A review by Hate Comes to Main Street of salacious new allegations against the Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered more questions about the strength of the Trump Justice Department’s case against the civil rights organization.

Those new allegations were contained in a recently returned superseding indictment of the SPLC on fraud and money laundering charges. This week, the New York Post trumpeted the development this way: “SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account.”

Those new charges came after the Trump administration’s original indictment of its longtime nemesis in April was widely ridiculed—even by white supremacists who had been SPLC targets—for its claims that the group had secretly staged Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017.

As I have reported, that spin runs counter to every known fact about what really happened in Charlottesville.

So, now, SPLC critics have latched onto the new allegations in the superseding indictment that a staff member—identified as “Employee-2”—was romantically involved with a paid informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Alliance. That informant—a “field source”—is identified only as “F-9.”

While not being directly named, Employee-2 is described as someone “who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project”—a high-ranking position but not the head of the organization as the term “boss” might imply.

Still, does the indictment really say that she “funneled $1.2 million” to a “lover” who was in a neo-Nazi group?

In a word: no.

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What the indictment really says…

Just like the original indictment did not actually contain the allegations that Trump administration officials and SPLC critics claimed, a close reading of the new indictment reveals the evidence may also not be quite as the Post suggests.

A few key points:

• SPLC paid that undercover informant $1.2 million between 2010 and 2023—a 14-year period—the indictment says.

• That indictment, however, does not specify when Employee-2 allegedly began the relationship with the informant. So, it’s possible the relationship began well after much of that money had been paid.

• The indictment claims, “Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account” and was deposited into a bank account that Employee-2 shared with F-9. That money was supposedly used “to pay the couple’s personal living expenses.”

• However, the person identified by the Post as Employee-2 left SPLC in October 2019 amid a leadership shakeup at the organization, presumably meaning she no longer had control of payments to F-9 in 2020 and 2021.

• So why would the DOJ’s indictment include payments to the informant after the woman was no longer an SPLC employee? And how much of that $140,000 was in that time period?

While raising potential ethical and legal issues about Employee-2’s conduct, that person has NOT been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. Southern Poverty Law Center Inc.—as a corporate entity—is the only defendant.

Yet, there are no allegations within the indictment that higher-ups within the non-profit organization itself knew about the potential conflict of interest nor that top SPLC brass directed it.

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And there’s more…

At the heart of the Trump administration’s indictment—the alleged fraud—is the allegation that “SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities.”

Yet, in the case of F-9, the superseding indictment alleges he broke into the headquarters of National Alliance in West Virginia, stealing “approximately 25 boxes of documents” that were used for an investigation published by SPLC.

That investigation—identified by the Post, correctly I believe, as one published in May 2015 under the headline “Chaos at the Compound”—was damning. It described “evidence of embezzlement, money laundering and more than two million dollars in unreported taxable income” within the neo-Nazi group.

The report identified SPLC’s source as Randolph Dilloway, “an accountant … active in the neo-Nazi, white supremacist scene for more than a decade.” SPLC disclosed that Dilloway had been hired by National Alliance Chairman Will Williams to audit the group’s books, and he eventually turned on them.

Dilloway “was given full, unsupervised access to offices holding dozens of boxes of poorly-filed financial documents and data disks associated with the group’s various business entities going back to 1985,” SPLC’s reporting indicated.

The SPLC report continued:

“For five months, Dilloway organized, examined, and in many cases copied key documents and data files among tens of thousands of pages of sales receipts, donation records and ledgers. Dilloway claims that within the first 10 weeks he reported his audit findings to Will Williams and Alliance attorney, Timothy E. Kalamaros, and warned them the NA’s financial records showed a ‘prosecutable pattern of embezzlement and income tax fraud going back at least 15 years.’

“Among the thousands of pages of documents, database files, transaction records and digital media provided by Dilloway to the SPLC, the disturbing email exchanges he had with Kalamaros and Williams outlining possible financial improprieties earlier this year seem to suggest the Alliance attorney was advising them to ignore evidence of tax fraud and embezzlement to avoid being audited by the IRS.”

The SPLC report also said “Dilloway has since been interviewed by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he is now seeking federal protection under IRS Whistleblower statutes.”

Still, according to the Post’s account—which seems to lean heavily on the word of current National Alliance leader Will Williams—Dilloway was likely just the stooge described in the indictment as someone who was paid $6,000 by Employee-2 to take the blame for stealing the boxes of documents.

Which also, presumably, meant throwing away his professional reputation as a trustworthy accountant—for $6,000.

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Not a new line of attack

The Trump administration’s attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center regarding the National Alliance files follows the pattern of a federal lawsuit filed against the SPLC in 2018 by a former Baltimore city attorney who lost his job after being identified as a “neo-Nazi” based on Dilloway’s documents.

In 2018, Glen K. Allen filed a federal lawsuit against the person identified as Employee-2 by the New York Post and against the Southern Poverty Law Center accusing them of engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

“The Intelligence Project and SPLC paid Dilloway for the stolen documents,” Allen’s lawsuit claimed. “On information and belief, the amount paid for the stolen documents substantially exceeded $5,000.”

Allen’s lawsuit also claimed:

“On information and belief, the Intelligence Project and SPLC have paid not only Dilloway but other members, former members, friends, acquaintances, and spouses or former friends and spouses of members, and supporters or former supporters of the National Alliance for information about the National Alliance.

“On information and belief, the Intelligence Project and SPLC have also paid members, former members, friends, acquaintances, and spouses or former friends, acquaintances, and spouses of members, and supporters or former supporters of other ‘hate groups’ as defined by the SPLC for information.”

These allegations occurred during a time when the DOJ claims donors were being kept in the dark about their money being used to pay informants.

Like with the current criminal charges, that 2018 lawsuit accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of attempting to “masquerade as a 501c3 public interest law firm dedicated to a tax exempt educational mission, when in reality the SPLC fails the basic requirements for this favored status because of its illegal actions (including numerous instances of mail and wire fraud), multiple violations of canons of professional ethics (including improper disclosure of confidential and privileged documents and failure to train its nonlawyer employees)….”

Allen’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed by the trial court, a decision that was later upheld by an appeals court.

What do you think? Please let me know in the comments below.

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Former GOP Congressman Denver Riggleman tried to warn America about the growing threat of QAnon, Christian nationalism, and right-wing extremism.

Then, much to his horror, a Christian nationalist-QAnon crowd stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Soon, Riggleman—an experienced intelligence officer—joined the staff of the committee investigating J6.

