The Performative Economy

The most powerful, high-visibility civil rights and public interest litigation group had the Ku Klux Klan on payroll. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) now faces an 11-count federal indictment in the Middle District of Alabama. It could not have happened to nicer people.

The charges range from wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. As Attorney General Todd Blanche noted: the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” And what an existence it’s been. SPLC is not a minor player in the progressive constellation. Though classified as “non-profit” it has close to a billion dollars in assets.

The Klan on the Payroll

According to the indictment, the SPLC routed more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to a network of paid “field sources” embedded in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, the National Socialist Party of America, and other extremist organizations. The money moved through bank accounts opened under fictitious names: “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” “Rare Books Warehouse.” One source, code-named F-37, sat in the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and helped coordinate transportation to the event. The SPLC paid him roughly $270,000 over eight years.

After Charlottesville, the organization’s revenue surged. Then President Donald Trump was, essentially, the patsy. Blame for Charlottesville fell on conservatives. It continues to this day.

While the SPLC was paying the Klan, it was simultaneously deploying its donor base for something else entirely. As Just the News reported, the organization committed $100 million from its endowment through 2032 to a “Vote Your Voice” turnout program in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Donor dollars marketed as legal defense against hate were converted into political infrastructure in five battleground states.

Pleading the Fifth, 146 Times

The same playbook is run by ActBlue. Two joint interim staff reports from the House Judiciary, House Administration, and Oversight and Government Reform committees document a fundraising platform whose compliance regime appears to have functioned in reverse. The first report, issued in April 2025, found that ActBlue trained its fraud-prevention staff to “look for reasons to accept contributions” rather than flag suspicious activity. Internal communications showed the chief fraud official willing to accept 10% more fraud while focusing on DEI. In a 30-day window in September and October 2024, the platform processed 237 donations made from foreign internet addresses using domestic prepaid cards.

The follow-up report released last week documents the cover-up: by March 2025, every member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave, and five current and former officials called for depositions invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times. The compliance team’s actual function, in retrospect, was not to prevent fraud but to provide plausible deniability while it occurred.

The Medicaid Laundromat

Then there is Minnesota. The Feeding Our Future case, the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program, the Medicaid waiver for autism services. As Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo documented for the Manhattan Institute, Housing Stabilization was projected to cost $2.6 million a year. By 2024 it was paying out $104 million. Former First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimated that 14 waivered Medicaid programs in the state had cost $18 billion since 2018, and that half or more might be fraud. Yesterday, as Power Line reported, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations executed 22 search warrants across the Twin Cities, mostly at daycares and autism providers operating under those waivers.

Chris Bray, in his recent essay on what he calls the Extractive-Performative Era, names the pattern with grim economy. The non-governmental organization that is funded almost entirely by the government. The anti-poaching activist who has the elephants on layaway. “The circle,” he writes, “is everywhere.” The Government Accountability Office now estimates federal fraud losses at between $233 billion and $521 billion every year. That is not noise around the edges of a basically sound system. That is the system.

Call it the Performative Economy. Its defining feature is that the civic mission is no longer the product. The performance of the civic mission is the product. SPLC sells anti-racism while paying Klansmen. ActBlue sells small-dollar democracy while flagging foreign internet addresses as friends. Minnesota’s Medicaid waivers sell stabilization to the vulnerable while routing nine-figure sums to operators who build their second homes in Kenya. The donor and the taxpayer are the marks. The institution is the intermediary. The people the donor and taxpayer believed they were opposing turn out to be the beneficiaries.

The indictments and raids of the last week are the beginning of an inventory. They are not yet a remedy. Until the architecture changes, the names on the indictments will rotate, and the half-trillion dollars will continue to move through the same circle to the same destinations. The country has discovered the receipts. The harder question is whether it has the will to dismantle the apparatus that produced them.