The Southern Poverty Law Center — the self-appointed hall monitors of American politics who decide which organizations are “hate groups” and which ones are just regular Democrats — just got indicted over an alleged $3 million fraud scheme involving a paid informant who was supposed to be infiltrating extremist groups.

And George Clooney, one of their biggest celebrity donors, suddenly can’t find his phone. Weird how that works.

For years, the SPLC has been the Left’s favorite weapon. Want to shut down a conservative organization? Get the SPLC to slap a “hate group” label on it. Want to deplatform someone? Point to the SPLC’s list. Want to feel morally superior at a cocktail party in Malibu? Write the SPLC a fat check and tell everyone at the table about it.

George Clooney did exactly that. So did George Soros. So did a parade of Hollywood types and liberal megadonors who treated the SPLC like it was the Red Cross with a law degree. They gave millions. They posed for photos. They name-dropped it in interviews.

Now the organization is facing a federal indictment alleging it ran a $3 million scheme with a paid informant — and every single one of those celebrity donors has gone radio silent.

No statements. No tweets. No Instagram stories with the sad-face emoji. Nothing.

Clooney — the guy who will fly to a UN summit to lecture you about refugees, who will hold a press conference about human rights in Sudan, who will personally call senators to lobby for whatever cause his publicist picked that month — can’t be bothered to answer a single question about whether he’s concerned that the organization he bankrolled was allegedly running a fraud operation.

“No comment.” That’s what reporters are getting. From everyone. The whole donor list has collectively decided that the best strategy is to pretend they’ve never heard of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

(Funny — they sure seemed to know the name when they were writing checks and getting photographed at galas.)

Soros’s people haven’t said a word either. And look, nobody expected the Soros operation to issue a heartfelt apology — that’s not really their style. But the silence is deafening. When your favorite nonprofit gets indicted and your first instinct is to hide, that tells you everything you need to know about what these people actually believed about the SPLC.

They didn’t care whether it was legitimate. They cared whether it was useful.

And the SPLC was *very* useful. For decades, it operated as a quasi-governmental censorship bureau. Big Tech companies used the SPLC’s “hate map” to decide who got banned from social media. Banks used it to decide who got deplatformed from payment processors. The media cited it like scripture.

All while, according to the indictment, the organization was allegedly paying an informant $3 million to infiltrate groups and manufacture the kind of intelligence that kept the donations flowing and the “hate group” labels coming.

Pop quiz: if you’re paying someone millions of dollars to find hate groups, and that person’s income depends on finding hate groups, how many hate groups do you think they’re going to find?

All of them. They’re going to find all of them. Everywhere. Your book club is a hate group. Your church is a hate group. Your fantasy football league is probably on a watchlist.

This is the organization that labeled the Family Research Council a hate group. That put Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a Somali-born woman who survived female genital mutilation and became a champion of women’s rights — on an “anti-Muslim extremist” list. That called Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim reformer, an anti-Muslim extremist. They eventually had to pay Nawaz $3.4 million for that one.

See the pattern? The SPLC’s business model was slander, and they were very good at it. Until they got caught.

Now the celebrity donors who gave this operation its credibility are nowhere to be found. Clooney won’t return calls. Soros is behind a wall of lawyers. The Hollywood donor class that spent years bragging about supporting the SPLC is suddenly suffering from collective amnesia.

Here’s what we know about celebrity activists: they love the photo op, they love the tax deduction, and they love the moral high ground. What they don’t love is accountability. The second their pet charity gets indicted, they scatter like cockroaches when you flip the kitchen light on.

Clooney will lecture you about justice in Darfur. He’ll lecture you about refugees in southern Europe. He’ll lecture you about gun violence, income inequality, and the importance of voting.

But ask him about the $3 million fraud scheme at the nonprofit he helped fund? Suddenly the man who never met a camera he didn’t like has no comment.

The silence is the confession, folks. If Clooney and Soros believed the SPLC was innocent, they’d be out there defending it. They’d be on CNN right now telling Anderson Cooper how this is all a right-wing conspiracy. They’d be tweeting up a storm.

Instead? Crickets.

Welcome to accountability season. The SPLC spent decades destroying reputations with fraudulent labels. Now their own reputation is in the shredder, and the famous friends who gave them cover are pretending they never knew the place existed.

Karma doesn’t need a publicist.