt not as a wound to be healed but as a resource to be mined. And if the grand jury’s indictment is proven true, that industry did not just fail to reduce racism. It paid racists to keep racism alive, because alive racism was worth more to the machine than a color-blind society could ever be. But this false innocence is not a simple lie. A lie knows itself to be false. False innocence is a moral credential claimed without moral action. It is innocence purchased through performance rather than earned through character. It is the DEI certificate that substitutes for actually caring about black lives. The hate list that substitutes for actually reducing hate. This false innocence is more than a personal corruption or failing. It has become the air that we breathe. The man who says he feels no white guilt may be telling the truth about his feelings. But ask him if he would say, openly and without hesitation, everything he actually believes about race in America. In certain rooms, in certain institutions, around certain people, he already knows the answer. The cost is real. He is living inside the world of white guilt, whether he feels it or not. The machine does not require his confession. It requires only his silence. This is what makes false innocence genuinely evil in the precise sense. It has corrupted the conditions under which honest people can speak honestly. It has made false virtue more valuable than the actual remedies. It has turned moral authority into a commodity that the loudest performers collect and the most honest people forfeit. And when an organization like the SPLC allegedly takes that logic to its endpoint by manufacturing the very hatred it claims to fight, because hatred is the raw material the innocence machine runs on, you are looking at the very heart of the white guilt machine. I still think about Morris Dees and his gun at Claremont McKenna. If the indictment’s allegations are proven, the gun was the whole point. The prop that made the performance credible. The danger that made the donors open their wallets. The legend that kept the white guilt machine running. The windmills had to keep turning. So someone had to be paid to tilt at them. The SPLC’s story is not an outlier. It is white guilt in America, followed to its logical conclusion. *** Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker. He writes at Man of Steele on Substack.

The GOP-led Senate moved early Thursday morning to pass a budget plan that would provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security and allocate another $70 billion for immigration enforcement for the remainder of President Trump’s time in office. The proposal passed the closely divided chamber 50-48, with Republicans backing the measure and Democrats voting in opposition. Republicans said that the measure, which now goes to the House, would help to secure the border. The passage means the resolution moves forward toward the reconciliation process, meaning Republicans can pass a funding bill without having to get past the filibuster. “We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end, Republicans will have helped ensure that America’s borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important agencies,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-ND). Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) criticized Democrats for blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security 16 times. The department has been defunded since February 14, 2026. “Democrats are playing to the most radical members of their party. 
Through their actions, Democrats are putting the safety and security of our nation behind the safety and security of their own political careers,” he said from the Senate floor. Democrats tried to add a number of amendments to the proposal that they claimed would address the cost of housing, childcare, and health care. “Instead of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans should be working with Democrats to lower out-of-pocket costs,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. A number of Republican-backed amendments also fell short after Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) sided with Democrats. Those senators voted against a proposal from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. “One recent study found that in three years alone, Planned Parenthood got a billion and a half dollars from Medicaid and Medicare. 
Money to be used on these risky surgeries and [transgender] procedures for our children. This is wrong,” Hawley said. “This is a terrible misuse of federal funds, and we should put a stop to it today.” Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mitch McConnel (R-KY), Murkowski, and Collins and also voted with Democrats to block an effort from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) to attach the SAVE Act, which would require photo ID to vote in federal elections, to the proposal.