“I thought the attack would be a wake-up call—it needed to be,” Riggleman wrote in his 2022 New York Times bestselling book, The Breach.

“Our fellow Americans were being radicalized to believe in twisted fantasies and conspiracies. We had to make the rest of the country understand we were now engaged in a new war, whether the battles were immediately visible or no. Welcome to our new forever war: the Information War.”

In this interview, Riggleman offers unique insights about the extremist threat facing America and offers hope for the future.

Please watch, then tell me what you think!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Sometimes, I get tired.

Tired of confronting a hate in America that seems more emboldened than ever to roar back in my face with all the venom it can muster.

Sometimes, I get demoralized.

Demoralized about the increasing number of Americans—people who probably consider themselves good Bible-believing Christians—who eagerly join with white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the online lynch mobs spewing their hate.

Sometimes, I question whether I’m really making a difference.

After all, my Hate Comes to Main Street publication is no match for the ferocious army of haters that America’s richest man, Elon Musk, can deploy with a tap of his finger to rile up the worst human beings among us.

As I written before, there have been tough weeks in this battle against hate that I have chosen for myself—for example, weeks when neo-Nazis have threatened my family and myself. But, in some ways, this past week seemed worse—because at times the amount of hate seemed almost overwhelming.

Watching the right-wing mobs terrorize parts of Belfast, I was horrified—as a human being and, yes, as a Christian—by the violent attacks on innocent immigrants who had committed no crime. Yes, the knife attack by the 30-year-old Sudanese immigrant was horrific, but that was a singular act of violence perpetrated by one (probably mentally ill) man with no help from anyone.

What I saw in videos posted online—White mobs chasing down immigrants in the streets, vandalizing immigrant-owned businesses, setting fire to homes believed to be inhabited by immigrants—reminded me of what I knew of Kristallnacht when Nazi thugs turned on Germany’s Jewish communities.

Surely, Americans could almost all agree that such acts of mob violence have no place in Europe, America, or any other civilized country. Surely, Christians would not argue with such a premise—after all, what would Jesus do? Surely, Jesus would stand between the innocent and the violent mobs, right?

As it would turn out, I was wrong.

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‘We’re winning!’

On Thursday, I published a post headlined: “A Warning for America: White Nationalists ‘Taking Notes’ on Belfast Race Riots.” I was proud of the reporting because, as far as I know, I was the first journalist to reveal that white nationalist groups here in America were celebrating the violent attacks on immigrants and “taking notes” about what they could learn from the tactics.

It was—I believed then and I still believe now—an important story about the threat that America faces from far-right extremist violence.

Unfortunately, the reaction from Nashville talk radio show host Chris Hand—he’s so Christian, he even has a cross in his bio—was typical. He responded to the link that I posted on X with an image of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson displaying the universal “fuck you” gesture.

Another account that I track on X belonging to Tennessee Christian nationalist C.Jay Engel—an “Anglo-Protestant Christian,” according to this bio—seemingly embraced the mob violence and echoed a celebration of the group’s Operational Security (OpSec) plan in being able to avoid identification and arrest.

“Reminder to keep planning, organizing, tactical planning, communication planning, networking, stockpiling, training and developing contingencies,” Engel wrote in a social media post. “Decades of struggle ahead.”

And on Facebook, my post triggered some sort of algorithmic frenzy or bot attack, best exemplified by the more than 6,000 laughing emojis that it received.

And some of the responses were truly disheartening.

“Everyone is rooting for the Irish Phil. You are literally surrounded,” said one person in a reply that received 732 likes.

“Are White Nationalists in the room with you now?” asked another who racked up 2,200 votes of approval.

One account posted, “The reaction emojis are like a score board. We’re winning.”

“This needs to be done all across Europe, the United States, Australia and Canada,” another account posted.

Yet another account added, “Its [sic] not a race riot. Its [sic] a national movement to remove the invading terrorists from their own country.”

What we now know is that the attacks were perpetrated by a neo-Nazi hate group—part of the so-called Active Club network that I have been investigating for several years now—and were not part of some spontaneous uprising.

Still, the onslaught of vicious replies to my post—now slowing down to just under 9,000 total comments—made the wave of hate seem almost overwhelming.

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‘They are so happy with you’

Yet, as often happens in such situations, morning brought a new perspective and hope that together we can make a stand against hate. That hope came in the form of a direct message from an Irish follower on X.

“I told all my Irish people that you are correcting the record, and they are so happy with you,” Mary informed me.

And she sent along photos from a march against fascism and hate that drew thousands of Irish residents to the city’s center.

“I really hope you know how people in my circle talk about your reporting!!” Mary added as she continued to send along photos from the Belfast event.

“It is really impactful,” she continued. “Too many journalists do not do it straight and you do. You are courageous—especially in this hyper partisan environment.”

Mary added, “Belfast doesn’t want to go backwards Thank you for taking an interest.”

And she expressed her gratitude in the true spirit of Ireland.

To Mary and all the others like her who lift my spirits during this difficult struggle against hate that we face in this country, to all who have chosen to support this independent project of mine, THANK YOU!!!

Together, we are never alone.

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Less than 24 hours after a Sudanese immigrant was implicated in a horrific stabbing incident late Monday, mobs of masked White men were terrorizing immigrant communities in Belfast.

“What no one appeared to notice,” writes Wired journalist David Gilbert, “was the role played by the white supremacist Active Club movement and its Youth Club wing in not only stoking tensions, but advising and orchestrating the masked youths who spearheaded much of the violence.”

David’s report advances my own reporting about how Will2Rise, the organization behind the Active Club movement, cheered on the attacks and encouraged its followers to learn from how the Belfast mobs evaded arrest.

I highly encourage you to read David’s report here: A White Supremacist Youth Group Helped Orchestrate the Belfast Riots.

White nationalist groups—including one recently platformed in a light-handed 60 Minutes report—are openly celebrating the violent attacks on immigrants in Belfast and suggesting their followers can learn from the rioters’ tactics.

Will2Rise—the influential white nationalist group associated with the Active Club network and headed by self-proclaimed fascist Robert Rundo—published an article Wednesday on operational security (“for educational purposes only”) that described how members of the Belfast mob have avoided arrest.

And extremism experts with whom I have exchanged messages over the last 24 hours confirmed my own horrified reaction to the chatter in the dark corners of the internet: What we’re seeing in Belfast should be a wake-up call for America.

“The Will2Rise OPSEC article is not a protest safety guide. It is a tactical, lessons-learned document for violent, extremist street mobilisation,” said Alexander Ritzmann, senior advisor with the Counter Extremism Project.

