In Trump's America, fighting back against the KKK is now basically an act of "terrorism."
The Justice Department brought charges against a major civil rights organization. This will be Trump's template for prosecuting the entire American left.
The Trump administration just fired the opening shot in its war against left-leaning nonprofit groups, wielding the criminal justice system as a weapon against a civil rights organization whose only crime was apparently infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama handed down an eleven-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a top civil rights organization dedicated to tracking and exposing hate groups.
The move should set off alarm bells across left-leaning nonprofits around the country, as it signals the Trump administration is moving forward aggressively to attack those groups, using whatever scraps of information it can find to destroy them. It’s important to unpack the indictment because it says a lot about how Trump intends to go after other groups tied to the political opposition, namely, by using spurious claims of “fraud.”
The government’s allegation is that the SPLC defrauded its donors by secretly routing three million dollars to individuals affiliated with white supremacist organizations (among them the KKK and the neo-Nazi National Alliance) in order to pay them as informants embedded inside those groups.
In other words, the administration is saying that by paying informants to infiltrate and expose domestic extremist groups, the SPLC was supporting those groups. If you think that’s stupid, you’re right.
Consider the analogy. An undercover cop sits at the table with the mob in an effort to document their crimes. Do you repay him by charging him with racketeering? Or how about this: A volunteer firefighter kicks down the door to rush into a burning building that someone else set on fire. Do you charge him with vandalism for kicking down the door or arson for being in the burning house? Of course not. That doesn’t make sense.
SPLC has spent more than fifty years working to document, track, and expose the violent extremist networks that have bombed American churches, murdered American citizens, and terrorized American communities. While not everyone has agreed with their methods or their politics, they undoubtedly saved lives by gathering critical information on these groups that federal authorities didn’t always have. In fact, the SPLC spent years partnered with law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and DHS, with whom they allegedly shared information provided by their paid informants, sources who risked their lives to get life-saving information.
For this, yesterday, the Justice Department announced it is prosecuting them.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at a podium Tuesday alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and announced that the SPLC had been “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” That’s quite the claim coming from the nation’s top law enforcement official. Indeed, the FBI runs paid informants inside criminal organizations every single day. The ATF does it. The DEA does it. No one has ever argued that paying a cartel insider makes you a drug trafficker, or that embedding an agent inside a militia makes the government a domestic terrorist organization. Taking to its logical end, the legal theory Blanche unveiled Tuesday would make every undercover operation in the history of American law enforcement a criminal conspiracy.
But it gets even sillier. Although the Justice Department is effectively accusing SPLC of funding terrorism, DOJ apparently couldn’t get anywhere close to charging SPLC with any sort of terrorism offenses. And how could they? The group obviously exists to oppose domestic extremist groups, not support them. So DOJ settled on a flimsy and almost laughable claim of donor fraud.
In effect, the government is saying that because SPLC kept its informant networks secret and used shell companies to pay them, it defrauded its donors. Ergo, it was secretly funding hate groups. Again, the firefighter analogy applies. The shell companies weren’t vehicles for embezzlement or a way to fund the terrible groups SPLC was trying to dismantle. They were clearly cover identities for sources whose lives depended on their anonymity. You don’t publish the names of your informants in an annual nonprofit report. You protect them. That’s seemingly what SPLC did.
Wire fraud requires a material misrepresentation that causes harm to a victim. So did that happen? Well, let’s follow the money. First, SPLC’s donors gave money to fight white supremacist and domestic extremist groups. Second, the SPLC paid sources inside those white supremacist and domestic extremist groups to stop violent attacks and expose criminals. Third, the SPLC received intelligence from informants to undermine, expose, and/or take down white supremacists and domestic extremist groups — including sharing that information with authorities, thereby preventing violent attacks and saving lives.
Sounds like they carried out their mission in a way any of their donors would celebrate. In fact, the only people who could argue otherwise are people who never wanted the SPLC’s mission to succeed in the first place, which brings us to the real story here.
