The Trump regime is trying to dismantle the Southern Poverty Law Center via absurd claims that the Montgomery, Alabama,-based anti-hate group helped fund the 2017 “Unite the Right” White power rally in Charlottesville.
The theory of the case is, to say the least, quite creative: the SPLC paid informants who were in charge of planning the rally, and then didn’t share information that it received from its inside sources with law enforcement.
What they want you to believe: that the SPLC had a financial incentive to help the hate groups.
Got it?
You have to dumb yourself down to get there, but that’s what they’re trying to get you to believe.
“The SPLC paid members of these extremist groups, it created work product that reported on these activities that the members participated in or contributed to, and to that end, it was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing. Not dismantling extremism, but funding it,” Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and former personal lawyer for Donald Trump, said at a news conference announcing indictments against the nonprofit last week.
This was all done, we are led to believe, so that the SPLC could continue to solicit money from its donors to fund its anti-hate activities; ostensibly, if it wasn’t for the Southern Poverty Law Center, there would be no more hate groups doing things like planning “Unite the Right” rallies and plowing through crowds of leftist protestors at high rates of speed.
Blanche isn’t dumb enough to sincerely believe any of this; the motive here is obvious – to tie up the SPLC in court, make the group spend gobs of money and time on fighting a stupid indictment, which means it will have less money and time to put toward collecting information on hate groups that are a key part of the Trump political base.
The indictments allege that SPLC defrauded its donors by making “materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for,” referring, specifically, to the group’s past policy of paying confidential informants for information, which dated back to the 1970s, and had been publicly known since the 1980s.
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“In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” the Trump DOJ said in the indictment. “The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources.”
Blanche just invited the Streisand Effect into how the CIA, FBI and local and state agencies use paid informants there, without apparently realizing it, but that’s another story for another day.
One hard part to having us believe what the SPLC was doing was somehow fraudulent: even the hate groups that the group was trying to infiltrate with its paid informants knew that the SPLC was trying to infiltrate them with paid informants.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says it no longer uses paid informants, which, I mean, I don’t like hearing that, if only because, it seems to me that a damn good way to get members of hate groups to snitch on their buddies is to lure the greedy or down-on-their-luck ones with money.
There aren’t a lot of people in these hate groups who just volunteer information about what they’re up to, and it’s not like the Trump DOJ is interested in trying to break these groups up, given their mutual admiration.
Side note here: I’m alive today because a guy who voluntarily infiltrated a Utah militia group blew his cover to warn me that an armed and angry MAGA AFP reader had vowed in a group chat to “get even” with me.
ICYMI
- I played an unwitting important role in ProPublica’s ‘The Militia and the Mole’
- Anonymous email: ‘Armed,” ‘dangerous’ MAGA neighbor threatens AFP editor
That was in 2023, during the Biden interruption to the Trump years, so the FBI actually got involved.
Now the FBI is being sicced on the people who literally bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan with a $7 million verdict in a 1987 lynching case.
The Trumpers want us to believe that the SPLC secretly helped the Klan and other hate groups to be able to keep the dollars flowing from donors, which is not only absurd, it’s something of an admission, given how those on the inside of the corrupt Trump regime are known to operate.
“The information that the SPLC shared with the FBI over the last 40 years saved lives,” said Bryan Fair, the interim president and CEO of the SPLC, which, on Tuesday, filed two motions in federal court demanding to know whether the wild allegations made public by Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel were made in secret to the grand jury ahead of the indictments.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the civil rights movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said.
“When threats and other unlawful activity were revealed, the SPLC immediately passed that information to law enforcement officials, local, state and federal and assisted in efforts to prevent violence and stop criminal activity,” Fair said, noting that the SPLC collected “voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence, potential perpetrators and even the potential weapons that could be used at the Charlottesville rally through its informants and compiled this in a lengthy report sent to numerous law enforcement agencies, including to the FBI’s Mobile, Alabama, office ahead of the event.”
It’s obvious what the Trumpers are doing here: they’re not going to win in court, but at the least, this will cost the SPLC time and money, and it may scare off donors, and those who run similarly focused anti-hate groups, from keeping tabs on the haters.
“We strongly deny the allegations in the indictment, and their falsity is already being exposed in our court filings,” Fair said. “The government is blatantly mischaracterizing our efforts to successfully fight hatred and violent extremism, something we have done for decades. At one moment, they are appreciating our work in destroying the Klan and now, they are saying the SPLC funded and promoted the Klan.
“The informant program was successful in accomplishing its purposes: threats and attacks were prevented, criminal activity was stopped, and information was gathered to dismantle the efforts of hate and extremist groups. There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” Fair said.
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Chris Graham