Ritzmann has described the Active Club movement, which uses combat sports to recruit disaffected young White men, as a “neo-Nazi militia hiding in plain sight.” (You can watch my recent interview with Ritzmann below.)

In an email, Ritzmann told me:

“In the Active Club context, the article reads as advice on how to conduct political street violence while making identification, arrest, and prosecution more difficult.

“The broader Active Club strategy depends on preserving a public fiction of fitness and heritage while building a pool of men prepared for violent confrontation. The OPSEC article fits that strategy almost perfectly.”

Ritzmann just published his own post about the Will2Rise opsec article.

Violence erupted this week after a “harrowing'‘ knife attack on a White Irishman by a Sudanese immigrant, and X owner Elon Musk has face intense criticism over accusations that he has used his platform to whip up tensions.

Jeff Tischauser, senior researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me he was not surprised that far-right groups here in the U.S. and across Europe are rallying around the White mobs because “members of the Active Club network see themselves as building an international movement of white nationalists.”

“White nationalists in Active Clubs want to harm non-White groups, so they lie about crime rates to paint non-White groups as more violent, which keeps their supporters angry, hateful, and easier to mobilize,” Tischauser said.

“Active Clubs want to see White people everywhere rioting over immigration, and Active Clubs want to add fuel to the fire to make this happen in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, agreed with that assessment.

“This should be a wake-up call of the dangers of social media that isn’t moderated and a moment for public figures to rethink stoking violence against innocent people,” Beirich told me in an email exchange.

She added:

“What is happening in Northern Ireland shows how white supremacists, racists and even public figures like Elon Musk are willing to take advantage of tragic situations to stoke rage and violence. Taking advantage of a horrific murder to rain down violence on immigrants and neighborhoods is what these groups are willing to do in their racist attempts to drive immigrants from Ireland and other countries. Organizations like the Active Clubs have been mobilizing and training for just such an opportunity.”

Plausible deniability?

Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, which traces harmful activity online, said his organization has “seen thousands of posts from far-right extremists and likeminded communities that have celebrated the riots, amplified calls for additional mobilizations, and encouraged escalations in tactics.”

Holt said those groups “are watching the situation closely, taking notes, and citing those events to further their own propaganda efforts.”

“Hardcore white supremacist movements often long fantasized about an inevitable racial ‘uprising’ or mass-conflict where White people will have to reassert dominance over their countries, going back decades,” he added.

“They are eager to see the situation in Belfast devolve further, hoping it will help bring about a racist awakening in Western society where they emerge as leaders.”

The Will2Rise article—to which I will not link in this post—denies that the Active Club network has played any role in the violence nor that the information is intended as anything more than “an academic curiosity.”

Will2Rise is headed by Robert Rundo, who was featured in a recent 60 Minutes profile which I criticized for playing into the hands of the violent convicted felon’s new “Fun in Fascism” propaganda effort.

“There were many fascinating truths revealed by the latest protests in Northern Ireland: it takes only 1,000 men in black bloc to outnumber 1312,” Will2Rise wrote, referring to the mob confronting law enforcement. (The number ”1312” corresponds to the letters on a phone keypad “ACAB”—”All Cops Are Bastards.”)

Another lesson that Rundo’s team gleaned from the violence: “Politicians are powerless when patriots organise on the streets, only able to complain and make meaningless statements of condemnation that make them look weak.”

Still, while apparently attempting to establish plausible deniability, the Telegram accounts associated with Robert Rundo and the Active Club network appear to be cheering on the violent mob’s attacks on immigrants.

“White boy summer is starting off hot this year,” said the caption for a photo of White rioters running from a burning police vehicle. It was posted on a channel that Robert Rundo frequently uses for official pronouncements. (See above.)

Another image showed a black-clad mob marching down the streets of Belfast with the far-right rallying cry: “By God, we’ll have our home again.”

Yet, another post declared, “Tomorrow belong (sic) to us.”

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‘Tribe up, get ready’

A related Sweden-based, neo-Nazi fight club known as Gym XIV—a reference to the neo-Nazi “fourteen words” slogan—shared posts that were even more provocative, including calls for more violence.

Robert Rundo, in a video I found online, has described the founder of Gym XIV as “one of the guys that helped really bring about the whole Active Club movement.”

“Give it a little time, it will become apparent to many more that there can be no middle ground,” said a post shared by Gym XIV. “The lukewarm and meek shall not inherit the earth. Instead they shall fade into oblivion and infamy.”

It concluded, “In the end, it’s either a total Aryan victory or planet of the apes.”

In another case, Gym XIV urged its followers watching events in Ireland: “Tribe up. Go to the gym. Support those that support you. Get ready.”

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A final thought…

From the SPLC’s Jeff Tischauser:

“Members of Active Clubs have a few key reasons to paying attention to what is going on in Belfast. First, white nationalists spend a lot of their time trying to make White people afraid of non-White groups. White nationalists do this by claiming non-White groups are more prone to act violently, which is what I’ve seen from Active Club channels on Telegram responding to the race riots in Belfast. White nationalists in Active Clubs connect individual acts of violence against White people that occur anywhere in the world to a perceived anti-White system. It’s all lies and bigotry. In reality, white-on-white violence is a bigger threat to White people. For example, I know of several Active Club members who are currently in jail for domestic violence in which they beat their partners, all of whom were White women. Leaders of Active Clubs don’t want anybody to know this because it will destroy their narrative about who commits violence.”

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Watching people die has never been my idea of an emotionally fulfilling way to pass the time; in fact, the notion itself nearly brings me to the point of nausea.

Sadly, far too many people—many of them minors seeking shocking experiences—have voluntarily fallen into the dark world of the website WatchPeopleDie.

The website is exactly as its name implies. As described by the ADL, WatchPeopleDie (WPD) is “a forum where users can post and view real images and videos of violence, including murders, torture, rape, executions, beheadings, suicides, dismemberments, accidents and animal killings.”

WatchPeopleDie also provides a means for circulating white supremacist and antisemitic material, including manifestos left behind by various mass killers.

Researchers have discovered that school shooters Solomon Henderson (from Antioch High School in Nashville) and Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow (Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin) were both radicalized on the website and apparently developed an online relationship with each other.

Peruse the disturbing website for just a few minutes, and it quickly becomes clear that becoming numb to the horror of violence is part of the allure.

“I want to become desensitized so that in the event of witnessing a violent death I can be the calm and collected one who calls for help instead of panicking—and it’s working so far,” a user recently posted on a WPD forum.

