The Southern Poverty Law Center had the ear and trust of America’s politicians and institutions as it sought to identify the most heinous evildoers in our society — and by doing so, to help eradicate them.

With indictments from a grand jury, we’re now discovering that the SPLC was playing both sides of the racism-industrial complex.

It was deliberately keeping a dying enemy on life support so that it could fight against it perpetually, the better to rake in donor cash and raise its own political leverage.

A federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC Tuesday for wire fraud and related charges stemming from secret payments of more than $3 million to individuals tied to the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, according to the Department of Justice.

One leader of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., received about $270,000 over eight years.

A second individual, embedded in a neo-Nazi group, was paid $1 million to steal 25 boxes of the organization’s documents.

Others had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America and the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.

SPLC CEO Bryan Fair tried to brush off the payments, calling them “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”

He claims the organization is being unjustly targeted.

But Attorney General Todd Blanche blasted the SPLC as “a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred” — and was instead “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The SPLC began in 1971, specifically formed to combat the Ku Klux Klan.

In a post-civil rights era, it was at the forefront of shifting the culture, making any form of racial hatred and bigotry unacceptable in American society.

Which makes this indictment a clear sign of how far this organization has fallen from grace.

It’s been co-opted by money-hungry radical leftists who’ve perverted the group’s original mission, using it instead as a weapon to attack enemies on the political right.

The SPLC, it turns out, is the equivalent of an arsonist firefighter — someone who sets buildings ablaze so he can help extinguish the conflagration for public praise.

Racism in America is so rare today that anti-racists must fund the most fringe organizations to help them stay afloat.

The SPLC can make the claim that it was funding “informants” — but it isn’t a law enforcement agency, and this financing allegedly went on for years with no end in sight.

That’s because it was invested in an ecosystem that requires an enemy to keep itself relevant and profitable.

After all, dismantling legitimate hate groups will only lead to the SPLC’s own disappearance.

By keeping relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support, this corrupted version of the SPLC can use its reputation to target anyone who opposes leftism.

It expanded its definition of “hate” to include anyone who counters the most absurd left-wing ideological stances, as its mission morphed from preserving civil rights to destroying the right.

Individuals like Charlie Kirk and James Lindsay, alongside parent advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty, were all wrongly marked on its Hate Map — right next to the very white supremacist groups the SPLC itself was funding.

Meanwhile, destructive entities like Antifa were spared condemnation, because they align with the end goal of destroying the America that the original SPLC helped to form.

The KKK is the historical boogeyman Black Americans like me are supposed to fear daily.

Now we know the real reason it still lingers in the shadows: The SPLC can’t create political leverage from a dead racist monster.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of “The Children We Left Behind” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.