In August of 2017, extremists came out of the woods, carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas, chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan — “so emboldened by [President Trump] that they saw him as an ally.” Those were the words of our former vegetable-in-chief, Joe Biden, who claimed the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the moral catalyst for his entire presidential campaign. A federal indictment now suggests that the catalyst was manufactured, and the people who built it were the same people weeping the loudest over it. The Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for purportedly funding the Unite the Right rally, assisting with its messaging and coordination, and secretly funneling over $3 million to the leaders and organizers of the very racist groups the SPLC claimed to be dismantling — among them the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. Their paid informants weren’t just monitoring extremist groups; they were actively promoting them, while the SPLC simultaneously denounced those same groups in its publications and solicited donor money to fight them. Jaw. Drop. Yes. An organization whose stated mission was to “dismantle white supremacy and confront hate across the country” funded white supremacy and hate across the country. The audacity is seriously breathtaking. Not only did the Left fabricate Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville — he did not call neo-Nazis “Very Fine People”; he explicitly said they should be “condemned, totally” — but it now appears they had a hand in orchestrating the very spectacle they used to build that lie. To appreciate the full scope of this, we need to examine the Southern Poverty Law Center and its omnipresence in our daily lives, constantly working overtime to paint Republicans as the bad guys. Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the SPLC positioned itself as the preeminent watchdog of American hate, “combating white supremacy.” A noble mission, in theory. In practice, it became something far more useful: a political targeting operation. As genuine white supremacy became an increasingly marginal force in American life — because America is, by any honest measure, not a racist country, and hasn’t been in years — the SPLC pivoted. Rather than declare victory and close up shop, it expanded its definition of “extremism” to encompass mainstream conservatism. The mission was simple: label conservatives BAD, and use that label to cut them off from corporate America. These weren’t fringe operations, either. The SPLC worked with Amazon, PayPal, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mastercard, among others, telling them who not to do business with — and that list included perfectly peaceful, normal conservatives. Yet all the while they were warning companies away from “neo-Nazis,” they were funding neo-Nazis. This is Aesop’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing” for our modern political era. The informants — referred to as “field sources” or simply “Fs” — were not heroic spies. They were key players in the movements that the SPLC claimed to oppose. Take “F-37” — secretly paid by the SPLC, a member of the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event, and an attendee who went at the direct instruction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings and coordinated transportation to the event. The SPLC paid him more than $270,000. F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, and was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC even featured F-30 in their “Extremist File” on their own website — while simultaneously cutting him checks totaling more than $70,000. F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance and actively fundraised for it. He served as a paid SPLC informant for more than 20 years and was secretly paid over $1,000,000. These findings are egregious, plentiful, and absolutely unsurprising. From its founding, the Democratic Party defended slavery, fought its abolition, and launched the Civil War to preserve the institution. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an explicitly anti-slavery counterforce. Abraham Lincoln — the first Republican president — was elected on the promise of containing slavery’s expansion. Democrats smeared him, seceded from the Union, waged war against his government, and ultimately assassinated him for the crime of wanting to free black Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats in Tennessee in 1866. Today, Democrats continue to fund the very groups they now pretend they never supported. The Left has spent decades constructing elaborate historical revisionism around a so-called “party switch” — the theory that the parties essentially traded ideological identities sometime in the mid-20th century, conveniently absolving Democrats of their entire history. It is, at best, a dramatic oversimplification. The racist Dixiecrats did not defect en masse to the Republican Party. They largely stayed put. What changed was the branding. The plantation politics of control and dependency simply modernized, metastasizing into a federal welfare apparatus that keeps constituencies loyal and politicians powerful. Republicans were never the party of slaves. Republicans were never the party of white supremacy. Republicans ended slavery, passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and fought Democrats’ racism every single step of the way. Why do Democrats do it? It must get exhausting, constantly rewriting history, tearing down the institutions they manipulated, and blaming every grievance in life on oppressors — when the true oppressor lies at the heart of the Donkey.  