Wow: It seems the Southern Poverty Law Center — a direct-mail fund-raising mill posing as a civil rights group — paid millions to racist “extremists” to spread hate that the SPLC then cited as it called for donations.

The Justice Department indicted the SPLC on wire-fraud charges Tuesday, saying the outfit has been “manufacturing racism to justify its existence” and even paying a “field source” to help organize the infamous 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally — the event that became ground zero for Democratic messaging about President Donald Trump’s alleged praise for Nazis as “fine people.”

It allegedly paid this “field source” more than a quarter-million dollars over eight years to post racist memes and gin up support for extremist beliefs.

Justice also says a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance got over a million bucks over nine years to feed the SPLC information about its membership and activities, which the nonprofit then used as fodder for its ongoing publicity campaign about the dangers of the National Alliance.

Officials of the SPLC contend that their strategy was essential to gathering intelligence about hate groups, but the group isn’t a law-enforcement agency out to build a court case.

It looks more like a ratcatcher breeding rats to get more clients.

What a “business model”: subsidizing racist organizations’ activities in order to fund-raise off the threat of growing extremism.

The SPLC made major bank in these years: Its $500 million in assets as of 2017 grew to $750 million by 2023 as it raised close to $200 million a year.

All while the highest levels of the federal government under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden treated the outfit as a trustworthy expert, invited to counsel law enforcement on extremist threats, even as it also ignored or downplayed leftist and Islamist threats.

Most media, too, treated it as a legitimate source of trustworthy information, even after its spurious 2012 listing of the Family Research Council may have inspired an attempted mass shooting at the group’s headquarters.

The SPLC has been blatantly exploiting the legacy of the civil-rights movement for decades, but the larger left didn’t care about its leaders’ profiteering and abuses of the staff or its other scandals.

As long as it kept offering up grist for progressives’ outrage, they winked at the grift: For shame.