As evidence of its desensitizing effect, the person added, “A bit after I became active on here, my grandmother died and I didn’t feel much of anything.”

WatchPeopleDie claims some five million registered users.

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Keeping the lights on

WatchPeopleDie and similar websites that cater to violent extremism are able to keep the lights on thanks to Cloudflare, a publicly traded corporation based in San Francisco, according to a recent report from the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) and the Center for Technology and Society (CTS).

Here is how the ADL report describes the role of the high-tech company:

Cloudflare ensures these spaces maintain their online presence through a broad suite of services, including its widely used Content Delivery Network (CDN), which speeds up website load times by routing visitor traffic to the closest global caching server,” the report notes. Cloudflare’s analytics service lets webmasters measure traffic, while its domain registrar manages domain records that function as a phonebook for internet users. Cloudflare also provides a cybersecurity shield that protects sites from digital attacks. Together, these services help keep websites accessible, fast, and secure from disruptions that would otherwise knock them offline.

The report is part of a campaign by the ADL to try to force Cloudflare and other high-tech firms to pull the plug on WatchPeopleDie and similar websites known for fueling school shootings and other acts of terror across America.

“Cloudflare has failed to meaningfully curtail the proliferation of content designed to stoke hate and violence,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO and National Director, in a written statement.

“The Company’s claim that it merely serves as a ‘pass-through’ utility is no excuse. By providing the infrastructure that enables hateful messages to reach and influence a wide audience, we believe the Company has failed in its risk oversight responsibility.”

A news release from ADL continues:

Cloudflare’s record demonstrates that it can and does block content when it determines that such content poses an unacceptable risk. However, it appears that these situations have generally occurred only after public crisis points, rather than pursuant to a clear, consistently applied risk framework.

For example, Cloudflare terminated services to:

• The Daily Stormer, but only after the site publicly claimed Cloudflare “secretly supported” its ideology;

• 8chan, but only after the site was linked to three mass shootings in five months, including in El Paso, Texas;

• Kiwi Farms, but only after what Cloudflare’s Chief Executive Officer, Matthew Prince, called an “unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life.” In each case, the company framed its decision as an exceptional act rather than the application of a consistent policy.

Cloudflare did not respond to my request for comment.

Watch my interview above with Daniel Kelley, senior director for the ADL Center for Technology and Society.

Read the ADL report on Cloudflare here.

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Will the conservative Southern Baptist Convention take a stand against Christian nationalism, against right-wing forces pushing a nativist agenda, against those using hateful rhetoric to cut down their enemies?

That test will come when messengers—in other words, delegates—representing the nation’s largest Protestant denomination gather for their annual meeting next week in Orlando and be asked to vote on a series of resolutions.

“The #SBC resolutions this year suggest that leadership is acutely aware of the dangers of the Dissident Right/’Christian Nationalism,’” wrote SBC thinker Neil Shenvi this week in a post on X.

One thing is clear: William Wolfe, the right-wing culture warrior trying to push the denomination’s 47,000 congregations and 13 million members farther to the right as part of his own Christian nationalist agenda, is not happy.

My series of essays this week on Wolfe—a first-term Trump administration official—has highlighted his associations with far-right extremists and his distinctly pro-White political agenda.

(More on Wolfe’s reactions to those essays can be found at the bottom of this post.)

“The Ghost of Russell Moore stalks many of the SBC resolutions this year,” declared Wolfe, who heads the so-called Center for Baptist Leadership.

Russell Moore is the former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission who angered conservatives when he opposed Donald Trump’s campaign for the GOP nomination in 2015.

Moore questioned not only Trump’s personal morality, he also expressed concerns about policies that Trump would implement.

Moore’s op-ed in the New York Times was headlined: “Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?”

“When evangelicals should be leading the way on racial reconciliation, as the Bible tells us to, are we really ready to trade unity with our black and brown brothers and sisters for this angry politician?” Moore asked.

Now, far-right figures like Wolfe—whose funding appears to come from outside the SBC as part of a broader right-wing political agenda—are focusing on hardcore immigration policies, racially divisive pro-White talking points, and the use of government power to impose their personal views of morality.

Which is why the upcoming votes on the SBC resolutions could provide a critical indicator about the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Does Russell Moore’s vision of a kinder, gentler church still have any adherents, or has the reactionary William Wolfe wing now gained a foothold in the era of MAGA?

Below are the resolutions and key provisions some are watching:

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Resolution on religious liberty

This resolution seeks to affirm longstanding Baptist embrace of the separation of church and state—based on the notion that faith cannot be coerced.

William Wolfe, on the other hand, has argued for a Christian Nationalist America where Protestant men like himself can impose their interpretation of Christian teachings.

“Yes, we are going to impose it on you,” Wolfe said earlier this year.

“If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just—if it lines up with God’s standards. And I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”

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Resolution on political violence and speech

Wolfe is notorious for his no-holds-barred battles on X where he routinely demonizes anyone who disagrees with him, hurls vicious insults their way and, generally, engages in dehumanizing behavior as part of his crusade.

“He went to seminary, got the grades, but missed the point of God’s redeeming love,” wrote conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson in a post earlier this year on X. “He is graceless, does not love his neighbor, and is also a humorless bully.”

(More on that later in this post, as well.)

This resolution argues that “dehumanizing rhetoric, reckless accusations, slander, and the normalization of hatred and contempt can harden consciences, inflame passions, and make violence more palatable in public life.”

It calls on “Southern Baptists to examine our own speech, online conduct, and public witness.”

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Resolution on immigration

As part of his work with the Center for Baptist Leadership, Wolfe has become heavily focused on mass deportation, even embracing the concept of remigration, which suggests the possible denaturalization of people who may have been longtime citizens and shipping them back to their countries of origin.

As I have previously reported, remigration is a concept that was originally developed by a former European neo-Nazi as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

Wolfe appeared at an event in Texas that included a former neo-Nazi speaker who represents a group that wants to encourage non-White people, including Black Americans, to relocate to other countries.

The executive director of the Center on Baptist Leadership also follows that group, the White Papers Policy Institute, on X.

This proposed resolution supports efforts to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and rejects amnesty, but also rejects “nativism, racial or ethnic hostility, ethnonationalism, discrimination, and all ideologies or rhetoric that deny the equal worth and dignity of any people group regardless of immigration status.”

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Resolution on antisemitism

An increasing number of people who identify as Christian nationalists—including some in Wolfe’s own orbit—have begun to embrace antisemitic notions, including ideas that Jews should be treated as second-class citizens in America because “this country belongs to Jesus.”

