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I was sitting in my office in Franklin, Tennessee, in early October 2023, when the phone rang. The caller said he was from something called “Nashville Open Source Intelligence.” I had never heard of it, but he quickly got my attention.

The mysterious caller said his group monitors Telegram—a messaging app popular among the far right—for threats against citizens, and I was now the target of a threat that had just been posted online.

Chillingly, not only was my photo posted, but so was my home address.

“Now looky here,” the post began. “ Peggy’s rich White ass hates ‘your’ poor White ass for some strange reason. She makes a living spewing off from her rich mouth about you having too much White privilege. Meanwhile you are struggling to put food on the table to just merely Exist in this dystopian nightmare these brainwashed maniacs like her have created for you.”

It concluded, “I think it’s about time that her and her kind were silenced.”

This would be the first threat I received but, sadly, not the last.

The post came from Nashville’s notorious Lewis Country Store. It was the home of the Tennessee Active Club, a white nationalist neo-Nazi network in Tennessee that utilizes combat sports to recruit members and train for violence.

Brad Lewis, a self-described “actual literal Nazi,” was their leader.

How did I become the target of neo-Nazis? How did hate march its way onto my suburban street and to my front door?

How hate came to Main Street

In mid-March of 2023, I had read in the local paper that one of our aldermen, Gabrielle Hanson, was opposing the Williamson County Remembrance Project. The project would erect several markers in town to chronicle the history of the mostly African American lynching victims in Franklin, Tennessee. Franklin is a beautiful small city sitting in and around a major Civil War battlefield. Citizens in Franklin treasure its history and understand how telling the full story is a way to recognize all parts of its past. One alderman noted, “The reality is this community has a strong collaborative approach to telling our history.”

Alderman Hanson strongly disagreed. She said these “racial terror placards” would give victim status to those who experienced a civil rights violation and lead to reparations. These remarks caused me to pay more attention to our Board of Mayor and Aldermen and to listen more closely to Alderman Hanson, who would later announce her candidacy for Mayor of Franklin.

I did not know that these were the first steps hate would take on its way down our Main Street.

Just a week later in March 2023, hate took a few more steps. Hanson was a guest on a podcast and began by discussing her stand against Franklin’s Pride Festival. Her comments in public meetings and during this podcast struck me as bigoted and divisive. Then, she began talking about the murders at Nashville’s Covenant School, which had happened a few days prior. She claimed to have inside knowledge and said the shootings were the result of a “love triangle” and that she had predicted the shootings.

Parents and family members of the victims were understandably outraged. It was at this point that I began attending open Alderman meetings and paying close attention to how those we had elected were serving our community. Many citizens, including myself, wrote our elected officials and voiced our concern over Hanson’s comments and called for an ethics investigation. That investigation was dismissed because Hanson’s words did not meet the very narrow definitions in the city’s ethics policies.

A month later Hanson ramped up her hateful rhetoric, and hate continued its march down our Main Street. Hanson did not want a Juneteenth Festival in town and wrote to a major sponsor of the festival demanding they withdraw their donation. She called the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition, sponsors of the event, radical. Members of this organization were my friends, and her words angered me. In this case, she had represented herself as an Alderman for the City of Franklin—my city—and I believed she had committed an ethics violation.

I, along with two others, filed a formal complaint. Hanson’s response? She filed official paperwork to run for mayor.

As a citizen who filed a formal ethics complaint, I knew my name would be public. I also knew I would be called to speak during various hearings. I was interviewed by several newspapers and a local television station.

I felt strongly enough about standing up against Hanson’s bigoted rhetoric that I was willing to speak boldly.

Once I became an official complainant in the ethics investigation, I sometimes felt an occasional cold breeze as I made my way down the grocery store isle or as I attended community functions. Folks in Franklin like our town to be portrayed as a “Hallmark” town, and negative publicity does not sit well with many. News stations, both local and national, had picked up on the story and some saw the complainants as the reason for negative publicity.

Standing up to hate was beginning to cost me social connections and a sense of ease.

By September, Phil Williams had picked up on the Hanson story. He began a months-long investigative series uncovering Hanson’s complicated past. Every few days, Hanson and her campaign would provide new material for Phil including doctored social media posts, lies to police, and a general trail of hypocrisy and deceit.

In early October, now-mayoral candidate Hanson was part of a candidate forum held at the Franklin City Hall. I attended. So did members of the Tennessee Active Club. Among the group was the “literal Nazi” Brad Lewis. They said they were there to provide security for their friend, Gabrielle Hanson.

I was approached by a citizen during this forum who told me to “stop giving our town a bad name and leave if you don’t like it here.” Phil Williams was also there and confronted the neo-Nazis. The story made national news.

The next day I received that first threat.

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Then a second threat

A few days later, I arrived home to find a flyer hanging on my front door handle. Candidate Hanson was having a meet and greet in my neighborhood, and members of my household were invited My husband and I decided to go, and I decided to ask Hanson directly what she thought of her white supremacist Nazi friends threatening me. She denied any knowledge of the threats. She asked for proof, so I raised my phone to show her a screenshot of the threat.

We arrived home and, within an hour, I was notified of another threat from the same group as before. This threat, also posted on Telegram, included a photo of my screenshot which I showed only to Hanson and her campaign worker.

“Well… well… well… One of our critics must be scared,” it read, concluding: “This ain’t your revolution no more. We’re taking over from here. Hail Victory.” It was followed by the twin lightning bolts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi SS.

For me, this was proof that candidate Hanson’s campaign was directly tied to the neo-Nazi Tennessee Active Club. Whether it was through the mayoral hopeful herself or a volunteer with the campaign, we did not know. My husband and I contacted Phil, and we agreed to appear on the evening news.

We were not afraid to stand up to hate.

It had shown up not only on Main Street but right at our front door.

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Lessons learned

The good news is that Hanson handily lost her bid for mayor. However, the white supremacists celebrated—because over 3300 people voted for their candidate who they apparently believed hates all the same people they hate. A local political action committee supported Hanson to the very end. The local Republican party refused to denounce Hanson.

I wish I could say we kicked hate all the way down Main Street and right out of town. The truth is we only quietened it for a while.

Phil Williams’ reporting shined a light on the racism and bigotry that came out in full force during the fall of 2023. Now, we are in another local election season. Several of the candidates are people who stood by Hanson to the very end.

I never thought I’d be the target of dangerous, armed, hate-filled men who wear Nazi tattoos with pride. To be honest, I never thought standing up to such hate would be necessary. But that is what it was and is for me—necessary.

The hate was always here, though.

It was somewhere below the surface waiting for the right time to reveal itself through men and women who felt emboldened to take off their hoods. I fear they are more emboldened than ever in today’s climate. Each time we have a chance to stand face to face with intolerance and prejudice we must hold the line. I have faith in what is right, and I believe love wins.

The only thing standing up to hate cost me is a few social invites and some friendships I had misread. What a small price to pay.

Peggy Kingsbury is a resident of Franklin, Tennessee, a small business owner, and a believer in democracy.

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A former Southern Poverty Law Center insider calls the Trump administration’s effort to create a bogus narrative around the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally “offensive,” especially to the people of Charlottesville.

The Trump Justice Department recently indicted the legendary civil rights group on fraud and money laundering charges and, even though it is not alleged in the indictment, publicly accused the SPLC of orchestrating the deadly protest.

“It’s incredibly offensive for one thing,” said Michael Edison Hayden in an interview for Hate Comes to Main Street.

“We know exactly who did this down in Charlottesville. It’s a huge offense to the people there who are still emotionally recovering from what happened.”

Hayden, who worked at the SPLC between 2018 and 2023, is the author of a new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town. The story includes his tenure as an investigative reporter for the non-profit organization. He even served as an SPLC spokesperson.

SPLC paid informants?

In the interview, Hayden—who has sometimes been sharply critical of SPLC management—told me he knew nothing about the system of paying informants that is at the heart of the Department of Justice’s allegations against the group.

SPLC now says that program was discontinued a few years back.

“I never heard of it my entire time there—never! No one ever mentioned it to me. I never had to speak about it,” he added.

“When you’re talking about the ins and outs of a major organization, you do get background information about stuff you don’t talk about, right? … I literally never even heard of this program.”

Who was ‘Unite the Right’ informant?

In the case of the Charlottesville informant, one paragraph in the indictment references a person who somehow got into “leadership chat group” for the rally allegedly helped arrange transportation for “several” of the 500-1,000 attendees.

MAGA influencers have alleged—without evidence—that the paragraph proves the Southern Poverty Law Center organized the rally and paid for transportation.

“Some of these chats were pretty accessible,” Hayden said.

“Sometimes they would involve just a link posted somewhere. So we don’t know if this is just some random guy who was feeding information to the SPLC and getting money for it … who happened to be lurking in the background.”

In fact, as I first reported, “Unite the Right” organizer Richard B. Spencer has speculated the informant “will be someone whom no one remembers.”

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Mike Hayden and Stephen Miller

We also talked about a major investigation in which Hayden was involved at the Southern Poverty Law Center that galled the Trump administration.

In that case, he obtained a cache of emails revealing how White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller had “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

“He was sending links to Breitbart to try to change the conversation on conservative media to something that was more nativist—you could argue more white supremacist,” Hayden told me.

After that, Republicans made a commitment to go after the SPLC.

“It was obvious that the SPLC would be in the sights of this administration when they came back,” the author concluded.

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Much more in video

In the interview, we talk much more about:

• Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the quaint tourist town that was torn apart by the arrival of extremists with the white nationalist group VDARE;

• VDARE’s influence on modern American politics;

• The intense stresses that come with investigating hate groups; and

• What Hayden thinks Americans can learn from what he has seen.

I think it’s a fascinating conversation.

Please watch, then tell me what you think.

Attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center fired back against the Trump administration Tuesday in a pair of filings that accuse prosecutors of ignoring critical evidence in its indictment of the civil rights organization, perhaps even misleading grand jurors who approved the charges.

In the filings, SPLC lawyers argue that the group helped thwart a potential terrorist attack in Las Vegas in 2019 and tried to warn law enforcement before the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Defense attorneys are asking the court to unseal transcripts of grand jury proceedings to determine what grand jurors were told. The motions also ask for an order requiring Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to retract statements he made on Fox News and prohibiting Trump administration officials from continuing to wage a pre-trial PR campaign against the group.

“This prosecution is as unprecedented as it is irregular,” SPLC lawyers argue in one of the two motions. “Comments made by Administration officials and flaws in the indictment itself suggest the case results from misleading both the public and the grand jury that voted on the charges.”

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‘Unite the Right’ warnings

As part of its efforts to prosecute the SPLC in the court of public opinion, Trump administration officials have accused the group of orchestrating the deadly “Unite the Right” rally.

President Trump himself has called the event “fake.”

Those accusations regarding Charlottesville are not contained in the indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama.

The indictment accuses the SPLC of fraud and money laundering in how it conducted an intelligence-gathering operation to dig up potential dirt on violent right-wing extremists.

Blanche told Fox News he had no evidence that SPLC ever shared information from those undercover sources with law enforcement.

In fact, defense lawyers insist that prosecutors knew that “the SPLC used the informant program to gather voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence at Charlottesville.”

Here’s what the motion says about that effort.

“That information was memorialized and provided to law enforcement, including to the FBI’s Mobile, Alabama office—the very office leading the investigation of this case—in advance of the rally in the form of a 45-page “Event Alert.” That document warned the FBI of the specific individuals likely to attend the rally and foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories. For some of the individuals identified in this Event Alert, the SPLC even provided details about those individuals’ weapons of choice based on intelligence gathered through the informant program.”

While the Trump administration has argued the purpose of the informant program was to “manufacture racism,” defense attorneys say prosecutors ignored evidence that the SPLC shared intelligence with law enforcement “to thwart, stop, or otherwise help dismantle the activities of those racist groups.”

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Individuals A and B

That motion identifies a person known as Individual A, a member of the extremist group Vanguard America who sought a security clearance as part of his work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 2018. According to that filing, SPLC passed along information from one of its inside sources. Federal prosecutors charged Individual A, who was convicted and sent to prison.

In 2019, SPLC warned law enforcement that “Individual B, a member of white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division, intended to engage in a major terrorist attack against Las Vegas citizens,” defense attorneys say.

That motion continues:

“The press release issued later by the Department of Justice detailed Individual B’s planned violence: [Individual B] admitted that, during online conversations between May 2019 and July 15, 2019, he discussed setting fire to a Las Vegas synagogue, and making Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices. Individual B further admitted that he conducted surveillance on a bar that he believed catered to the LGBTQ community, located on Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas, in preparation for a potential attack. The complaint filed by the government against Individual B, signed under oath by an FBI Special Agent, detailed specifically just how close Individual B got to executing a mass terror attack….”

Individual B, according to the motion, was charged, pled guilty and sentenced.

“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” defense attorneys argue. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”

Magistrate Judge Kelly Fitzgerald Pate gave the government until May 5th to file a response.

We saw the video with our own eyes:

• Hundreds of angry White men walking in mass, carrying torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

• White nationalists, dressed for battle in helmets and body armor, brandishing weapons of every sort, violently attacking counter-protesters who had come to take a stand against their hate.

• Neo-Nazi Alex Fields plowing into a crowd inside his Dodge Challenger, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than 30 others.

Now, President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies want us to believe that we did not see what we thought we saw in Charlottesville, that it was not disturbing evidence of the rise of hate in America.

In the president’s own words, “It was fake.”

This latest Trump conspiracy theory involves the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally where as many as 1,000 white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hatemongers descended upon the Virginia town for an event that would quickly turn deadly.

After a trial lasting more than four weeks, with more than 900 exhibits and 35 witnesses, an 11-person jury found the white nationalist organizers liable for some $26 million dollars in damages for what transpired that August weekend.

As the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, the “Unite the Right” organizers “planned for months to provoke Antifa and its followers into a violent battle.” One man, Jason Kessler, “sought to “rais[e] an army.” That included “discussing whether someone could drive a car through a crowd of demonstrators.”

Another prominent figure believed that “violence might be necessary to secure [a] white ethnostate.” And, according to the court, “he wasn’t alone.”

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Here’s what you probably have not seen in any mainstream media.

In his most recent conversation with 60 Minutes—part of the extended interview that did not make it into the broadcast—President Trump insisted that “Unite the Right” was really a leftist plot ginned up by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The president repeatedly referred to the SPLC as the “Southern Law.”

“Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law,” Trump told correspondent Norah O’Donnell in that extended interview posted by CBS News.

“And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”

The president claimed SPLC “spent millions and millions of dollars” on “bad, bad groups,” and the civil rights group “kept ‘em going.” Trump falsely claimed investigators “have checks to the Ku Klux Klan and many others.”

“These are not just allegations,” he insisted.

Those comments were reposted on X by Trump’s rapid response account.

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Here are the facts

As I have previously noted, the actual indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, makes no such allegation about the SPLC funding the events in Charlottesville.

It only says the Southern Poverty Law Center paid an informant who somehow was included in the leadership chat group for “Unite the Right” and was involved in arranging transportation for “several” attendees.

It does not identify the informant as an actual leader in the movement, nor does it say that SPLC paid for organizing the event or for transporting participants.

Still, that has not stopped MAGA influencers from claiming that “Unite the Right” was really an SPLC plot.

In response, one event organizer, Richard Spencer—who was among those found civilly liable for the tragedy—has mocked the MAGA conspiracy theories, comparing them to the useless “Epstein Binders” released by AG Pam Bondi.

Another Charlottesville figure, who now goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus and was convicted for his role in the tragedy, had a similar reaction.

“Every ‘right-wing’ influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me,” he wrote in a lengthy post on X.

Despite Trump’s claims, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted to reporters last week that investigators only have payments to informants inside various hate groups, not to the groups themselves.

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When you’ve lost Jared Taylor…

In fact, a frequent target of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate investigations is also expressing skepticism about the DOJ’s indictment.

“I am no friend of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I suppose I take a detached sort of amusement in its current struggles,” said Jared Taylor, who publishes a white nationalist website called American Renaissance.

Commenting on the criminal case during AmRen’s Radio Renaissance podcast, Taylor said the SPLC indictment “doesn’t make sense to me.”

“They were paying people to go spy, and that’s the sort of thing that these so-called watchdogs do,” he continued. “They send people in and they try to get the hot dope on all of these ‘nasty haters.’ I just don’t think that many of the donors would be upset that the money was spent for that purpose.”

Related:
Inside the influential white-supremacist conference that calls Tennessee ‘home away from home’
Advocates for political violence among those welcomed to conference at Tennessee state park

SPLC’s website describes Taylor as someone who “projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist—a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old.”

His group hosts an annual conference at Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park where, in SPLC’s words, “racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

“These people are swine, top to bottom, but I don’t think they deserve to go to jail for what they were doing,” Taylor insisted.

What do you think?

Thanks to for having me on to talk about my reporting about how white nationalists are mocking MAGA’s spin on the DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As I reported last week:

Prominent white nationalists, including those who planned Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally, are mocking MAGA figures for their efforts to spin the Trump administration’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Those reactions from the people with the most knowledge of the events in question follow repeated claims by MAGA figures in recent days that the indictment of the legendary civil rights group proved that it created what were essentially “false flags” for fundraising purposes.

“I’m beginning to feel that the #SPLC indictment is much more like the Epstein Binders than a real criminal case,” said Richard Spencer in a post on X.

“In other words, it’s a convenient conspiracy theory or limited hangout served up by the government to allow conservatives to indulge in victimization.”

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“I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

Megan Basham is the type of Christian who, from my personal experience, can sometimes give Christians a bad name.

Because she did not like my reporting, even though she knew absolutely nothing about me, she recently tried to falsely label me as a serial adulterer who jumps from one marriage to another. Her defense: she reached that conclusion because that’s what AI led her to believe.

Basham also falsely claimed that I somehow “need” hate groups “to keep [my] little website going,” despite the fact that my award-winning reporting on the rise of hate in America has resulted in death threats against me and my family. I have neither the “need” to fabricate that hate, nor a “need” for it in my life.

Sadly, my experience is not the first time that the self-described “journalist” has faced questions about her heavy-handed and, many would say, cruel approach. (More on that at the bottom of this post.)

A commentator for the right-wing Daily Wire and a self-described evangelical “church lady,” Basham positions herself as an arbiter of what is true Christianity. She engages in what she calls “debate” with a take-no-prisoners vengeance to which anyone who has a differing viewpoint must submit—or be destroyed.

Such viciousness is often chum in the water for her 206,000 X followers, who can get worked up into a feeding frenzy around the targets of her wrath.

Take, for example, her recent baseless insistence that the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center showed the legendary civil rights organization paid people “to organize protests and transport [people] to those protests.”

Basham did not appreciate my own post that conclusively showed that MAGA influencers like her were twisting the words of the indictment—a conclusion that, to this day, she refuses to acknowledge.

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How it started

Her response was to attack me professionally and personally.

“Over the last few days I have explained to a couple of evangelicals relying on his reporting that Phil Williams is not a reputable reporter but a one-man hit job factory against conservative Christians,” she posted on X on April 22 in what she herself described as an “argument AGAINST”—in all caps— my credibility.

Her post indicated she had not actually understood what I had written in the essay she was trying to rip apart.

An anonymous account came to my defense.

“First off, you do not know [Phil] Williams at ALL. He is the most stand up Christian caring human being I’ve ever met,” the person wrote.

