More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center – historically one of the nation’s most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.
On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced – at a blatantly political press event – that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for “wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.” The indictment, described by Patel as “massive” and “sweeping,” relies on the notion that the SPLC ‘s use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.
Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions – had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, FBI a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC “kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support.” The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC’s own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.
The absurdity of the indictment is obvious to anyone – including former federal prosecutor Blanche – who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. In fact, over the past few decades, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis. The indictment also charges that SPLC “concealed” its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, just as the FBI and the Justice Department would do, so as not to expose their paid spies.
To suggest that the SPLC “supported” the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.
Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment’s fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. “To the extent that there’s any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization,” he said, “that’s not in the indictment.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government’s attack on SPLC. Former federal prosecutor Doug Jones of Alabama described the indictment as “outrageous” and “pure political retribution” by Trump. Having taken down Klan groups in court, Jones recalled how the SPLC “helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan’s oerations in Alabama and beyond” in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile lynching incident.
There are literally dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files.
It isn’t only liberal lawyers who can see through the phony arguments in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s Trump-friendly publication, the conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that “the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the [SPLC’s] use of informants amounts to fraud.”
More than one conservative has welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays, and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value that is upheld on the right only when convenient and comforting.
Still. the most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives, however, but from the fascist right. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.
Curtis Yarvin, the fascist gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: “What’s cool is that I don’t really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn’t be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of ‘finally getting it.’”
And on the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel – whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders – the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. Far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, they know that SPLC was their worst enemy.
“The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism — they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all,” the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. “What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes – and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy, too.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.