As far as I could determine, Wolfe has not publicly condemned or distanced himself from his Christian nationalist allies who have articulated such views.

This resolution declares that the SBC “unequivocally condemn[s] this new surge of antisemitism in all its forms, including violence, cultural hatred, and conspiracy theories of Jewish controlled cabals, as sinful, unchristian, and an assault on both biblical truth and basic human dignity.”

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Wolfe’s reaction to my reporting

The executive director of the Center on Baptist Leadership never responded to my inquiries to give him a chance to comment before my posts this week, and he has not pointed to any inaccuracies in the three essays

Finally, on Thursday, he appeared to play the victim.

“I’ve been attacked all week by a failed fake news ‘journalist’ on his Substack because I don’t think that White people - or anyone - should be discriminated against because of the color of their skin,” Wolfe wrote.

“Because I oppose the inhumane and un-Christian anti-White ideology that leads to the death of young men like Henry Nowak. And this is supposed to make me look bad?”

Then, when I responded to his post, asking him about his extremist associations, he hid my reply and blocked me. That response is especially ironic given Wolfe’s push for greater transparency within the SBC.

Asked by an X user why he blocked me, Wolfe replied: “Because he’s a lying hack.”

Another account called out the Center for Baptist Leadership’s executive director for failing to respond to my requests for comment.

“What are you afraid of?” the person asked.

Wolfe replied, “Not afraid of him, just don’t take him seriously.”

Welcome to the culture wars of the Southern Baptist Convention.

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Related Posts:

In Part 1, I laid out the associations by William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, with people who have embraced the Ku Klux Klan and who have been labeled as “antisemites and racists.” Part 2 examined other controversial figures. This post reviews Wolfe’s racial agenda and the people coming to his defense—or not speaking up against him.

More than 30 years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention decided it was time to come to terms with its racist past.

Formed in 1845 in defense of slavery, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination had stood with Jim Crow through the decades. And on the 150th anniversary of its founding, the SBC passed a resolution at its annual meeting in which it “unwaveringly [denounced] racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin.”

“Be it further resolved,” the statement continued, “that we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Just eight years ago, the SBC’s preeminent educational institution, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, joined in the reckoning for its own role.

“We have been guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity,” wrote the seminary’s president, Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. “We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story.

“We comforted ourselves that we could know this, but since these events were so far behind us, we could move on without awkward and embarrassing investigations and conversations.”

That was then.

Now, William Wolfe—the head of the Center for Baptist Leadership, an outside far-right group with a Christian nationalist agenda—is on a mission to convince the SBC’s 47,000 congregations and 13 million members that their 181-year-old denomination has a new kind of race problem that must be rooted out.

Wolfe is lobbying SBC messengers—delegates to next week’s annual meeting in Orlando—to elect conservative Florida Pastor Willy Rice to be the next SBC president. And, in a February post on X, Wolfe singled out Rice’s opponent, South Carolina Pastor Josh Powell, as a purveyor of that racist agenda.

Josh Powell’s views on race, Wolfe argued, are “horrific” and “un-Christian.”

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William Wolfe: ‘This is horrific’

The focus of Wolfe’s ire was a statement Powell had published during the racial reckoning of 2020. In it, the pastor described his personal resolution to respond to the country’s racial divisions “as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, seeking nothing more than to be faithful to the Word of God….”

Wolfe’s post on X seemingly highlighted the specific commitments by the South Carolina pastor that he found most egregious.

Powell committed:

• “To denounce racism and white supremacy not just in its most glaring instances, but also in its subtle forms, which are more rampant and pervasive than we often realize.”

• “To plead with my white brothers and sisters to speak out and act out, empathizing when they see someone hurting, no matter what they look like.”

• “To follow the example of the good Samaritan, helping to bandage wounds and care for the hurting.”

• “To use our voices to proclaim the beauty of God’s multi-colored creation and the equality of every man and woman before the Lord.”

“This whole thing is really, really bad,” Wolfe tweeted. “This is horrific, woke, and shaming of White Christians. It’s deeply anti-White. Un-Christian.”

Un-Christian?

To denounce racism and white supremacy?

To plead with Christians to empathize with those who are hurting, “no matter what they look like”?

To follow the example of the good Samaritan?

To proclaim the “equality of every man and woman before the Lord”?

That is what Wolfe considers to be “horrific” and “un-Christian”?

Wolfe’s post is perhaps no better example of the racial politics—critics would call it a white nationalist agenda—the former first-term Trump administration official has brought to the Southern Baptist Convention in recent years.

Still, SBC leaders have largely been silent about Wolfe’s very public campaign to portray White people as the real victims and to argue that efforts to promote diversity represent “garbage” that must be kept “out of our convention.”

NOTE: This is my analysis of the public controversies that have been whirling around Wolfe online. For more of his perspective—and to judge his beliefs for yourself—I strongly urge you to check out his X account, and CBL account. For other perspectives from Christian nationalism critics, I would suggest the X accounts for Blake Callens, Janet Mefferd, Eli McGowan, Neil Shenvi, and Youke.

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‘Some of my best work’

In Part 1 of this series of essays, I highlighted how William Wolfe had ‘found common ground with characters whose controversial ideas were once seen as representing the face of hate in America.” Part 2 described his ties with other Dissident Right figures who have faced accusations of racism and antisemitism.

While not responding directly to my post, Wolfe pulled out what he seemingly considers one of his greatest hits. It was a tweet that went viral in the rough-and-tumble world of X, where he does battle with his ideological enemies.

“Just to be 100% clear, I absolutely still avow this post of mine which was reposted by @elonmusk,” the Center for Baptist Leadership’s executive director boasted. He shared the post, which he called “some of my best work.”

That original post, from December 2025, declared: “White Guilt has been one of the most destructive forces of the 21st century to date. If Western Civilization falls in our lifetime, it will be because we allowed this mind virus to destroy us.”

Musk—who regularly embraces white supremacist narratives—shared Wolfe’s original post to his 240 million followers, adding: “It ends now.”

Soon after getting amplified by Musk, Wolfe was basking in his viral moment—a moment that produced disturbing reminders of the dark world of social media.

An X account that regularly produces antisemitic themes shared Wolfe’s post with a cartoon suggesting Jews were using the Holocaust for that “White Guilt.”

Natural Law Theonomist—another X account that routinely posts racist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and homophobic themes—congratulated Wolfe on the retweet , giving him the one-word salute of the far-right: “Patriot.”

Another account, calling itself “Freedom Fighter,” responded to Wolfe with a cartoon depicting Barack Obama as a cobra, adding: ”It started with this snake.”

But rather than being deterred about triggering a string of vile reactions, the would-be Baptist leader celebrated his achievement.

“So thank you, @elonmusk for buying a platform and making it possible for a total nobody like me—just a kid from a lower middle class family from North Carolina—to reach over 200 million people with my commentary and thoughts in a year.” He added, “And thanks for the buzzer beater repost!”

And he used the attention to drum up support for his effort to remake the Southern Baptist Convention into his preferred image.

“If you want to help drive the poison of ‘white guilt’ out of the American church, check out our effort to do just that,” he posted.

“Christians, in many ways, are the worst offenders on this. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Help us put the work away for good.”

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Friends in low places

One of the first people to call out William Wolfe on X for his recent association with a Ku Klux Klan-praising podcaster was Christian nationalist critic Youke, who later noted some of the vile accounts coming to Wolfe’s defense.

“Based af,” said an anonymous account known as Marcus Tullius. “I already like William Wolfe. You don’t have to sell me.”

Youke posted a screenshot, urging her followers, “See a few examples of this anon’s posts. This is the kind of account praising William.”

She provided evidence of some of the racist and antisemitic messaging routinely produced by the right-wing account.

And Youke noted some of the Wolfe-adjacent accounts that follow Marcus Tullius: Among them, Joshua Abbotoy, co-founder and CEO of American Reformer, the non-profit entity funding Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership.

Nathan Halberstadt is a general partner in New Founding, a for-profit firm started by the American Reformer principals, and Christian nationalist podcaster C.Jay Engel, travels in those same Dissident Right circles.

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‘Demonic anti-White racism’

Wolfe does appear to have the ear of some of the Southern Baptist Convention’s most conservative figures, and more moderate voices seem fearful of the online army that Wolfe can deploy to lambast those pastors and other SBC activists who are deemed to be insufficiently orthodox.

One of the few vocal critics within the SBC has been Dwight McKissic, the senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.

McKissic, one of a relatively small number of Black pastors within the SBC, was featured in a 2021 article in The New Yorker describing increasing racial tensions within the SBC during the MAGA era of American politics.

The article was titled, “The Fight for the Heart of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

That is a battle that McKissic continues to wage, with William Wolfe often appearing to be the face of the problem that he sees.

In a 2024 on X, the outspoken pastor accused “the William Wolfe wing” of the Southern Baptist Convention of “pushing a cultural, politically conservative, southern, red states agenda…as opposed to a Kingdom agenda.”

Just in the last few days, McKissic condemned Wolfe’s post on X in which he claimed that Josh Powell’s personal resolution to oppose racism—the one I described at the beginning of this essay—was “horrific” and “un-Christian.”

“William Wolfe is opposed to [Josh] Powell, a candidate for SBC president, because Powell powerfully, persuasively, and publicly opposes racism,” McKissic tweeted. Regarding Wolfe’s original post, McKissic noted, “Opposing racism is now called ‘shaming of White Christians.”

The Texas pastor added, referring to Josh Powell, that he was “grateful to have a candidate for president of the SBC who unapologetically opposes racism and discipline[s] his congregation to do the same.”

And McKissic later reposted Wolfe’s boast of his viral tweet about “white guilt”—the one shared by Elon Musk and that Wolfe called “some of my best work.”

“There is no sense of guilt or shame in the blatant racism and sexism that’s been exhibited periodically throughout SBC history,” McKissic said.

The executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership responded to the Black pastor:

“Please repent of your demonic anti-White racism, Dwight.”

With the current dynamics within the Southern Baptist Convention in 2026, no SBC leader has publicly come to the McKissic’s defense—nor have they called out William Wolfe for his racial agenda and what my first essay described as his “strange (racist, antisemitic) bedfellows.”

And if SBC pastors are too afraid of the backlash to take a stand, has William Wolfe not already won?

Please tell me what you think in the comments below.

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In Part 1, I laid out the associations by William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, with people who have embraced the Ku Klux Klan, as well as figures who have been labeled as “antisemites and racists.” This part examines other controversial figures in Wolfe’s orbit.

When right-wing political commentator Jeremy Carl’s nomination to be an assistant secretary of state went before the U.S. Senate, members of the Senate Foreign Relations committee confronted him with harsh words.

Some of those harsh words were his own.

And William Wolfe, the man now attempting to steer the Southern Baptist Convention farther to the right, was watching what his friend was facing as he appeared in February for his Senate confirmation hearing.

Despite vociferous condemnations that would be aimed at Carl as the proceedings unfolded, Wolfe refused to disavow him.

“I avow @realJeremyCarl,” Wolfe tweeted after the hearing had concluded. “He’s an American Christian patriot through and through. One of the best of us.”

Among Carl’s provocative statements that senators questioned during the confirmation process:

• “The Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”

• “Jews have often loved to play the victim, rather than accept they’re participants in history.”

• “Hitler is always the convenient kind of bad example.”

• ‘The Holocaust dominates so much of modern Jewish history…. Everyone has traumas in their past. How much are we going to re-litigate them?’’

• ‘‘The Capitol riot defendants had it worse than Black Americans in the Jim Crow South.’’

• “If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered.’’

• A nation that treats the claims of George Floyd’s partisans as serious arguments is a nation that is dying.”

• ‘The great replacement is real. And they’re going to try to make you pay for it.”

• ‘There is a pathological war on white people in America. It’s time decent people wake up and fight against it.’’

Such comments seemingly reflected a worldview where White people had become the real victims in American society.

“Some may try to excuse Mr. Carl’s remarks, claiming his words were taken out of context, that he never said them, and that his own heritage protects him from criticism,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat.

As she spoke, Rosen—a Jewish woman and former synagogue president—sat in front of a sign displaying one of Carl’s quotes about Jews. (See photo above.)

"So, let me be clear,” she continued. “Identity does not excuse antisemitism. Identity does not excuse racism. Identity does not excuse hateful rhetoric regardless of who says them. Words matter.”

Sen. Cory Booker, the New Jersey Democrat, agreed.

“I have never seen such a blatantly racist individual who does not even deny that he has made these statements but wants to tell us that he regrets them,” Booker told the committee.

Sen. John Curtis, a Utah Republican, ultimately announced he too would oppose Carl’s nomination, calling his “insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated.”

That announcement by a fellow Republican would ultimately force Carl to withdraw his name from consideration.