That’s when Basham questioned whether I was the right kind of Christian.

“If @PhilNvestigates is a Christian, he is of the mainline sort that argues that homosexuality and abortion are compatible with Christianity,” she responded.

Online, she has repeatedly demanded that I respond to her speculation about my personal beliefs.

I have never publicly discussed the details of my faith; that’s between my priest and myself. Still, Basham apparently comes from the politically driven mindset that those issues are the only ones that define who counts as a real Christian.

The next day, as the MAGA backlash against my reporting on the SPLC indictment continued, another detractor suggested that I must be gay—again, as if that was somehow relevant to the accuracy of my reporting.

“Phil is not gay but he has had three wives,” Basham responded.

Even the original tweeter was taken aback.

“I was being mean and a bad person on X,” the person responded. “You did it much better so I am going to delete my tweet.”

Later, I called out Basham for her personal attack, noting that “my second wife died, and I found the person with whom I want to spend the rest of my life.”

What happened to my first marriage at an early age is nobody’s business—even though some of her followers continued to demand that I provide an explanation.

In response to my post, Basham apologized for using the word “but”—not for telling her followers that I had three wives! She claimed she was simply defending me against an anonymous tweeter’s accusation that I was gay.

“I did not know one of your wives died. I’m sorry that happened to you,” she wrote.

Still, when pressed about her apology for the “but,” the Christian influencer—who has repeatedly defended thrice-married MAGA figures Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth—admitted she was implying that I was a serial adulterer.

“Just admit that you were calling him an adulterer and apologize for that,” an anonymous account tweeted. “Don’t apologize for including the word ‘but.’ This is why people have such low regard for Christians and Christianity these days.”

Basham answered, “Yes, that was my implication yes. And that’s why I apologized for saying but.”

Even in that moment, she was still unable to bring herself to offer an unambiguous apology.

Instead, Basham hinted it was still possible that my one and only divorce—what she repeatedly called my “first divorce”—might have been an adulterous one by her personal biblical standards.

“Now, I don’t know the circumstances of his first divorce, so it’s possible I may still think that,” she wrote. Her apology, she admitted, was only for “including the wife who died in that assessment” of my character.

In another tweet, Basham admitted she formulated her opinion because—get this—”AI told me he has had three wives.”

“I consider divorce for any reason beyond adultery or abandonment a form of adultery,” she explained.

Later, Basham responded to someone who was defending her and asking, “Since when is it wrong to state facts?””

“It wasn’t,” she agreed. “And I still may think that the grounds for Phil’s first divorce are not justified.”

What does a previous marriage have to do with my reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center and the rise of hate in America?

Obviously, NOTHING!

Basham has previously argued that Trump’s multiple marriages and open affairs are irrelevant because “I don’t know many Christians holding Trump out as a moral exemplar that we should listen to on issues of a family and marriage.”

Instead, apparently for me, any hint of divorce was simply a handy weapon she could wield against someone she considered an enemy.

In the end, it was a reminder that hate can sometimes come to Main Street, pridefully wearing a shiny gold cross around its neck.

As I processed the exchanges, I found myself wondering whether, when Megan Basham finally puts her smartphone aside at the end of the night, does she tell herself that she was really Christ-like that day?

Or, in her mind, does she see herself as proverbially overturning the tables in the Temple, forgetting that the exercise of moral indignation by Jesus did not define every day of his 33 years on this earth?

Only she can answer those questions.

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Is there a pattern here?

Of course, similar concerns were raised by Basham’s 2024 Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. In it, she names names of evangelicals who, by her definition, have been “co-opted by political forces with explicitly secular progressive aims.”

Despite becoming a New York Times bestseller, Basham’s book faced brutal criticism for its numerous factual errors.

A review by The Dispatch argued, “It’s worth asking: If we can’t trust her with the basic facts, why should we trust her with the interpretation of these facts? Tennessean reporter Liam Adams noted, “Those who are accused of wavering have said Basham used quotes out of context, while others have criticized the author and publisher for sidestepping journalistic ethics.”

One of Basham’s targets, Pastor Gavin Ortlund, produced two video responses—including the one below after what he described as a “pile-on” on X that was generated by the Christian influencer’s continuing attacks on him.

“In the worst expressions of it, it kind of has the feel of people trying to drag you name through the mud,” Ortlund said in the video posted below. “It feels like a smear campaign, you know, just relentlessly cruel.”

Basham also faced intense criticism for naming a church sexual abuse survivor without the woman’s permission. That led to unsuccessful calls for the publisher, Harper Collins, to withdraw the book from the market.

“Naming a sex abuse survivor without her consent is completely unethical,” wrote Julie Roys, who runs a watchdog website devoted to sexual abuse in the church. She added, “I wish I could say I was surprised, but Basham has repeatedly shown disdain for survivors.”

The Tennessean noted that Basham responded “by saying on social media those who publicly make accusations ‘should be obligated to stand behind them.’”

A book review on the Religion Unplugged website characterized Basham’s approach like this:

“She calls out individuals and institutions and repeatedly frames their left-wing views as necessarily ‘dupes or deceivers’ of one form or another. She agrees she doesn’t know if these examples are ‘literally’ bought and paid for but will only allow that they might be influenced by other negative motives, or—at best—fooled.

“Why can’t people ever simply have good-faith disagreements? She agrees in the introduction that such a thing is possible, but in practice largely ignores that possibility for the majority of the book.”

That, from my experience, is the central question about Megan Basham’s approach: Why does she not acknowledge that people can simply disagree, especially on matters of faith, in good faith?

Why does a Christian of all people feel the need to engage in the politics of personal destruction?

And how did she imagine it would be appropriate under any circumstances to hint that I was a serial adulterer when she knew nothing of my life?

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A final note:

Yes, I have blocked Megan Basham on X because I have concluded that, in my opinion, it is simply not possible to have an honest conversation with her.

And I have no plans to respond further, no matter how vicious her attacks may become. I think there is generally great truth in the aphorism, “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

And, as a Christian, I honestly hope she can somehow find a way to bring more peace into her own life.

Finally, thank you to all who have come to my defense and offered words of encouragement. If you support my work, I hope that you will subscribe to “my little website” and will continue to follow me on this sometimes-difficult journey.

Imagine it’s June 1939. A ship carrying 907 Jewish refugees floats just miles off the coast of Florida—close enough to see the lights and palm trees of Miami, but with nowhere to land.

Mothers hold their children a little tighter as they stare out at the shoreline. Fathers stand silently, watching a country they had hoped would save them drift just out of reach. Children—too young to understand—simply wonder why they cannot go ashore.

These passengers were fleeing Nazi Germany, where their lives had already been dismantled piece by piece. After Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses were destroyed, synagogues burned, and thousands were arrested. It was not just violence—it was a warning.

The Nuremberg Laws had already stripped Jewish citizens of their rights. They could no longer vote. They could no longer hold many jobs. They were excluded, isolated, and humiliated. Doctors could no longer treat patients. Lawyers could no longer practice law. Teachers could no longer teach.

Imagine waking up one day and being told that everything you worked for—your career, your identity, your place in society—no longer belongs to you.

And worse—your neighbors, your government, even your country—now see you as less than human.

Families who had lived in Germany for generations were suddenly strangers in their own homeland.

So they fled.

They sold what little they had left. They packed what they could carry. And they boarded a ship with one hope: safety.

The year before, at the Evian Conference in France, thirty-two nations met to address this growing crisis. They’d heard the threats made by Hitler and the Third Reich towards the German Jewish population and the Jews of Eastern Europe. Nation after nation expressed sympathy—but none were willing to open their doors in any meaningful way.

The world knew what was coming.

And the world hesitated.

Nazi leaders were watching closely, monitoring the Evian Conference. Every closed door, every refusal, sent a message: no one is coming to help.

Then came one final test—the voyage of the SS St. Louis leaving Hamburg May 13th, 1939, bound for Havana, Cuba.

But when it arrived, the passengers were denied entry. Their landing permits were suddenly invalid.

Negotiations failed.

Hope began to slip away.

With nowhere else to go, after being at sea for two weeks, the ship turned toward the United States.

And for a moment—just a glimmer of a moment—hope returned.

On board were many professionals—doctors, teachers, engineers—people who could contribute to society. Families who wanted nothing more than a chance to rebuild their lives. And the 200 children who simply needed a place to grow up, to be free, to play, learn, in safety.

The United States had a choice. A seminal moment.

Would it rise to the opportunity?

Would it act not out of fear, but out of compassion?

Would it lead?

Or would it turn away?

The decision rested with one man: Franklin D. Roosevelt. The most powerful man in the world.

Messages poured in. Appeals were made. Humanitarian organizations begged for action. Telegrams from parents with pleas to at least “give refuge to the children” aboard. These pitiful cries reached Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman known for her advocacy for children, a said “champion of children.”

But still—no answer came.

No exception was made.

No door was opened.

And the answer—from the most powerful nation in the world—was no.

The ship was forced to turn away. Coast Guard Cutters were sent with a message from the President of The United States. “SS St. Louis, leave US waters now.” The message was blared through a megaphone, while shots were fired, underscoring the communication.

Imagine the silence on that ship as it began to move away from the American shore. Imagine the realization settling in—that the last hope had just disappeared behind them.

Nine hundred and seven people.

Now with nowhere left to turn.

In that moment, the fate of these individuals—and perhaps the moral example set for the world—hung in the balance.

Could saying yes to the ship change the course of history, the greatest power in the world granting refuge to 907 German Jews, would that have mitigated the Reich’s plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe?

World War 2 started a mere 11 weeks later.

We will never know the answer to the lack of decisive action.

But then, one man made a decision.

The ship’s captain: Gustav Schröder.

He was not a politician.

He was not a world leader.

He did not command armies or shape global policy.

But he had something just as powerful: a conscience.

Though he served within Nazi Germany’s system, he did not share the hatred driving it. While others followed orders without question, Schröder chose a different path.

He chose humanity.

He treated his passengers with dignity. He refused to label them as less than human. He saw them for what they were—families, individuals, people in desperate need of help.

When orders came to return the ship to Germany, he defied those orders.

He knew what awaited his passengers. Certain death.

By this point, the threat was no longer abstract. It was real. It was imminent.

In fact, a large contingent of passengers approached the ship’s Captain with a chilling message: if the ship returned to Germany, they would rather die at sea than face what was waiting for them.

Think about that.

A group of people so desperate… so terrified… that they would choose suicide in unknown chilling depths of the Atlantic, embraced by the icy fingers of the sea over the certainty of death at the hands of those that hated them.

And Schröder listened.

He took their fear seriously. He carried their burden.

He even considered an extraordinary act—running the ship aground near the coast of England. Not out of recklessness, but out of strategy. He believed that if the ship were wrecked, international law—and basic human decency—would force a rescue.

He was willing to risk his career.

His reputation.

Even his life and the lives of his wife and two children. His family, lived in Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Reichstag.

Schröder was willing to risk everything for people he had just met weeks prior.

Why?

Because it was the right thing to do.

Eventually, through the efforts of Morris Tropper and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a solution was found. The passengers were allowed to disembark in Antwerp—split among England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

It was not ideal.

But it was something.

And for many, it meant survival.

But history reminds us that the danger had not passed.

As World War II unfolded, Nazi forces swept across Europe. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands fell under occupation.

Of the 907 passengers, 254 would later be murdered in the Holocaust, many at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Two hundred and fifty-four lives lost.

But six hundred and fifty-three survived.

Six hundred and fifty-three people were given more time—more life—more chances to see their families, to build futures, to exist.

Because one man chose to act.

Not a government.

Not a conference of nations.

Not a powerful institution.

One person.

Years later, on March 11, 1993, Gustav Schröder was honored posthumously by Yad Vashem as a person Righteous Among the Nations.

A title reserved for those who risked everything to stand against injustice.

Not because it was easy.

Not because it was expected.

But because it was right.

And that brings us here.

To this moment.

Because history is not just something we study.

It is something we learn from.

The question is not what you would have done in 1939.

The real question is—what will you do when your moment comes?

Because it will come.

It may not look like a ship off the coast of Florida.

It may not be broadcast to the world.

It may be quieter.

Smaller.

Easier to ignore.

A moment where you see something wrong—and have the choice to speak up or stay silent.

To step in or walk away.

To help—or to do nothing.

And in that moment, you may think: “I’m just one person. What difference can I make?”

But history has already answered that question.

One person can make the difference between silence and action.

Between fear and courage.

Between life and death.

So I ask you: When your moment comes, will you look away? Or will you be the one who says yes? Will you be the one who stands up—who speaks out—
who chooses courage when it matters most?

“Never Again” requires action, not just remembrance.

Be that one person.

Cathy A. Lewis is the author of Some Came by Ship, based on the true story of the SS St. Louis. Her previous book, The Road We Took, is the harrowing account of an American Boy Scout in Nazi Germany.

www.cathyalewis.com

stlouislegacyproject.org

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Prominent white nationalists, including those who planned Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally, are mocking MAGA figures for their efforts to spin the Trump administration’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Those reactions from the people with the most knowledge of the events in question follow repeated claims by MAGA figures in recent days that the indictment of the legendary civil rights group proved that it created what were essentially “false flags” for fundraising purposes.

“I’m beginning to feel that the #SPLC indictment is much more like the Epstein Binders than a real criminal case,” said Richard Spencer in a post on X.

“In other words, it’s a convenient conspiracy theory or limited hangout served up by the government to allow conservatives to indulge in victimization.”

Spencer, one of the organizers of the 2017 gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups, included a photo of far-right influencer Jack Posobiec holding up his copy of the much-anticipated Epstein Binders. In fact, it turned out that the binders released by AG Pam Bondi were nothing new.

Since news of the indictments broke on Tuesday, Posobiec has been among those far-right and MAGA figures who have falsely claimed that the indictment showed Charlottesville was “staged by the SPLC.” The group had previously reported on the influencer’s white supremacist connections.

Among those also latching onto such conspiratorial interpretations were MAGA figures who have long been critical of SPLC’s decisions over the years to classify certain conservative organizations under the label of “hate.”

Evangelical Megan Basham falsely claimed that the indictment said the legendary civil rights group paid people “to organize protests and transport [people] to those protests.” Federalist co-founder Sean Davis argued “the SPLC funded and organized [Unite the Right] while pretending to be scandalized by it.”

In fact, the DOJ indictment only says that SPLC paid an informant who was a “member of the online leadership chat group” and who had “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” It also claimed he “made racist postings under the direction of the SPLC.”

It does NOT say that SPLC was directing the informant on the organization of the rally nor paying him to transport people—only that the SPLC had an informant on the inside who was working in that capacity.

Spencer, whom a jury found liable in a civil trial for his role in planning the Charlottesville tragedy, understood the distinction about the informant.

“My hunch is that it will be someone whom no one remembers, who came out of the woodwork,” he said in a post on X.

In a separate post, the white nationalist also mocked FBI Director Kash Patel, calling him a “clownish figure.”

“It’s difficult to take anything he signs off on seriously,” he added.

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Spencer predicted that “exposure of a paid informant in the Alt-Right will quickly allow conservatives to claim everything they don’t like is a ‘hoax,’ ‘scam,’ ‘SPLC front,’ etc. They did this with J6….”

Later, in a podcast interview, Spencer said: “Conservatives are dumb, and they come to the wrong conclusion and they come to a very self-serving conclusion.”

Appearing alongside Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Spencer derided suggestions that the Southern Poverty Law Center or anyone else on the left was pulling the strings on the Unite the Right rally.

“The fact is this indictment does not even suggest that,” the rally organizer added. “And this is, it's just a very self-serving thing for conservatives to now say, oh, I knew it was a hoax or something.”

Spencer predicted what SPLC’s defense would be.

Another Charlottesville figure, who now goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus and was convicted for his role in the rally, was equally adamant.

“Every ‘right-wing’ influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me,” he wrote in a lengthy post on X.

On Instagram, an account associated with the white nationalist Patriot Front also lambasted the claims from the far-right, MAGA influencers.

That account, known as @patriotjourno, argued that the SPLC indictment was “an attempt to silence the nationalist movement.”

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“First off, the weaponized MAGA influencers have been acting as if the SPLC was funding entire organizations and, in turn, the entire nationalist movement. That’s simply not true,” the post read.

“Based off the indictments, they were funding INDIVIDUAL TRAITORS within these organizations.”

The post later continued, “First it was fed-jacketing, now it’s SPLC-jacketing, but the end goal is the same; they don’t want whites to organize. The mainstream right sees the writing on the wall. Nationalism is the future, and they know it. This will not be the last time they come after us or the movement.”

Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau led members of the neo-Nazi Vandguard America in Charlottesville.

On Telegram, another account associated with a white nationalist figure also ridiculed suggestions that the SPLC was trying to “manufacture opponents.”

“As with most right-wing talking points, it is incorrect,” wrote the person who claims his goal is to “spread revolutionary Fascist ideals.”

That account’s post claimed to have identified at least two of the informants who were allegedly paid by SPLC. (I redacted the names from the post below.)

In one case, he alleged the SPLC source “ruined and almost destroyed the National Alliance.” Another “assisted in the downfall of the Aryan Nations.” A third “led the American Front during its decline into irrelevance.”

“The SPLC was not trying to prop up the racialist movement via funding,” the post said. “They were trying to destroy it by bribing traitorous retards, thereby leading to the downfall of the groups they were involved with.

“This is a hugely important distinction.”

He added, “The fact that a group has an informant within it does not mean that group itself is a honeypot. Unfortunately, just about every group will end up with an informant in it at some point….”

What do you think?

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In recent years, questions about the intersection of faith, politics, and ideology have divided America.

One voice critically analyzing these trends is Neil Shenvi, a Southern Baptist evangelical, a conservative thinker, and author. Shenvi has been roundly criticized by the left for his views on “critical theory” and “wokeism.” These days, he finds himself under increasing attack for his views on the “Woke Right.”

In this interview, we explore Shenvi’s perspective on Christian nationalism and the Dissident Right, the “spiritual threat” he believes such ideology poses, and why understanding these movements is vital for Christians today.

“I don’t think the Dissident Right currently is a political threat,” Shenvi told me. “I do think it’s a spiritual threat.”

Shenvi’s critique also puts blame on some of the forces he believes are responsible for what he sees as a Dissident Right backlash:

“And I especially think it’s a threat to young White males who are tired of being called oppressors and are then being sucked into this black hole….

“I think that the first step then for the church is to speak clearly against critical theory. When someone is being judged and abused and written off because of their skin color, that is wrong whether they’re White or Black or purple. And you’re not an oppressor because you happen to have XY chromosomes. That is not just. It is wrong.

“I oppose it, whether it’s implemented by the left or the right. But then from that basis, we then say, what’s the right way to think about these issues? And showing that God’s reality, God’s truth in the Bible is good and beautiful.”

Frankly, I think some both on the far left and the far right will find portions of this interview with which they will quibble. But shouldn’t we at least listen?

Please watch, then tell me what you think!

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Give Donald Trump’s Justice Department credit: They were able to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center on one set of facts, while spinning a completely different yarn about the legendary civil rights organization.

And the right-wing spin machine is absolutely making stuff up.

As you will see below, that is objectively true.

Payments to informants or hate groups?

First, play very close attention to the specific allegations approved by a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama. The indictment says that, over a 10-year-period, SPLC (1) “secretly funneled $3 million”… (2) to informants… (3) “associated with various violent extremist groups.”

But note the blaring graphic (above) that was displayed by Fox News: “Southern Poverty Law Center Accused of Funneling $3M+ to Extremist Groups.”

Get the difference? “To informants” versus “to extremist groups.”

Fox host Kayleigh McEnany declared that the money went “to some of the very same extremist hate groups it claims to have been fighting—what a charge!”

She later claimed that SPLC paid the money “to incite racially charged events.”

NONE of that is in the indictment returned by the federal grand jury.

In fact, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said as much when pressed by a reporter at the DOJ’s hastily called news conference about whether the money had gone to fund the groups’ operations. (Watch below.)

“Look, I want to be careful to keep any comments that we make inside the indictment, and so what the indictment lays out is payments to individuals who had leadership positions within these organizations,” Blanche said.

“That’s what the grand jury found.”

Of course, it did not help that Blanche also made loose comments, such as:  “In no fundraising efforts that the investigation found did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we're gonna give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’"

But that version of events—”a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan”—is NOT in the indictment.

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SPLC money used to fund ‘false flags’?

From there, the right-wing spin machine went into overdrive.

In a tweet to his 239 million followers, Elon Musk flatly declared that the Southern Poverty Law Center had “funded a large number of false flag ‘right wing’ organizations and events. Total scam.”

That is NOWHERE in the indictment.

”HOLY CRAP!” Internet provocateur Nick Sortor blared. He falsely claimed that FBI Director Kash Patel said SPLC paid KKK leaders “to stage ‘HATE CRIMES.’”

If any of Sortor’s 1.5 million followers bothered to closely watch his video, they would have seen that Patel never claimed any “hate crimes” were staged as a result of the SPLC’s informant program—nor is that in the indictment.

Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh told his four million followers that the Southern Poverty Law Center “funded ‘right wing hate groups’ and organized fake right wing protests so that it could turn around and fundraise off of them and use them as a pretext to crackdown on conservatives nationwide.”

Again, no DOJ official ever made that claim, nor is it in the indictment.

Walsh, by the way, has faced criticism from the SPLC for what it called his “general hate” and “violent rhetoric.”

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What about Charlottesville?

Preposterous claims about 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally—which ended in 32-year-old being run over and killed by a neo-Nazi—immediately caught fire. Perhaps, they saw it as a chance to brush back criticism of their own activities.

Alt-right figure Jack Posobiec told his 3.3 million followers: “Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC.”

Nobody ever said that, nor is that in the indictment.

SPLC, it should be noted, had previously reported on how it said Posobiec’s rise was “tied” to the white supremacist movement. (Posobiec has now posted that—because I used SPLC as a resource in the past—that, by definition, means I “lied.”)

Likewise, Federalist co-founder Sean Davis informed his 632 thousand followers that the SPLC had ‘bankrolled the Charlottesville ‘white supremacy’ riot.” Again, that is nowhere to be found in the charges.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters argued, “Charlottesville was astroturfed. They paid a guy, not only to organize it, but to bus people in.”

Again, that appears to be pure fabrication!

Then, there wasThe Blaze, which is already under scrutiny for falsely accusing a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6 pipe bomber.

It announced “BOMBSHELL” news that “Charlottesville violence allegedly was a leftist-funded ‘false flag.”

As previously noted, that’s not supported by the indictment.

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon declared that “Alex Jones was right” about Charlottesville being a “false flag.”

Again, not true!

And right-wing podcaster C.Jay Engel pronounced the news as “total vindication for the Alt Right,” claiming “hate crimes are fake. They don’t exist.”

Also false!

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Ask the Charlottesville defendants

By the way, the accusations are not sitting well with the people actually involved in Charlottesville.

Just one example from the person who now calls himself “Augustus Invictus”:

“I have, as a lawyer, represented more than a few of them in court, as we have all been hounded by law enforcement (henchmen of the SPLC and ADL) for years. I cannot count the number of people I know whose lives have been destroyed over the past 9 years because we dared to unite all the disparate factions of the right-wing in order to protest the destruction of White America.

”Every "right-wing" influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me.”

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What the indictment actually says

Instead, the details provided in the charges prepared by the Department of Justice are, by comparison, much tamer.

According to the indictment, one of the group’s informants was ONE “member of the online leadership chat group” that planned the Unite the Right rally. It claims the source “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

That’s it!

He was (1) in the chat—NOT in charge of organizing the rally—and (2) he organized transportation for SEVERAL attendees. Not dozens of attendees. Not scores of attendees. Not hundreds of attendees. “SEVERAL” attendees! And it does NOT say that SPLC had him arrange the transportation.

That’s the actual quote from the grand jury.

According to the indictment, the informant got paid about $30,000 a year to provide information for SPLC’s intelligence-gathering operation—obviously not enough to bus in hundreds of right-wing protesters, provide room-and-board and other expenses for what was the largest hate gathering in decades.

The truth is, as the record shows, SPLC had tried to sound the alarm about the potential danger in the days leading up to the gathering:

“Unite the Right” is expected to draw a broad spectrum of far-right extremist groups – from immigration foes to anti-Semitic bigots, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, Patriot and militia types, outlaw bikers, swastika-wearing neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members – all of whom seem emboldened by the Trump presidency.

The “summer of hate” gathering of racist extremists from all corners of the country will face counter-demonstrations pledged by hundreds of anti-racist, antifa activists, including so-called anarchists, civil-rights community organizers and Black Lives Matter members.

…

The looming social chemistry on a hot summer weekend — 115 miles from Washington, D.C. — seems to point to the clear possibility of violence. Riot-equipped Virginia State Police will augment local police and sheriff’s deputies.

And not to be left out…

Tennessee’s 5th District congressman, Andy Ogles, now claims all of this is also somehow proof that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been secretly bankrolling the Patriot Front’s flash-mob protests.

“They are trying to vilify white people. This is EVIL,” the diehard MAGA Republican posted.

Will we ever get back to anything even remotely resembling normal political discourse?

What do you think?

(EDITOR’S NOTE: One paragraph was amended slightly to emphasize what the indictment did NOT say. The initial post had the wrong number of followers for Sean Davis and misidentified Matt Walsh’s website.)

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“There is nothing political about this indictment or this investigation.”

That was what Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche claimed Tuesday as he ceremoniously announced the indictment of another Trump administration foe—this time, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group that has battled white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other forms of right-wing extremism.

To be clear, what the Department of Justice is doing is going after the money of a group that has been highly critical of the Trump administration.

Time will tell how much meat there is on the bones of those charges.

Still, there are plenty of reasons that I will detail below why the SPLC has been a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump and his associates—and why they might have been motivated to try to take the organization down.

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But, first, in case you missed it…

In a news conference in Washington, Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, had indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

A Department of Justice news release quoted Blanche, accusing the SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Calling SPLC a “fraudulent organization,” Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer added, “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”

Patel said the group had engaged “in a massive fraud operation.”

“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,” the FBI director claimed.

In fact, the indictment itself refers to the people paid by SPLC as “informants” and “field sources,” claiming the group “secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds” to those sources using bank accounts in fictitious names. Those payments allegedly occurred over a period of 10 years.

It alleges that someone identified as “Employee 1”—who, by the way, is not charged—falsely claimed in bank documents to be the sole proprietor of those fictitious companies that were used to disguise the payments.

Was someone potentially sloppy in how they implemented the informant program? Perhaps.

Was it for the sinister motives claimed by Blanche and Patel? That is far less clear from reading the indictment.

For example, one of SPLC’s informants, the indictment says, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia.” It says the source made “racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC” and helped to coordinate transportation to the event.

It does not say how high up the informant was in the organization, nor that he did anything illegal in the process.

In another case, the DOJ says SPLC paid a former chairman of the neo-Nazi National Alliance—at the same time he was listed in an “Extremist File” on the SPLC website. What is missing is an explanation about whether the group might have eventually turned him and used him to gather new intelligence.

Still, a close reading of that indictment reveals that it does NOT contain any allegation that the Southern Poverty Law Center ever encouraged its sources to “manufacture racism,” as Blanche claimed in his news conference.

On the contrary, the indictment notes one situation—going back 12 years to find an example portrayed as sinister—where one of SPLC’s sources “stole 25 boxes of documents” from what it admits was “a violent extremist group.”

Those documents, according to the indictment, were later used as a basis for a story published on the SPLC’s HateWatch website about the group’s activities.

In fact, in a video released the day before the indictment, SPLC insisted that what it did was entirely consistent with its mission to disrupt hate.

Calling it a “past practice,” SPLC Interim President and CEO Bryan Fair said the group had paid informants—by the way, just like the FBI does—to provide information that it could then use against those hate groups.

“This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence,” Fair said. “In 1983, our offices were firebombed and, in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff.”

Information from those informants, Fair said, was often shared with law enforcement, including the FBI, although the practice was not publicized “to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families.”

“There is no question,” Fair said, “that what we learned from the informants saved lives.”

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My personal experience

From my own experience, there is absolutely nothing that I have ever seen that would suggest there is anything “fraudulent” about the group itself.

Instead, the incredibly passionate people at the Southern Poverty Law Center have been an enormous asset to me in my own investigation of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups.

When threats have been posted online against me or my family, SPLC staff have been the first to call to alert me of the danger.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates: Confronting Hate

SPLC is also now spearheading two federal lawsuits against members of the Goyim Defense League, the same group that lashed out at me late last year. One lawsuit was filed on behalf of a Nashville bar employee who was violently assaulted by GDL members in July 2024; the other lawsuit represents Nashville’s Gordon Jewish Community Center, which was also targeted by the group.

That follows a long history of the SPLC using litigation to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups who have targeted innocent Americans.

Still, back in October, Patel cut ties with SPLC, saying it had “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” He also severed the bureau’s relationship with the Anti-Defamation League.

Admittedly, the Southern Poverty Law Center has in the past been accused of being too heavy-handed in its designation of some conservatives under the umbrella of “hate”—and it has on occasion apologized. Some of the criticism, including internal criticism from its own staff, was completely warranted.

But some of the accusations against the group have also been overblown and appear to be equally motivated by partisanship.

For example, critics lashed out at the FBI’s Richmond office for relying on SPLC research for an intelligence report that was characterized as being anti-Catholic.

In fact, the SPLC had warned about an antisemitic splinter movement that rejects the papacy and promotes “works associated with antisemitic violence.” The FBI intelligence was compiled as a result of an investigation of a self-described “Fascist Catholic” who appeared to be preparing for acts of violence.

That’s the part that I bet you’ve not heard from any other news source!

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The rest of the story…

All of this comes from a presidential administration that has pardoned January 6 rioters who attacked Capitol police, as well as swindlers who were convicted of engaging in what were truly massive frauds.

So why might the Trump administration have an interest in targeting the SPLC and going after its money?

A few examples for your consideration:

• In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center obtained a cache of emails revealing how White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller had “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

  

• The next year, SPLC ”released a new Extremist File on Stephen Miller.” That file, it said, “documents not only the findings in the leaked emails that revealed his alignment with white nationalist thought and far-right extremism, but also digs further into his background, including Miller’s ties to white nationalist Richard Spencer and his work with far-right hate groups while studying at Duke University….”

• Last year, SPLC reported that “the head of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Tom Homan, appears to have met with an associate of the Proud Boys on at least four separate occasions. At least one of these instances was a private meeting held in Chicago after the 2024 presidential election to talk about deportations.”

  

• In addition, the group has noted that “Patel has repeatedly appeared on podcasts and at events alongside racists and antisemites.” He appeared at least six times on the podcast of antisemite Stew Peters.” SPLC noted, “The podcast host has engaged in Holocaust denial… promoted the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory’… and called for the executions of Anthony Fauci, Hunter Biden, and Alejandro Mayorkas.”

• SPLC opposed the current FBI director’s nomination, writing: “Patel’s political allegiance and financial ties to President Trump, his lack of professional qualifications to lead the agency, his past statements threatening to ‘come after’ perceived opponents, and his associations with race-based extremists are disqualifying.”

• The group documented what it called a rash of hate incidents following the 2016 election “as white supremacists celebrate Donald Trump’s victory.” It reported that, “In the ten days following the election, there were almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation from across the nation. Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.”

• It criticized Trump’s “both sides” framing of the tragedy in Charlottesville, accusing the president of using his position “to send dog whistles and promote a revisionist history. This continues to embolden people with white nationalist views by justifying their inexcusable and violent actions.”

• SPLC has filed multiple lawsuits in opposition to the Trump administration, including one accusing it of “violating due process rights of immigrant children and their sponsors.” It sued the Trump administration over the suspension of the Job Corps program, calling it “illegal.” And it sued Trump’s Department of Education, seeking to block its “unlawful rollback of civil rights protections for students experiencing discrimination in schools.”

Is there more to the story than we know?

Will this result in a successful prosecution—or provide yet another example of a rogue Justice Department attempting to intimidate the president’s enemies?

What do you think?

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For me, it was a solemn and humbling experience to be asked to light a candle for Yom HaShoah, the 2026 Community Holocaust Commemoration sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville.

I was invited to participate because of my on-going stand against hate, and the candle I lit was in honor of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” those who came to the aid of the Jewish community during the dark days of the Holocaust.

“They saw injustice and acted,” noted Rabbi Shana Goldstein Mackler before I took my turn in the ceremony. “They recognized the warning signs—the words, the patterns, the quiet shifts—and chose courage over comfort.”

Yet, the program from that evening has continued to trouble me—not only because of the dark history it vowed should not be forgotten, but also because of what it might say about the moral clarity of our country today.

Is 2026 America so different from 1939 America?

That program focused on the so-called “Voyage of the Damned,” the transatlantic ocean liner SS St. Louis that set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939, with more than 900 Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi Germany.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, those refugees had made arrangements to stay in Cuba while they waited for the U.S. government to process their visa applications. But, when they arrived, authorities turned them away. Because of strict immigration laws passed by a KKK-aligned Congress in 1924, U.S. officials ordered the Coast Guard to keep the ship from coming ashore.

“Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded,” says the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

From there, the St. Louis headed north toward Canada, but they were also denied permission to disembark. The ocean liner returned to Europe where Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France allowed the Jews to immigrate.

Tragically, 254 of the St. Louis’s passengers later died in the Holocaust.

In 2012, the U.S. State Department under President Barack Obama formally apologized in a ceremony attended by 14 surviving passengers.

“This is the intersection of world history and U.S. history at a very dark chapter, and this was unfinished business that needed to be taken care of,” said Hannah Rosenthal, the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.

Six years later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also apologized on behalf of his country.

“By issuing this apology, it is my sincere hope that we can shine a light on this painful chapter of our history and ensure that its lessons are never forgotten,” Trudeau said in his statement. “Antisemitism, xenophobia, and hatred have no place in this country or anywhere in this world.”

These days, America’s most powerful politicians appear to have decided that it is not America’s job to help refugees from other countries in search of safe harbor.

Some are even advocating a return to the immigration laws of the 1920s.

“Whatever fanciful leftist notion to the contrary, the United States of America cannot be expected to absorb the rest of the world’s problems,” said a 2024 letter by Republican Reps. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.), and Scott Perry (R-Penn.) about a proposal to allow Palestinian refugees into the country.

More recently, Ogles has used AI slop video to portray himself as a Crusader out of the Middle Ages, and he has made it clear that Christians are his real concern.

In 2025, President Trump dramatically cut back the number of refugees from other countries, declaring that White Afrikaners from South Africa should receive priority over everyone else.

Last year, Rabbi Sarah Bassin wrote in a post for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that the decision to turn away the St. Louis “was framed as a pragmatic policy decision at the time.”

She continued, “Denying visas was bureaucratic and bloodless. Its air of reasonableness made it palatable to the public. That is often how cruelty is enacted—with a thin veneer of respectable law and order cloaking the most heinous indifference to inhumanity.”

Would the St. Louis be allowed to come ashore in America today?

I’m honestly not sure.

What do you think?

On the far right, calls are growing for radical policies that not only include deporting people in the country illegally, but also potentially targeting citizens.

“At its most extreme, remigration is really about ethnically cleansing countries of black and brown people,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “This is more extreme than anything any anti-immigrant movement has ever proposed before.”

Beirich noted, “It’s a much broader thing than removing people from a country who don’t have the right papers to be legally there. This is about reconstituting the nature of a population of a country.”

She added, “I can’t think of anything more hateful.”

To achieve their goals, Beirich said, “it would mean probably close to a third or more of Americans would have to be removed.”

And proponents of remigration readily admit that they are willing to toss out the U.S. Constitution if necessary.

“These aren’t people who are necessarily beholden to democracy or the Constitution,” Beirich continued. “These are white supremacists who won a country ruled by White people—White men, most likely. And that doesn’t have anything really to do at the end of the day with American democracy as it was conceived of from the beginning—even with its racist underpinnings.”

Please watch the interview above, then tell me what you think!

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For many decades, it has been widely accepted that the “junk science” of eugenics led President Calvin Coolidge to embrace flawed notions that race made some people better suited to be American citizens than others.

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 essay in Good Housekeeping as he was about to assume the vice presidency.

“Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

That race-based view of humanity led to the forced sterilization of Americans who were somehow deemed to be unfit and, after being embraced by Adolf Hitler, to the many horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.

But for Christian nationalist podcasters C.Jay Engel and Andrew Isker, both who have now settled in Jackson County, Tennessee, Coolidge’s words provide a refreshing affirmation of their own views of what it means to be an American.

Watch the clips below, and decide for yourself.

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‘Whose country is this?’

During a 70-minute episode of the Contra Mundum podcast this week, Isker and Engel read and celebrated Coolidge’s more than century-old essay. Three years later, after Coolidge had become president, the KKK-influenced Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set race-based preferences for immigration.

That essay was titled “Whose Country Is This?”

“Woah!” Isker proclaimed after his sidekick read the paragraph where Coolidge wrote about “racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside.”

Engel continued, “I think one of the fascinating things is, like, Calvin Coolidge—after he wrote this piece—was elected president.”

“Yeah,” Isker agreed. “There weren’t journalists that took this quote, this paragraph and said, ‘Did you know he said this?’”

“Yeah, this was normal,” Engel interjected.

Isker continued, “The entire country was like, yeah, we want this guy to be our president.”

“This is how they thought. This was normal language,” Engel agreed, calling Coolidge “a deeply Christian man.”

At no point did Isker or Engel ever acknowledge that such “race science” theories from America’s dark past have been widely discredited and rejected.

‘White people from around Great Britain’

Instead, the podcasters appeared to find affirmation of their own beliefs that, consistent with the Immigration Act of 1924, White descendants from western and northern Europe—the Nordics, as Coolidge called them— are the ones with the only real claim to become U.S. citizens.

Engel, ignoring the many immigrants who come to America from all over the globe during its 250 years, argued that the only ones who made the country a “nation of immigrants” are the ones from western and northern Europe.

“It’s immigrants, but restrained to this geographical area,” he continued.

Isker agreed. “This is, like, White people from the area around Great Britain—so, like, northern Germany, France, Britain, Ireland, and then the Scandinavian countries. That’s who he’s talking about as, like, the ethnicities that mixed.”

“And it’s like, well, we don’t want these people from, you know, eastern Europe that are going to come cause problems, that can’t mix very well with us. That’s the distinction that he’s making.”

As I pointed out in a previous post, eugenics helped fuel the notion that immigrants from neighboring countries—Italy, for example—were somehow biologically unfit to become Americans.