The Left’s power is predicated on a specific narrative: that America is irredeemably racist, that Republicans are its standard-bearers, and that only Democratic governance stands between marginalized communities and existential threat. Strip away that narrative, and there is no justification for DEI mandates, race-based policy, or collectivist governance. The reality is that America is an extraordinarily tolerant country — so they have to manufacture racism through organizations like the SPLC, to keep the fear alive, the donations flowing, and the power grab rolling. Democrats have a lot of nerve pointing fingers from the plantation they built and never abandoned. But they can’t stop, and they won’t. They have to lie. They have to fabricate. Because it is all they have left. Don’t fall for it. The blueprint of this particular lie is now visible in court documents.  I wish we could all just move on and be normal Americans again. We can forgive past errors — history is messy, and both sides have stains. But I fear nothing will change until we stop letting them rewrite reality, gaslight the country, and play Big Brother with every label they slap on us. America doesn’t have a white supremacy problem. It has a Democrats-funding-white-supremacy-groups problem, and now the receipts are in federal court.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** I don’t care if “bon appétit” translates to “bomb app the teeth,” emotional saxophone is described as “obscure trumpet music,” or if [INTENSITY INTENSIFIES] and the lower portion of my screen suddenly spits out “%%%%%%%%%%%%%” over the one line of dialogue that ties the whole storyline together. I want subtitles. If you can understand shows like “Peaky Blinders” without subtitles, you’re on a different playing field. “Who the f*ck is Tommy Shelby,” a villager asks in the trailer for “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.” “Vulopse sewinge ooleesplyin ooim yewiyam,” Shelby responds. According to the captions, he allegedly says, “Perhaps someone should explain to him who I am.” I rest my case.  With 70% of adults queuing up captioning in 2026, we’ve fully entered our sound-maxxing era. Gen Z will say they invented “reading” movies and TV with subtitles, but [woman sighs aggressively] of course they didn’t. Shockingly, there were human people alive before 1997 who thought of putting words on screen to help tell a story. Early adopters invented “intertitles” to spruce up turn-of-the-century blockbusters such as “Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost” in 1901, using text to describe silent scenes. The idea quickly caught on as “subtitle” overlays, and it eventually hit the small screen as “captioning” in the ’70s. While subtitles are designed to translate spoken dialogue into different languages, captions cover every last bit of audible sound. [Door creeks] “Oh. I didn’t know you were here.” [Coughs, clears throat] [Whimsical tuba music]. You can have it all with the second one. I’m reading a really good series on Netflix right now

The Trump administration on Thursday moved to reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana, easing research restrictions on the substance and marking the most significant shift in federal drug policy in decades. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order reclassifying FDA-approved products containing marijuana as a Schedule III drug, placing them alongside prescription medications. The administration also announced an “expedited” hearing on June 29 to consider the formal reclassification of cannabis. “These actions will enable more targeted, rigorous research into marijuana’s safety and efficacy, expanding patients’ access to treatments and empowering doctors to make better-informed healthcare decisions,” Blanche said. Under the decisive leadership of @POTUS, this Department of Justice is delivering on his promise to improve American healthcare. This includes: • Immediately rescheduling FDA-approved marijuana and state-licensed marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule IIl • Ordering a new,… pic.twitter.com/DUtqKQgavl — Acting AG Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) April 23, 2026 Since 1970, marijuana has remained in Schedule I—the most restrictive category—alongside substances like heroin, LSD, and ecstasy. Scheduling of a drug is “based upon the substance’s medical use, potential for abuse, and safety or dependence liability,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Under the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule III drugs are defined as substances with a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” The DEA considers Schedule I drugs to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The Trump administration’s move does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law, but allows cannabis companies to deduct standard expenses like rent and payroll for the first time, CNBC reported. “Today’s order is reflective of the Department of Justice’s continued dedication to common-sense policies and the prioritization of the safety and well-being of all Americans,” Blanche said. In December 2025, Trump first signed an executive order directing federal agencies to increase medical marijuana and CBD research. Over the weekend, Trump voiced frustration with the pace of the rescheduling process while signing another directive easing restrictions on psychedelics alongside podcast host Joe Rogan. “You’re going to get the rescheduling done, right? Please? Will you get the rescheduling done, please?” Trump said to White House staff in the Oval Office. “Joe, they’re slow-walking me on rescheduling, okay? You’re going to get it done.” Two dozen states, along with Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana use, according to the Associated Press. About 40 states have medical marijuana programs, and eight others permit low-THC cannabis or CBD oil for medical purposes. Only Idaho and Kansas maintain a full ban on marijuana. In November 2024, voters in Nebraska approved a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana, while similar proposals failed in Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota.