The SPLC Indictment
1,110 words
On Tuesday, April 21st, a Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering based on FBI and IRS investigations. (See press release here.)
According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid more than $3 million to people affiliated with such Right-wing groups as:
The Ku Klux Klan
United Klans of America
Unite the Right
National Alliance
National Socialist Movement
Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club
National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party)
American Front
These payments went beyond simply paying informants to collect information, which is what the SPLC’s donors were supporting them to do. Instead, it is alleged that the SPLC was shaping the messaging of these groups and helping them to organize events—which the SPLC would then decry as “hate” and use as a basis to rush back to their donors to raise more funds.
Thus Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public. 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.”
Apparently, the supply of “extremism” and “hate” was not sufficient to support the SPLC’s rapacious fundraising, so they just manufactured some hate. It is no different in principle from rabbis spray-painting swastikas on synagogues, or blacks spray-painting the word “nigger,” and then posing as victims of hate crimes.
But it was far more lucrative. For a mere investment of $3 million to manufacture hate, the SPLC raised almost $1 billion in donations to fight hate between 2014 and 2023.
When I heard about the indictment, I uncorked some cheap champagne—something that pairs well with popcorn—and kicked back to watch the internet go crazy.
Here are my thoughts.
It should be news to no one that White Nationalism, like other dissident political movements, is targeted by governments and non-governmental organizations for surveillance, infiltration, and subversion.
As White Nationalist, I have an interest in knowing who the infiltrators and informants are. First, we need to purge them. It would be nice if some of them do jail time for their crimes. Second, it would be good to know what damage they did. Perhaps movement organizations and individuals can pursue damages in court. Third, it would help us create a more accurate psychological profile of such traitors, so we can keep them out in the future.
The Trump administration also has an interest in outing at least some of these informants and infiltrators. They will not, of course, out the federal government’s own operatives. But they have an interest in outing the informants of an NGO such as the SPLC, which routinely slurs the Trump administration by linking it to White Nationalists and other “extremist” groups on the Right.
These slurs really sting people like Trump. The hallmark of the “normie” conservative is the conviction that “racism” and identity politics for white people are simply evil. Of course, this only applies to white racism and identity politics. The GOP routinely panders to non-white racists and identitarians, as does the rest of the political mainstream. Indeed, anti-white racism is now the one unifying characteristic of the political mainstream. The American Right is steadily shedding this dogma, but it remains especially powerful among Boomers like Trump.
Thus, when the Justice Department discovered that the SPLC had not just been watching and infiltrating “hate groups” but actually putting money in their coffers, directing their messaging, helping to organize their events, and then raising funds off of the results, they naturally regarded this as a way to kill two birds with one stone: take down the SPLC for fraud and smear the far Right as being astroturfed by the Left.
Claiming that the far Right is fake has long been popular among low-IQ MAGA influencers. When Trump was out of office and not running the Feds, MAGAtards loved to claim that far-Right groups like Patriot Front were “Feds” paid to make Trump look bad. Now that Trump is head Fed, they have smoothly pivoted to the claim that Unite the Right was astroturfed by the SPLC.
So is this good or bad for White Nationalism?
It is an unmitigated boon. The SPLC, one of the banes of our existence, will be weakened by this. It may even be destroyed.
But how is it a good thing that White Nationalist groups had high-level infiltrators? It isn’t. But given that there were such infiltrators, it is good to know who they are. It isn’t good to have cancer, but it is good to know if you have it. This news is not akin to cancer. It is akin to the diagnosis. Thus the Trump administration has done our movement a huge favor. Thank you, President Trump.
But isn’t it bad that smooth brains on X are claiming that the entire White Nationalist milieu is simply astroturfed by the Left? Sure, in a perfect world, in which there were no stupid and dishonest people, this would not be happening. But that’s not reality.
Good news is still good news, no matter what idiots twist it into.
We are lied about and slandered all the time. This is just a drop in the ocean. Beyond that, it isn’t even a new slander.
Intelligent people are not taken in, and more of them are coming to our side every day.
The claim that our movement is astroturfed is the same sort of wishful thinking that attributes national populism to a few charismatic politicians deceiving the masses.
In truth, our movement has far firmer foundations. Nationalism, populism, and white identity politics are growing because of the failures of liberalism, multiculturalism, and globalization.
There’s a great deal of speculation about who the informants actually are. Naturally, everyone thinks that their least favorite nationalist is the villain. I see little reason to get too worked up over this. These operatives do not enjoy the immunity of federal informants. All their names will be revealed eventually.
When the SPLC goes on trial for manufacturing hate and defrauding its donors, I wonder what an Alabama jury will think of it. Here’s hoping that the SPLC is shut down, its assets distributed to its victims, and its operatives perp-waddled off to enjoy the joys of diversity in close quarters.