Harry Litman: The DOJ's fraud indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center is disgracefully dishonest. [View all]

https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/funding-extremism-please



You may have heard that the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (”SPLC”) on Tuesday and done a double-take. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, stood at a podium and announced that the SPLC, the organization that famously bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan, was, in fact, doing the opposite of what it claimed. The SPLC was, in Blanche’s words, “not dismantling extremism, but funding it.” He added, for good measure, that the SPLC had been “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

The SPLC a clandestine supporter of the very groups it is famous for fighting? It really didn’t seem to add up at the most basic level. And the reason it didn’t is that it isn’t true.

This is, above all, a deeply dishonest indictment—politically motivated, intellectually bankrupt, and designed to leave a lasting false impression in the minds of people who will never look past the headline: My gosh, the good guys are the bad guys. The SPLC is a shill for the very groups it claims to fight. It is a narrative that is not just false but Orwellian, turned exactly on its head by people who purposely intend to deceive.

The conduct that the administration has alleged is criminal is the use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups. As the indictment puts it, “unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance.”

That sounds strange and puzzling. Read on a bit longer, and it becomes clear that the administration is charging the SPLC with what law enforcement does every day: recruiting and paying confidential informants inside extremist organizations to gather intelligence, expose their operations, and ultimately dismantle them.

*snip*