Above everything else, the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center is absurd. Maybe deliberately so.
It’s hard to tell with the Trump administration. It’s a vessel floating on a current of spite, letting the vindictiveness turn it one way and then another with no apparent plan.
But everyone onboard is eager to praise their captain’s skills. Which may explain the blind fury the U.S. Department of Justice is bringing down on a group known for criticizing the direction the president is taking us.
DOJ alleges that the SPLC, a Montgomery-based civil rights organization that made its name destroying the Ku Klux Klan, was actually a secret ally of the Klan and other white supremacist organizations, committing fraud on its earnest donors.
Why? Because the SPLC for years paid moles in those groups to feed intelligence to the SPLC. Some of that information went to the FBI and law enforcement. Some of it went into SPLC’s ongoing reporting on extremist organizations.
Violent racists are not known for forgiveness. So to protect their sources’ identities, SPLC routed payments to the informants through shell companies.
There are plenty of grounds to criticize the SPLC. But if you take Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel seriously, SPLC was actually deceiving the people supporting its anti-Klan activities.
“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,” Blanche said at a press conference Tuesday. “Not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”
Let’s take a brief spin through history. The Southern Poverty Law Center rose to fame in 1987, when it secured a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America, whose members lynched 19-year-old student Michael Donald in Mobile in 1981. The verdict bankrupted the UKA and forced them to sell their headquarters.
But we can go back further. In 1980, the Southern Poverty Law Center created a team called “Klanwatch.” Its goal was to watch the Klan. Specifically, to track movements of Klan members across state lines and monitor attempts to incite violence at a time when racist assaults on Black Americans were rising.
SPLC’s use of informants in those groups has been public knowledge since at least 1986. Its use of paid informants has been known since at least 1994.
If you’re an SPLC donor who’s just now learning your money supported efforts to disrupt the Klan, I can only conclude that some force ripped you out of 1978. It’s also worth noting that SPLC’s informant payments were minor in the group’s financial picture. As Chris Geidner of Law Dork pointed out, the $3 million DOJ claims SPLC spent on informants over nine years was a pittance compared to the $123 million in revenue it reported in 2023 alone.
The indictment is a lot of chutzpah from an administration rushing to restore Confederate monuments, erase federal exhibits on slavery and, as The Atlantic put it, shut down legal immigration, “especially for people from poor, not-majority-white, non-Christian nations.”
The SPLC opposes all these things. Which makes DOJ’s projections of extremist-coddling on SPLC ludicrous. But it may be that the merits of the case matter less to Blanche and Patel than simply launching an attack on the organization.
It’s no secret that SPLC’s philosophies put it on the left. It waged successful battles in the early 2010s against repressive state immigration laws (including Alabama’s infamous HB 56) and took on important LGBTQ+ cases. SPLC has long criticized Trump and the Trump administration. In 2019, it published leaked emails written by Stephen Miller, now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, praising “The Camp of Saints,” a racist novel popular among white nationalists.
As a result, SPLC is a bete noir for the right. To the president’s cronies, whose endless flattery of the chief executive creates new frontiers in sycophancy, any criticism of the president is illegitimate. Obedience is all that matters.
This is, of course, authoritarianism. Whether Blanche or Patel believe the nonsense in the indictment is irrelevant. Facts matter only as much as they can hurt SPLC. And if they can’t hurt the group, they don’t matter.
That’s why I’d wager that they won’t run away from the absurdity of their charges. The point isn’t to make a reasonable argument; it’s to crush an enemy. And by doing so, showing one’s loyalty. Saying a civil rights group is secretly against civil rights is ridiculous. Something only Trump could believe. But DOJ works to satisfy the president. Satisfying the president means embracing his thoughts. And submitting to his delusions.
DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience. To them, displays of fealty matter more than the truth.
And to the corps of lickspittles attacking SPLC, debasement is a virtue. If reality cannot cannot justify their crusade, absurdities will do.
This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes New Jersey Monitor, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