The Trump administration’s prosecution doesn’t appear to be born from a tip, a whistleblower, or a good-faith audit. In reality, it appears born from political hostility toward the SPLC from the very men who are now wielding the indictment against it. Indeed, MAGA figures have been gunning for the SPLC for years and now seem to be using their offices to attack it.
Take Stephen Miller, for instance. Stephen is arguably the most powerful policy architect in the executive branch. And he just so happens to sit in the SPLC’s Extremist Files, alongside former Klan leaders and neo-Nazi figures. He was placed on one of SPLC’s hate lists for promoting white nationalist content. Miller has a direct personal stake in destroying the organization that documented him, along with an array of other Trump figures and conservative groups infuriated that the SPLC has exposed their ties to domestic extremist organizations, such as those that carried out a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
So it should come as no surprise then that the Trump administration has been signaling it’s going to do something against SPLC.
In April of last year, Kash Patel announced a Justice Department task force on “anti-Christian bias” and declared that the FBI would “never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups — and certainly not from the SPLC.” He then formally severed all FBI ties to the organization in October 2025 in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whose organization had also been designated as a hate group by SPLC. Patel branded it a “partisan smear machine” whose hate map had “defamed mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”
This is the same Kash Patel who stood at a podium Tuesday to announce the criminal indictment of that same organization. The man who publicly declared war on the SPLC — for allegedly defaming his friends — is now announcing its prosecution. In any functioning judicial system, that sequence of events alone would raise serious questions about selective and vindictive prosecution. Perhaps, in coming courtroom battles, it will.
But the score-settling is actually not the most alarming part of what happened yesterday. The precedent is what people should be paying attention to.
The Trump administration is willing to use a grab bag of legal claims (support for domestic terrorism, wire fraud, whatever it can get its hands on) to prosecute organizations tied to the political opposition. Specifically, the tenuous use of “fraud” is something all left-leaning nonprofits should hone in on. The DOJ is scanning their websites for how they portray themselves to donors and looking for anything it can get its hooks into to prosecute them. It doesn’t even matter if the cases hold up in court. Their hope is that negative news coverage will be enough to scare off donors, employees, and the public, until those left-leaning groups are forced to shut down.
The Soviet Union considered this their “easy button.” You don’t need to use a secret police to silence your opponents if the attorney general will hold a press conference to do the job for you. You certainly don’t need to spend the money to build another gulag if a federal indictment will effectively bankrupt an organization, destroy its credibility, and terrify its leaders and donors into silence. SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said Tuesday that the government has been weaponized to dismantle organizations like his. He’s right. And he will not be the last to say it.
Zoom out, my friends. They’ve issued executive orders targeting law firms that represent Trump’s enemies… weaponized audits of universities considered bastions of liberalism… frozen grants used to punish civil society organizations for insufficient loyalty… launched investigations of journalists who criticized the president... pursued indictments of political opponents and former employees who exposed Trump. They’re bubble-wrapping each of these actions in the language of law and order. But together, they constitute a systematic campaign to quash dissent and the political opposition to Donald Trump.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is not a perfect institution. In fact, for many years while working in the Republican Party, I considered them an annoyance, albeit an annoyance that often times did good works. But political preference isn’t the standard for who gets prosecuted in America; it’s good-faith evidence of actual criminal conduct. And on the evidence available today, this indictment does not appear to be born from good faith but, rather, from an administration that demanded prosecutors find something — anything — to take down one of their nemeses.
We can laugh at the absurdity of someone like Kash Patel trying to accuse an organization that fights domestic extremism of funding it. But we should take the Trump regime’s revenge campaign seriously. Because they certainly are.
Your friend, in defiance,
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I figured SPLC was first on the DOJ "terrorist" list. The GOP has hated and mocked them for years...the GOP doesn't believe in freedom and justice for all.
Gotta call it what it is…BULLSHIT!! Proud supporter of SPLC for over 25 years!!