Among the group of immigrants deemed to be less desirable at the time were the Italian ancestors of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

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Does Vivek ‘look’ like an American?

Both Isker and Engel have argued that the U.S. belongs to “Heritage Americans,” by which they primarily mean people from White European backgrounds.

“How do you define Heritage American? How do you define it?” Isker asked.

He suggested that a Japanese person could look at a picture of former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a second-generation Indian American, and tell by looking at him that he is not an American.

“They’ll get it right every single time,” Isker added.

“Isn’t that crazy?” Engel replied, seemingly feigning disbelief.

“They’ll know.” Isker continued.

“How do they know that?”

“They know what an American is.”

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People with funny names ‘don’t care about this place”

In another tangent, Isker referred to a judge with a foreign-sounding name who ruled against President Donald Trump’s efforts to revoke the Temporary Protective Status granted to immigrants under former President Joe Biden.

Isker gave a name that did not match any of the judges that I could identify as having ruled on such TPS claims.

“This is a person whose background is not consistent with American institutions,” he argued based on the supposed name of the judge. “He has no conception of the world of Alexander Hamilton or even Calvin Coolidge.”

Isker continued, “America exists as a place for him and his people to extract from. That’s all that it is. And our institutions are chocked full of people like this that don’t care about this place, that don’t care about its people. It’s a scam.”

How can he tell based on the person’s name?

NOTE: Isker and Engel responded to this post in a live version of the Contra Mundum podcast.

Please watch the clips, decide for yourself, then tell me what you think.

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In recent years, America’s far right convinced voters they were worried about illegal immigration.

But listen closely to what they are now saying, and you’ll find growing openness about a more ambitious plan to, in effect, Make America White Again.

It’s a plan, as I document below, rooted in a century-old effort led by the Ku Klux Klan to reclaim America for the people they considered to be “real Americans.”

Those so-called real Americans, of course, were the White Americans.

‘Make America look like America again’

Among the clues, President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security calls for deporting 100 million people—a goal almost seven times the estimated number of immigrants illegally in the country.

“America for Americans,” the official DHS account proclaims in other posts on X.

***

Former Customs and Border Patrol official Greg Bovino now admits that, in fact, he had a plan to deport almost a third of the country—a notion that we now see making its way into mainstream GOP politics.

“We have roughly 100 million people in this country who shouldn’t be here,” said Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French, drawing enthusiastic applause from the crowd at this year’s CPAC.

“They don’t share our values. They don’t want to assimilate.”

South Carolina GOP Senate candidate Paul Dans has also embraced the concept.

***

Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, who has boasted about his A+ “remigration score” from a shadowy group I linked to a pro-Nazi account on X, calls for repealing the 1965 Hart-Celler Act.

Prior to that law’s passage, racist “nation-of-origin” preferences established in 1924 had largely limited immigration for four decades to White people from western and northern Europe.

Calling for the deportation of all Muslims, Ogles talks about wanting—pay close attention—to “make America look like America again.”

The diehard MAGA congressman follows a white-supremacist account on X that calls for a plan to “go from 55% White American to 80% White American.”

***

Former Trump administration official William Wolfe, who is leading an effort to try to push the Southern Baptist Convention further to the right, sparks outrage with his unapologetic public pronouncements about race.

“I want my boys to grow up in a country where they don’t look like they’re the foreigners,” Wolfe told a far-right group that calls itself the “True Texas Project.”

His tweet—”total immigration moratorium, 100 million deportations, denaturalization, and remigration”— drew praise from the same white supremacist account that has set a goal of making America 80 percent White.

***

And Tennessee-based Christian nationalist podcaster C.Jay Engel, who has recently created a “White advocacy” group with the help of a man who publishes pro-Nazi materials, voices similar desires.

Declaring that the country belongs to “Heritage Americans,” Engel argues for an immigration system that reflects discredited theories that “genetics are part of the foundation of a people.” He demands a reversal of “the consequences of Hart-Celler” and a “return to the patriotic immigration system” of the 1920s.

As Cato Institute immigration expert David J. Bier recently told me, those proposals reflect far-right dreams of bringing what amounts to ethnic cleansing to America. (You can watch the entire interview below.)

“They’re telling us explicitly what their agenda is, and it is an agenda targeting not just … immigrants here or illegal immigrants even. It’s about targeting Americans based on their background,” Bier told me.

“And that’s ethnic cleansing. That’s the definition of ethnic cleansing.”

Echoes of KKK America

In such talk, you can hear echoes of KKK America, a dark chapter in U.S. history when politicians decided that the “Nordic race” was the superior race.

In the 1920s—the decade that brought the “patriotic immigration system” praised by podcaster C.Jay Engel—as many as 60,000 Ku Klux Klan members, in white robes and hoods, paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. An estimated 150,000-200,000 people lined the parade route.

Like today’s far right, Klan members proclaimed themselves “100 Per Cent Americans,” carrying the Stars and Stripes as their marching bands performed the patriotic medleys of the Republic.

By some estimates, millions of Americans—including one out of every seven White men—were registered members of the Klan at the peak of its popularity.

“We hold firmly that America belongs to Americans and should be kept American,” KKK Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans wrote in 1925.

A year earlier, the influence of the Klan’s publications had been felt on the floor of the U.S. House as lawmakers debated whether to impose strict immigration quotas in an effort to protect the race they viewed as the superior race.

“Mr. Chairman, I know that many of you gentlemen who are going to vote for this bill ... will do so because the word has been given ... by the organization that at present seems to me to be all powerful and who directly through its organs, The Fiery Cross and The Forum, are insistent upon this legislation,” observed Rep. Adolph J. Sabath, a Democrat from Illinois.

Everyone agreed that there was a need for strict controls to deal with the country’s burgeoning immigrant population.

Then, as now, the argument was over the dogged insistence by some that certain immigrants were just not the right fit for America.

The legislation had been shaped with the help of practitioners of the now-discredited “race science” of eugenics. Immigrants from Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland, Russia, and Turkey—to name a few—were deem genetically inferior to people from western and northern Europe.

Ironically, had they not immigrated before the doors slammed shut, the “inferior” Italian ancestors of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would likely never have made it to America under the “patriotic” system to which some on the far right would like to see the country return.

Rep. Albert Johnson, the Washington state Republican who authored the bill, argued there was a need for legislation that would “end forever the idea that the United States is an asylum for the oppressed of the world.”

Sound familiar?

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‘The future of the Nordic race’

Others were more blunt, calling for “Nordic unity”—by which, one critic said, they meant people who were “tall, blond haired, have blue eyes, straight noses.”

“The future of the Nordic race and, thus the human race, depends upon the English-speaking people standing together,” said Rep. John J. McSwain, Democrat of South Carolina, quoting a Columbia University professor.

Rep. Clarence F. Lea, a California Democrat, argued that “true assimilation requires racial compatibility.”

“Nature’s God has given the world a brown man, a yellow man, and a black man,” Lea told his House colleagues. “Whether given to us by the wisdom of a Divine Ruler or by our own prejudices or wisdoms, we have a deep-seated aversion against racial amalgamation or general social equality with these races.”

Rep. Robert E.L. Allen, Democrat of West Virginia, insisted, “The primary reason for the restriction of the alien stream is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” Allen was appalled that an immigrant would have the right, “whatever his breed to mix his blood with that of our children.”

“America must protect America and American institutions for Americans,” agreed Rep. Jacob L. Milligan, a Democrat from Missouri.

While embracing their own hyphenated Anglo-Saxon identities, the bill’s proponents objected to the existence of “Little ltalys” and “Chinatowns” in America’s largest cities.

“When a woman marries a man, she takes his name and gives up hers,’‘ said Rep. Allard H. Gasque, a South Carolina Democrat. “Those who come to live in our home—America—should take our name.”

Just some now bemoan the influence of Indian Americans in the ownership of hotels or convenience stores, proponents of the legislation wrang their hands over Greek Americans who had invested in restaurants, candy kitchens, fruit stands, and similar establishments.

“Greeks are fast approaching a monopoly on these lines of business,” worried Rep. Addison Smith, Republican from Idaho.

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‘No greater curse’ than freed slaves

Perhaps the most blatant reflection of the tenor of the debate came from the racist mouth of Rep. Ralph Waldo Emerson Gilbert, a Kentucky Democrat who was still smarting from the emancipation of America’s slaves.

“No greater curse could ever have been inflicted upon a people than the importation of Negro slaves into this country when their subsequent elevation to equal rights and privileges shall have in fact been consummated,’‘ Gilbert argued.

The Kentucky congressman was aghast that, as he recounted, “The other day one of this race with thick lips, curly hair, was entered into a beauty contest with White girls in one of our Northern cities.”

Gilbert noted thankfully that his part of the country still had its former slaves under control.

“For there, a healthful sentiment takes the place of law, and a proper distinction has served to prevent its evils,” he boasted.

Most of the opposition to Albert Johnson’s immigration bill came from representatives from states that had the most experience with people who had come from southern and eastern Europe.

They argued that those newcomers had served valiantly in the World War that ended just a few years before and had injected life into their cities.

“This debate at times to me looks like a burlesque show,’‘ said Rep. Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat. “We have on this committee men from certain parts of the country for whom I have the highest regard and respect, who have an idea that an immigrant has no love for America.”

Many of them, Dickstein suggested, had never really interacted with the immigrants they feared.

Minnesota Republican Rep. Oscar J. Larson agreed. “We should not be so completely obsessed by nativism, by the shibboleth ‘America for Americans.”’

“The test of American citizenship,” he continued, “should not be from whence we came or to what race we belong, but what we are. Character should be the supreme test of desirability and citizenship.”

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Kentucky murders v. New York murders

Like with today’s debate, opponents disputed bogus claims that immigrants brought increased crime. One noted that native-born Kentuckians were just as likely to commit murders as any of the feared immigrants from Italy.

