The anti-fascists are now funding fascists

In recent weeks, I keep coming across new items that need constant double-checking, because they are so absurd that at first glance they appear made up. Last week, this story in particular caught my attention: On April 21, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

For European readers unfamiliar with the SPLC, picture an organisation with the moral authority of a national civil rights monument and the soft power of a private intelligence agency. Founded in Alabama in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm — and famously responsible for civil suits that bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s — it grew over half a century into the most influential hate-watchdog institution in the United States. It regularly creates lists of “hate groups” that are adopted by state agencies such as the FBI (leading to potential investigations) or can be used by Amazon, PayPal, and YouTube to de-platform organisations and individuals. They are also quoted across European media as a kind of moral GPS for the question of who counts as politically respectable and who is supposedly a hater or fascist-adjacent.

Given the much flaunted moral authority of said organisation, what the indictment alleges is truly striking. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC is accused of having funnelled more than $3 million in donor funds to at least nine paid informants, routed through shell entities with names like “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse”. The recipients were not minor figures at the periphery. One was a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance who allegedly received more than $1 million over a decade. Another was an “Imperial Wizard” of the United Klans of America. A third sat in the online leadership chat of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally — at which a counter-protester was killed by a neo-Nazi driver — and is alleged to have received over $200,000 between 2015 and 2023. Other payments allegedly went to figures associated with Aryan Nations and an Aryan-Nations-linked motorcycle club called the Sadistic Souls.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put the prosecution’s theory in a single sentence: The SPLC was not dismantling these groups but manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred. To be honest, while I was surprised by the details of the case, I am not surprised by the pattern: In late-stage Western democracies, the supply of genuine extremists is significantly smaller than the institutional and media demand for them. Without the made-up threat of an imminent fascist take over, hundreds of NGOs would have to close down, and an entire industry based on nothing but imagination would disappear. The truth is that we do not have a fascism problem. The professional antifascism complex has a problem with the fact that there are not enough fascists to justify their continued existence, so they had to adopt a policy of funding what they pretend to be fighting. 

This, of course, is not a uniquely American phenomenon: Consider the German parallel, so close to the SPLC story that it almost feels like a translation with the only difference being that, how else in Europe, the main source of money was the taxpayer. In 2001, the German federal government, filed an application before the Federal Constitutional Court to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany, at the time the most prominent neo-Nazi party in the country. The Court terminated the proceeding on 18 March 2003, not because the NPD was ruled constitutional, but because the case had become procedurally untenable. As it emerged, the chairman of the NPD in North Rhine-Westphalia and his deputy were paid informants of the German domestic intelligence service. Three Constitutional Court judges wrote that the observation of a political party by intelligence assets sitting on its national or state executive boards was generally incompatible with the requirements of a fair trial. Then-interior minister Otto Schily was eventually forced to admit that at least one in seven NPD officials was on the payroll of the domestic intelligence service. In other words, the leading neo-Nazi party of the Federal Republic had become a state operation.

As per usual, Germany decided not to learn from history. After missing out on the chance to fight actual Nazis 80 years ago, they have now decided to fight fictional ones: In January 2024, the German investigative outlet Correctiv published a report alleging that members of the AfD and other figures had hatched a “secret plan” for the mass deportation of German citizens with a migrant background at a meeting in Potsdam. Three million Germans took to the streets in subsequent weeks, encouraged by the Social Democratic Scholz government. Alas, a few weeks ago the Hamburg Regional Court has since forbidden Correctiv from repeating these claims, as they were almost entirely made up. 

A significant share of the fascist threat in the West is being subsidised, exaggerated, or in some cases manufactured by the institutions that loudly insist they exist to oppose it. The optimistic take is that this says something flattering about our societies, even as it says something disquieting about parts of our institutional class. I am not denying that there is a racist or Neo-Nazi fringe in many Western countries. But that fringe in 2026 is much smaller than the professional antifascism complex needs it to be. Western publics have spent the last several decades growing out of the harder ideological positions, not into them. Which leaves the institutions whose budgets depend on the opposite trend with a problem they cannot easily solve, except by either making up or actively funding an otherwise non-existent threat.