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Transcript:
Two years ago, I made a video debating the meaning of stochastic terrorism, after I was cruelly censored by Mastodon for inciting violence with a festive post celebrating the message of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which is that workers should kidnap their bosses at gunpoint to be justly paid for their work.
I mentioned an incident from 2013, in which a gay rights activist planned to murder a bunch of people at the headquarters of the virulently homophobic Family Research Council–headquarters he was able to find because Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, listed them on their website as a hate site and included their offices on a handy map.
Was SPLC accountable for that act of terrorism? I don’t think so, and neither do researchers like Dr. James Angove at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, but the rightwing hate groups that SPLC exposes continue to try to flip the “victim” narrative by arguing that being labeled a hate group is dangerous rhetoric that endangers their lives.
SPLC has been targeted by the hate groups they expose throughout its history, or at least since 1979 when they switched from a legal clinic helping those in poverty to actively attacking the Klu Klux Klan, which, despite already being on their last legs, fought back by firebombing SPLC’s headquarters in 1983. A few successful lawsuits later and the SPLC was able to declare victory and transition their “Klanwatch” program into a more general “Hatewatch” program that still exists today, in which they identify and investigate hate groups around the United States, leading those hate groups to cry victim.
Those hate groups got a big win last week, when the Trump administration announced that they would be prosecuting SPLC on federal fraud charges, claiming that the group cheated their supporters by paying informants to infiltrate hate groups and gather intelligence on potential violence. That program is no longer active, and when it was active it was kept secret from the public, obviously, but it wasn’t kept secret from the feds, considering that SPLC shared the intel with law enforcement when appropriate. It was only last year that Kash Patel announced that the FBI was severing its official relationship with SPLC, right before he took a government jet to Vegas to compete in a keg stand contest, probably.
So, I’m not a lawyer and I have no idea if this case has merit–the feds allege that SPLC set up fake organizations to pay the informants in secret and without telling donors, and for all I know that is illegal. But considering that the feds seem to have known about this program for decades, throughout conservative and liberal administrations, I have no doubt that this is happening specifically because the far right is now in power and is using the power of the federal government to punish the people and institutions they see as standing up to fascism. And that’s bullshit.
All that said, there is an additional complication to this case, and it actually reminds me of the recent revelations about Cesar Chavez, which shocked people who hadn’t studied his history but was par for the course for those who had. Because when the Justice Department alleges that “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” there are a lot of ex-employees and insiders who would begrudgingly, at least partially, agree.
As someone who talks often about far-right and religious hate groups, SPLC has been a fantastic resource. Their in-depth investigations help reveal networks of violent extremists that we need to be paying attention to. But for most of their history, the organization has been plagued by mismanagement: the founder, Morris Dees, was always known to be a charismatic and ambitious guy who knew how to drum up publicity and make a buck, and he and other leaders throughout SPLC history were frequently accused by staffers of racial discrimination and sexual harassment. These accusations came with plenty of evidence, and, importantly, from people who still genuinely believed in the organization’s mission and wanted it to succeed.
The accusations have been well documented by talented journalists as far back as the 1990s, and according to several ex-employees it continues today. Just last month, former SPLC investigator and spokesperson Michael Edison Hayden detailed his experiences working there from 2019 to 2024. He joined up full of excitement to fight rightwing extremism, but was shocked at the toxic work environment he walked into. Though the staff had already unionized, when he became a union steward in 2022 he realized leadership was actively anti-union and seemed to do everything they could to make union leaders miserable until they quit.
The most disappointing thing he describes, in my opinion, is SPLC’s seeming capitulation in advance to the Trump administration. When Trump was elected the first time, the organization got a flood of very large donations that allowed them to hire loads of new employees. However, by the 2022 midterms they were sending their staff on pointless and expensive jaunts instead of funding actual investigations, and by the time Trump was elected they were drastically reducing their publicity and delaying their annual Year in Hate and Extremism report by six months at the request of Democratic leadership.
October 7th of 2023 marked the beginning of the end for Hayden, as he watched SPLC refuse to act on the growing support in the United States for genocide against Palestinians. SPLC actually punished Hayden, an Arab American, for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire, while ignoring his friend and coworker who also signed but was a Jewish woman. She and other coworkers pointed this out and encouraged him to take action, so he went to the ACLU, who wanted to take his case until they ran into conflicts of interest: the ACLU lawyers and the SPLC lawyers work in exactly the same space. Eventually, he found another lawyer who secured a settlement a few months later.
It’s so disappointing to see an organization that has the funding and goals and staff to make real change in the world, but the leadership decided to bet it all on cowardly compliance. We have seen this over and over and over again ever since Trump took office for his second time: the institutions that stand up to him, win. Those who give in, lose.
One of Trump’s first executive orders, for example, sanctioned law firms that took positions antithetical to his administration. Within weeks, “nine of the country’s biggest firms capitulate(d) to Trump’s demands, agreeing to provide the administration with a total of nearly $1 billion in free legal assistance in exchange for an unenforceable promise from the president not to issue an executive order punishing the firm.”
“Four firms…chose to fight…Each won federal district court rulings holding that the orders violated their First Amendment right to advocate for clients and causes of their choosing.”
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell refused to step down in the face of Trump’s Justice Department harassing him, and last week the Department announced they were giving up.
SPLC thought they could milk their donors with scary emails about how they were fighting fascism, while actually laying low and avoiding taking the spotlight with a principled stand. And how did that work out for them? A federal indictment for fraud for an investigative program that doesn’t even exist anymore.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that for most of its history, SPLC has had white straight male leadership getting paid handsomely while a diverse team of investigative journalists and legal experts toil beneath them with little reward. “Diversity is a strength” has become a bit of a cliche that people don’t take seriously, but it is honestly true: I believe that if SPLC had spent the past few decades fostering, rewarding, and promoting employees from a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, then today they would actually be able to meet the moment they were supposedly created for. We need strong institutions led by courageous people who aren’t afraid to fight fascism in the cold light of day, as opposed to institutions that clearly only exist because they make their rich leadership richer, and so avoid any action that might make them uncomfortable.
Like Hayden, despite knowing SPLC’s flaws, I think this is a witch hunt. I truly, genuinely hope that SPLC wins this case and takes the lesson: adapt, fight, and win, or die.