Again, the gentleman from Kentucky was prepared to defend the nobility of the murders committed by the Anglo-Saxon people of his state.

“Homicides are not always the result of moral turpitude,” Rep. Ralph Waldo Emerson Gilbert argued. “In my state, they are the result of temper or the result of a code of honor, false and erroneous though that code may be.”

On the other hand, a large percentage of homicides in New York, as he saw it, resulted from the “dastardly work of gangsters employed on a commercial basis.”

“There a life is taken for money, a depravity totally unknown in the killings of Kentucky,” the congressman concluded.

And when critics found such arguments to be laughable, hardliners argued that such views were evidence that their colleagues had been corrupted. After all, the states with the highest immigrant populations had also opposed Prohibition.

“The foreign bloc has raised its cry and protest and against this selective and restrictive immigration bill,” said Rep. John L. Cable, an Ohio Republican. “The political power and influence of this un-American group is well known.”

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‘Second Declaration of Independence’

In the end, Albert Johnson’s immigration bill passed the U.S. House on a vote of 232 to 71, clearing the Senate days later, and heading to President Coolidge’s desk.

Years before, the Vermont Republican had penned a Good Housekeeping article in which we see his own embrace of eugenics in answering the predominant political question of the day: “Whose Country Is It?”

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote.

“Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

On May 26, 1924, Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 into law—a law that Albert Johnson called “America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”

In this declaration, however, all men were not created equal.

That restrictive legislation would later draw praise from Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf manifesto, mimicking his allies on the other side of the Atlantic as he embraced the rallying cry “Germany for Germans.”

And it would eventually be used to turn away Jews attempting to escape the Nazi Holocaust.

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What kind of country do we want?

This is, in C.Jay Engel’s words, the type of “patriotic immigration system” for which some on the far right now long.

Is America’s KKK past destined to become part of its future?

Will we as a country, as some would like, once again drift back toward the race-based immigration policies of the past?

Who, especially among Republicans, will now have the courage to speak out before such ideas move into more mainstream GOP conversation?

Those are the questions America now faces.

What do you think?

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But what are the facts?

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, has studied the issue perhaps as much as anyone in the country.

He says the Maury County Republican and his anti-immigration allies get a lot wrong.

“It’s just totally backwards. The entire narrative couldn’t be more wrong,” Bier told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

You can find my full report for Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 here.

Back in December, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted an image on X with the words “America After 100 Million Deportations” superimposed over a nostalgic beach scene.

The DHS social media post described that serene imagery as “the peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”

“That is explicitly targeting people based on their ancestry—and, of course, it’s about people’s background,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies for the libertarian Cato Institute, told me in the attached interview.

“They’re telling us explicitly what their agenda is, and it is an agenda targeting not just … immigrants here or illegal immigrants even. It’s about targeting Americans based on their background.

“And that’s ethnic cleansing. That’s the definition of ethnic cleansing.”

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No one has ever claimed that there are anywhere close to 100 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

Targeting 100 million people for deportation would, by definition, require going after longstanding American citizens, Bier added.

Last month, during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy blasted Bier for his references to “ethnic cleansing” on social media, accusing him of being “hyperbolic.”

That viral moment, Bier told me, suggests Americans are simply unaware of what immigration policies are being enacted in their names.

“It seems like a very significant portion of the population—and even members of Congress—are simply unaware of what the administration is doing, what policies it’s enacting, what rhetoric it is putting out to the public, how it is justifying its policies,” he added.

In fact, Greg Bovino, who spearheaded Trump’s deportation efforts for months, recently confirmed to the New York Times that he indeed had a plan to deport 100 million people.

‘Make America look like America again’

More recently, Tennessee GOP Congressman Andy Ogles has called for repeal the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which got rid of racial quotas that were put into place in 1924 in order to favor White people from Western and Northern Europe.

Ogles has celebrated his A+ “remigration score” from a group with white nationalist ties. White nationalists around the world have praised his plans.

Ogles says his goal is to “make America look like America again.”

“So again, you’re advocating for the policy that kept the Jews in Europe to be killed, that excluded non-White immigration overwhelmingly,” Bier said.

“The reality is you are making a claim about what it means to be an American. And what it means to be American has nothing to do with race.”

He continued, “It doesn’t have anything to do with where your parents were born. It has nothing to do with your ancestry even. It’s a view incompatible with that of the founders, which of course believed that anyone could come here and be an American regardless of their background.”

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In this interview, Bier offers a thoughtful perspective that challenges conventional narratives and argues for reform rooted in facts:

• He underscores the significant economic benefits immigrants bring to the U.S., including a $14.5 trillion contribution to deficit reduction over the past 30 years.

• Bier discusses the racist origins of past immigration laws, such as the Immigration Act of 1924, and warns against reverting to such discriminatory policies.

• And he refutes the narrative that immigrants increase crime rates, presenting data that shows immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and often contribute to safer communities.

To read the detailed analyses by Bier and his Cato colleagues, click here.

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Today I’m formally announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: the Hate Comes to Main Street subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for paid subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Plus, I really want to hear your thoughts about what is happening where you live and to get your suggestions about what topics you would like for me to address.

Let’s make this a community conversation!

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

   Hate Comes to Main Street is a reader-supported publication. To stay up-to-date, you can subscribe for free. If you think this content is desperately needed today in America—and want the option to comment on my posts—please becoming a paid subscriber.

In his 2023 book, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy, the veteran journalist tries to warn America about the insurrectionist streak that he believes still lurks in American society.

Some Americans, Neiwert admits in this conversation, probably find such talk to be almost two dark to embrace.

“I think a lot of people want things to just keep going or go back to normal someday—and it ain’t gonna get back to normal anytime soon,” he tells me.

What can we learn from his experiences?

Please watch, then tell me what you think.

Two days before the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, veteran journalist David Neiwert sounded the alarm.

“At the same time that Republican senators and congressmen say they will be contesting the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Congress, thousands of Trump supporters—ginned up on conspiracy theories and Trump’s groundless claims of election fraud, as well as his open invitation to supporters for what he promised will be a ‘wild’ event—will be taking to the streets to protest his defeat,” Neiwert wrote for the progressive Daily Kos website.

His warning was prescient: “Given the outcomes of previous pro-Trump protests in D.C., it is virtually certain to result in violence.”

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Recently, I had a chance to dive into Neiwert’s brilliant 2023 book, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy.

Neiwert, who began his journey by documenting the rise of right-wing extremism as a young reporter in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s, convincingly lays out a case that anti-democratic sentiments had been building within the far right well before the January 6 insurrection.

He writes:

“The siege of the Capitol had been carefully planned, orchestrated by paramilitary claques who spearheaded the attack, and supported by an army of true believers of various stripes: conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, and far-right street brawlers….”

“Preventing the certification of the Electoral College votes, however, was only the temporal objective of Trump’s army. In a larger sense, the insurrection’s intent was to overthrow democracy itself and replace it with an authoritarian autocracy.”

Throughout the well-crafted book, Neiwert makes it clear that those anti-democratic impulses are still being felt within American society, although many of those battles have shifted—at least, for now—to the local level.

For the Proud Boys, for example, it was a part of a deliberate strategy to focus on local issues in which they could involve themselves and recruit new followers. Unfortunately, Neiwert notes, it had the insidious effect of creating turmoil inside communities where little had previously existed.

The Age of Insurrection documents outbursts in towns across America—for example, the 2021 school board hearing in Williamson County, Tennessee, where anti-maskers threatened parents who had expressed support for a mask mandate—as evidence of the continued vitality of that insurrectionist streak.

And just as he warned of the dark day that ultimately was to be remembered simply as January 6, Neiwert cautions that the threat remains.

“They’ll only succeed, of course, if we keep our eyes closed to the continuing threat and fail to be prepared,” he concludes. “Because as far as they’re concerned, they are ‘at war.’ Only a fool would disbelieve them.”

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Perhaps the reason that Neiwert’s book was so resonant with me is that, through his decades of experience, he confirmed what my own more limited experience has told me. Here is how I have laid out the thesis for Hate Comes to Main Street:

What I have come to realize is that the battle for the soul of America began on the main streets of America—as people with declining political influence desperately sought to retain their grip on the levers of society.

There, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and QAnon conspiracy theories had begun as overlapping parts of the same Venn diagram, with one feeding upon the other until they were almost indistinguishable.

And each remains determined to maintain control over the nation’s politics—even if it means abandoning democracy.

And once hate had gained a foothold on Main Street, it was just a matter of time before it began to make its way to Pennsylvania Avenue.

In several chapters that I have already written for what I hope will one day become a Hate Comes to Main Street book, I have described characters from my own journey—Franklin, Tennessee’s Gabrielle Hanson, for example—as being the hero in the movies that played in their own heads.

Similarly, throughout The Age of Insurrection, Neiwert describes how the various factions of Trump’s army were shaped by their detachment from reality.

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Describing one of those factions, he writes, “Two key things united the Patriots: first, the shared belief that a nefarious cabal of ultra-wealthy (and mostly Jewish) ‘globalists’ secretly control America’s political system, its government, and its media; and on January 6, they believed this cabal had conspired to manipulate the 2020 election to dethrone Trump and install a ‘Communist’ puppet in the person of Joe Biden.”

And here is how Neiwert explains the role of conspiracy in shaping such anti-democratic notions.

“Conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain why the country is no longer what they wish it to be. Simply put, it provides a clear self-reinforcing answer to the source of their personal disempowerment. It also has the advantage of telling believers that they are solo, go-it-alone action figures in the movies of their own lives.”

That is part of the very complex challenge we now face as a country.

The Age of Insurrection is a book that greatly helped me to understand my own journey, and it is completely deserving of my highest recommendation.

You can check out my Hate Comes to Main Street bookstore here. (Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase—but the recommendations are absolutely sincere.)

What do you think?

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