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Wolfe: Jeremy Carl ‘crucified by the Left’

But rather than seeing his friend as a flawed nominee, Wolfe—the executive director for the Center for Baptist Leadership—saw Carl as a White martyr being “crucified” on the cross of diversity.

Wolfe, a first-term Trump appointee who brought his political background to the denominational fight that has enveloped the SBC, has vigorously attacked efforts within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination to address its racist history. He has labeled diversity initiatives within the SBC as “White guilt,” a “mind virus,” and “garbage” that “must be kept out of our convention.”

In January, Wolfe had tweeted out praise for Carl as being among a “handful of good Christian men who never demonized White Americans/Christians and opposed the anti-White hate even when it was costly.”

That praise of Jeremy Carl was attached to the post below, which showed Elon Musk retweeting an openly racist and antisemitic account.

Then, the day after the confirmation hearing, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership lashed out.

He had watched the Senate debate and found fault, not with his friend’s controversial statements, but with his critics.

“The attack on @realJeremyCarl is a major mask off moment: If you don’t hate White people, they will smear you as a racist,” Wolfe tweeted.

“Jeremy isn’t a racist, of course, he just doesn’t hate White people and wish for their destruction.”

Wolfe continued, “In fact, now we see that the only way to NOT be called a ‘racist’ by the Left and the Media is to be a racist, just against Whites.

“Once you see it you can’t unsee it.”

NOTE: This is my analysis of the public controversies that have been whirling around Wolfe online. For more of his perspective—and to judge his beliefs for yourself—I strongly urge you to check out his X account, and CBL account. For other perspectives from Christian nationalism critics, I would suggest the X accounts for , , Eli McGowan, , and Youke.

‘SBC leadership knows this’

While William Wolfe positions himself as a heresy hunter, looking for evidence of Southern Baptists deviating from SBC orthodoxy, he works in circles of people determined to ignore a central tenet of the so-called Baptist Faith and Message:

“Church and state should be separate.”

Wolfe served as an editor of the Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel, released in 2023, which calls for the national government to implement “Christian Orthodoxy.” It includes potentially outlawing public blasphemy—a use of government power that the Baptist Faith and Message specifically condemns.

One of Wolfe’s co-editors was Texas-based Pastor Joel Webbon, who has quickly become one of the most controversial figures in Christian nationalist circles, even drawing rebukes from more-established figures in the movement.

Among Webbon’s views:

• “Those of Jewish descent are generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.”

• ”The “leading cause of antisemitism” continues to be Jewish behavior.”

• Jews should not be allowed to hold public office in America. As he has put it, “They can be in the car, they just can’t drive.”

• Nick Fuentes was justified in mocking the Holocaust “because Holocaustianity has been weaponized as a false religion to ensure that White people cannot have a country.”

• The Holocaust was “probably not as bad as we’ve been told,” and Hitler probably “didn’t even know” about it all.

• Gender equality is part of a Jewish plot to “eradicate White people.”

• Women should be put to death for making false sexual assault allegations, claiming “#MeToo would end real fast” if that occurred.

• ”There are not enough Black men in America, Christian men who know enough theology to be qualified to pastor Black churches.” As a result, Black Americans need to “go find a good, God-fearing White church” to attend.

• If Christians are “not being called a Nazi, an antisemite, a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot, then they are simply not fighting hard enough.”

While Wolfe has extensively purged his X timeline, including interactions with Webbon, there is no evidence the Center for Baptist Leadership executive director has ever called for the Texas pastor to renounce any of those views.

Instead, he expressed agreement earlier this year with Webbon’s accusations against Christian nationalism critic Eli McGowan.

“Yes, Eli is of his father (the devil),” Wolfe posted.

Webbon responded, “Amen.”

And, as Christian nationalism critic Blake Callens reported, Wolfe was photographed with Webbon and his equally controversial sidekick Wesley Todd earlier this year at a GOP event in Plano, Texas.

“What Wolfe did,” Callens wrote, “was publicly fellowship, and allow himself to be photographed, with two men who have become infamous in Christian media for actively spreading the type of racism most Americans associate with figures like David Duke”—a reference to the former KKK grand dragon.

Callens described Wolfe’s work as being “to lobby the Southern Baptist Convention towards the extremist ideology shared by his employer.” Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership is a project of the non-profit American Reformer.

The critic noted that “much, if not most, of SBC leadership knows” about Wolfe’s relationships and agenda, but “have said nothing publicly.”

That, he concluded, “is shameful.”

I could find no evidence that Wolfe ever publicly responded to that criticism.

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Then, there’s the ‘Nazi pornographer’

In 2023, Jake Meador, editor of the Christian publication Mere Orthodoxy used his X account to explore the relationships between the principals behind American Reformer—the group funding William Wolfe’s SBC efforts—and a pseudonymous extremist that Meador characterized as a “Nazi pornographer.”

That extremist, who goes by the name “Raw Egg Nationalist” or REN, published a magazine known as Man’s World that sometimes included softcore pornography.

The deal with REN was struck by New Founding, a so-called “venture firm focused on critical civilizational problems, founded by Dallas-based investor Nate Fischer with Joshua Abbotoy serving as managing partner. American Reformer was founded by the same men, and the entities share an address.

Meador noted New Founding had invested in an herbal team company owned by REN. As described by Baptist Global News, Raw Egg Nationalist—his real name is Charles Cornish-Dale—is “a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist with a Nazi aesthetic that New Founding claims is just ‘tongue-in-cheek.’”

Still, Raw Egg Nationalist was published by Antelope Hill Publishing, a company best known for its distribution of Nazi material. And Meador noted that REN routinely posted content like the image below. The Christian editor added, “Note that the quote he shares here is an excerpt from Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.”

Meador also reported that Raw Egg Nationalist account “sometimes posts ‘HH,’ which is a social media shorthand for ‘Heil Hitler.’” In another post, REN had claimed there were “zog chemicals” in shampoo—an apparent reference to antisemitic conspiracy theories of a “Zionist Occupied Government.”

In 2024, REN was featured in an Atlantic magazine cover story about “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet”—and, on his X account, REN celebrated the following quote that he called a “zinger”:

“Someone asked me the other day—I think it was a girl, actually—she was like: ‘So would you take away the vote from women?’ I was like, ‘I would take away the vote from the vast majority of men as well.’”

These days, REN’s posts on X are filled with slurs against women (warning of the threat posed by “utterly unf*ckable women”) and immigrants (claiming a ferret serves a “more useful purpose than virtually all the immigrants … combined.”)

Last month, he insisted there was no reason to be bemoaning—in his word, “blackpilling”—the fact that “Confederate states are rushing through rigged maps to erase Black districts off the map.”

