Trump DOJ will avenge the KKK by taking out SPLC
The racism is not subtle.
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“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday.
Flanked by embattled FBI Director Kash Patel, Blanche announced an 11-count federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the civil rights organization which effectively brought down the Ku Klux Klan.
The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.
The SPLC spent five decades tracking white supremacists, infiltrating violent extremist groups, and dragging them into court. These are methods the FBI itself routinely employs — or did before it decided that racist militias were good, actually. In fact, the FBI coordinated with SPLC for years, relying on intelligence received from the organization to combat domestic extremists.
But now, as part of the project to undo Reconstruction, the Justice Department hopes to take out the SPLC using the very tools that group used to defeat the KKK. And along the way, they can exculpate every violent bigot who ever swung a tiki torch with murder in his eyes. Those boys weren’t bad, they were just stirred up by outside agitators from the SPLC!
The organization that bankrupted the Klan
The SPLC was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, as a civil rights litigation shop. Its strategy was to file tort suits against the Klan, holding the organization financially responsible for acts of violence perpetrated by its members.
SPLC’s most consequential case involved the 1981 lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. After a jury failed to convict Josephus Anderson, a Black man charged with the murder of a white policeman in Birmingham, members of the United Klans of America (UKA) snatched Donald off the street more or less at random.
“If a Black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man,” argued UKA Titan Bennie Hays, the second-highest Klan official in Alabama, at the weekly meeting of Unit 900.
Two Klansmen abducted Donald, beat him with a tree limb more than a hundred times, and hanged his body from a tree across the street from Hays’ own house.
“A pretty sight,” a Klansman remarked as he watched police gather evidence. “That’s gonna look good on the news.”
The SPLC represented Michael’s mother Beulah Mae Donald in a civil suit against UKA. In 1987, a jury awarded her $7 million in damages, bankrupting the UKA and forcing it to sign over the deed to its headquarters.
But litigation wasn’t SPLC’s only weapon.
In 1981, as Klan membership surged amid the backlash to the civil rights era gains of the previous decades, the SPLC launched Klanwatch to monitor white supremacist activity and organizations. The project was later rebranded as Hatewatch as white supremacy evolved beyond the traditional Klan into a broader ecosystem of neo-Nazi groups, militia movements, and online accelerationist networks.
The methodology was the same one used by law enforcement: place sources inside violent organizations, gather intelligence, and use it to build legal cases. The FBI, which had been running informants inside Klan organizations since at least the 1960s, knew exactly what SPLC was doing and even shared intel with the organization.
But SPLC made a lot of enemies in the rightwing ecosystem with its Hatemap of extremist groups, which included conservative mainstays like the Family Research Council, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, opponents of the SPLC’s mission, including Elon Musk, targeted the organization for criticizing their newly-martyred saint.
In October, Patel cut ties with the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group. In what was surely not a coincidence, he timed his announcement to fall on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for observant Jews.
But it’s one thing to sever ties with civil rights groups. It’s quite another to charge them for criminal conspiracy.
Fraud is whatever Todd Blanche says it is
The indictment returned Tuesday rests on the theory that SPLC defrauded its donors by paying informants inside hate groups.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's ("SPLC") stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.
Building on this supposed deception, the DOJ charged SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC. By the inescapable logic of its own complaint, the FBI itself funds all manner of criminal enterprises through its own network of paid, covert informants. Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the organization was illegally diverting donor money to fund hate groups via its informant network.
“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public," Patel sniffed from the podium. "They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups, even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal, and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”
Then, as if to demonstrate that the campaign against SPLC is a witch hunt, Patel went on Sean Hannity’s show last night to riff about an active case and preemptively declare guilt.
If the government has actual evidence of wrongdoing, it’s not sharing. There’s zero mention of self-dealing by SPLC executives in the indictment. If the SPLC were really trying to “manufacture” racism, devoting just $3 million over the course of a decade out of an annual budget that tops $120 million would be a pretty inefficient way to go about it. Moreover, the government’s theory of the case is that the informants took their SPLC bounty and plowed it back into the organizations they were spying on — something else which the indictment takes pains to assert elliptically without presenting any evidence.
And yet this bizarre theory undergirds the entire criminal case. The wire fraud and money laundering charges rest on SPLC donors having been tricked into turning over money. And the false statements to the bank — made to set up pass-through accounts to pay informants — are charged under 18 USC § 1014, a statute regulating “loan and credit applications generally; renewals and discounts; crop insurance.”
Clearly the government intends to replicate SPLC’s success shutting down UKA by suing SPLC out of existence. But it’s very hard to see how this dubiously cobbled-together indictment could produce the desired result.
The retcon
Even if this case implodes on impact with a federal court, it will still serve the larger conservative goal of recasting perpetrators of rightwing violence as the real victims.
Just hours after MAGA rioters overran the Capitol, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz claimed on the House floor that facial recognition had confirmed the violent mob was really antifa goons. When that lie didn’t pan out, conservatives pivoted to blaming government “instigators,” even going so far as to brand a former Oath Keepers militia member Ray Epps as an FBI plant who incited the crowd so that MAGA patriots could be prosecuted.
On his first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned all the January 6 defendants, save for a handful of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who’d been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Now the Justice Department is moving to vacate their convictions on the theory that their prosecutions were politically motivated. (Ironically, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio actually was a government informant, so, by the DOJ’s own logic, the FBI funded his crimes.)
The SPLC indictment is part of the wider plot to retcon an organization that spent half a century tracking, infiltrating, and litigating against violent white supremacist groups into an organ for “manufacturing” racism where there was none. The informant program that fed intelligence to law enforcement for decades is reframed as a criminal scheme to deceive donors and launder money. The civil rights lawyers who bankrupted the United Klans of America are cast as the Klan’s secret patrons.
The indictment’s references to the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville are positively perverse. The DOJ claims that the SPLC’s paid field source “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” This implies, but does not state, that the SPLC paid for transportation to the event. The government is all-but explicitly blaming SPLC for those angry young men brandishing tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the car that plowed into counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer.
This is nonsense! James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people who showed up to advocate for racial justice and killed Heather Heyer. The organizers of the event were white supremacists who planned a rally to advocate for white supremacy, and celebrated the death of a “fat, disgusting Communist.” And now it is the official position of the United States government that the civil rights group which walloped Klan is the real culprit.
Already the supposed “victims” of the SPLC are circling like vultures. The Family Research Council, designated as a hate group by the SPLC for linking homosexuality to pedophilia and supporting the criminalization of same-sex relations, demands restitution from SPLC’s endowment. This is surely not what SPLC’s donors had in mind, but it would certainly fit in with the inverted reality the Trump administration is trying to usher in.
If there is a silver lining, it’s that the SPLC seems ready for the fight.
From a legal standpoint, this indictment is crap. From a political standpoint, it’s an effort to avenge the KKK and enshrine white supremacy in America. Both should be dismissed with prejudice.
That’s it for today
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I apologize to readers for the later-than-normal publication time this morning. There was an issue (my fault) scheduling the newsletter last night that I didn't catch until I was awake this morning and realized it hadn't gone out. I appreciate your patience!
I hate this timeline. November can't come soon enough. Now I'm off to make a donation to the SPLC.