Meanwhile, his Man’s World continues to distribute what, by Baptist standards, would be considered highly inappropriate content.

Among Raw Egg Nationalist’s followers on X is the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership.

As far as I can determine, William Wolfe has never publicly commented on the controversy, although a now-deleted post appears to show him mocking the furor over Raw Egg Nationalist’s much-discussed use of “HH.”

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Other William Wolfe bedfellows

The executive director for the Center for Baptist Leadership also moves in Dissident Right circles with other figures known for their controversial views on democracy, on race, and on the role of Jews in America.

As I have previously reported, Christian nationalist podcasters Andrew Isker and C.Jay Engel are part of an effort to build an “aligned community” in Jackson County, Tennessee. That effort is being financed by Nate Fischer and Josh Abbotoy, the principals involved in New Founding and American Reformer.

On election night in 2024, Wolfe appeared on the pair’s Contra Mundum podcast, celebrating the possibility that Donald Trump might win both the Electoral College and the popular vote, leading to the authoritarian “Red Caesar” that some Christian nationalists hope will arise to impose their worldview.

“If he does that then, you know, Red Caesar, mandate from heaven, rock and roll, let’s go,” Wolfe said.

Isker and Engel have argued America should be reserved “Heritage Americans,” mainly those of European descent.

They have celebrated images of Whites-only diners in the 1950s, with Engel proclaiming “the 1960s ruined everything.” They have defended racial discrimination as “freedom of association,” denouncing the efforts of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, in general.

“You cannot have both MLK and Heritage America,” Engel wrote in one social media post.

They have also platformed people with antisemitic views and individuals who question the Holocaust. Engel himself has argued that "the Jews as a collective have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life, rooted as it is in European Christendom." And, on a series of podcasts with the controversial Christian nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon, Isker has argued that Jews should not be treated as full-fledged Americans because “this country belongs to Jesus.”

“My job is to normalize dissident right-wing talking points to the normies,” Engel wrote in a post on X. “This is the function of the vanguard; this is the strategy of instilling a counter-revolutionary ethos in Middle America.

“We will tear off Liberal scales from their eyes and radicalize Main Street.”

Isker has argued, “The institutions matter. The mainline churches matter. One day we will retake them. By force if necessary.”

By all appearances, Wolfe considers both Isker and Engel to be ideological allies.

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Still, no comment from Wolfe

Part 1 gained considerable attention as Southern Baptist delegates, known as messengers, are preparing for their annual meeting in Orlando.

William Wolfe still has not responded directly to my inquiries, although the following post may have been a backhanded acknowledgement of my reporting.

Wolfe did share a post on X from a lay churchman from Bowling Green, Kentucky, who expresses similar views on immigration, multiculturalism, and what he calls “gay race communism.”

“These types of hit pieces will become more & more like a badge of honor as our culture slips further into multicultural chaos & as we continue to revert back to historical Christian theology,” Eric Salmons posted.

”William doesn’t need to be vindicated but both history & the future will be on his side.”

Christian nationalism critic Eli McGowan had a considerably different reaction regarding Wolfe’s role in the upcoming SBC annual meeting:

“In a healthy denomination, he would not be allowed to serve as a Messenger.”

And there’s even more…

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The Southern Baptist Convention - and Its ‘Horrific, Un-Christian’ Race Problem

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Borrowing from Shakespearean imagery of one who finds himself thrust by circumstances into the unexpected company of an odious character, it has often been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows.

But that adage barely begins to describe the politics currently engulfing the Southern Baptist Convention.

There, dogmatic power seekers within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination have found common ground with characters whose controversial ideas were once seen as representing the face of hate in America.

Among those leading that effort to push the Southern Baptist Convention even farther to the right is William Wolfe, a first-term Trump administration appointee and now executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership.

Wolfe recently joined a podcast to discuss “how to deal with being smeared as a racist”—just two days after the pseudonymous host of that podcast openly embraced affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, affirmed his belief that “races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals,” and decried race mixing as “evil.”

As part of his campaign, Wolfe also took his case before a far-right group whose leaders have been denounced as “antisemites and racists.” At one of the group’s events, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership also found himself in the company of a former neo-Nazi figure who is now pushing what, critics say, amounts to an ethnic cleansing of America.

But, rather than acceding to suggestions that such views represent “hate,” William Wolfe and his friends insist their efforts are about “love”— love of their country, their faith, and their people.

At stake in this ideological battle is the future of an evangelical denomination—with 47,000 congregations and some 13 million members—that separated from their Baptist brethren in the North in 1845 in defense of slavery and sat quietly through the worst abuses of Jim Crow. In 1995, the SBC passed a resolution in which it repented, asked for forgiveness and committed to “eradicate racism in all its forms from Southern Baptist life and ministry.”

That was before broader cultural forces sweeping America led to fears that the Southern Baptist Convention was becoming, in the insult of the day, “woke.”

Now, Wolfe argues “White guilt” must be seen as a destructive “mind virus” and talk of diversity as “garbage” that must be kept “out of our convention.” And women must be told to keep their mouths shut when it comes to church matters.

Wolfe’s efforts—which include platforming ideological allies on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast and using his X account to bully his enemies—are a project of the non-profit American Reformer. Although the group’s structure and its finances can be murky (see Blake Callens’ analysis), its donors include the Heritage Foundation, which birthed the controversial Project 2025.

The Center for Baptist Leadership’s website describes its desire “to revitalize SBC for the sake of its enduring gospel mission and the purity of its witness to a lost and dying world that needs Jesus Christ.”

But it also appears to be part of a broader effort by Wolfe to push a Christian nationalist agenda.

“America was founded as a Protestant Christian nation,” Wolfe said in one podcast. “It was a project of Protestant Christianity applied to a particular people, expressed in a particular political arrangement, and the character of our nation. And what made it great was Protestant, and we are losing that.”

He continued, “So, American Reformer wants to revitalize the Protestant tradition, and you can’t do that without dealing with the Baptists.”

Wolfe helped edit the 2023 “Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel,” which calls for the national government to implement “Christian Orthodoxy,” including treating abortion as murder. It leaves open the possibility of laws that prohibit public blasphemy against “the One, True, and Living God.”

Current Southern Baptist principles—the so-called Baptist Faith and Message—declare that “church and state should be separate” and “the church should not resort to civil power to carry on its work.” It opposes public blasphemy laws.

Still, in the America that William Wolfe hopes to achieve, men like him will impose their interpretation of Christian teachings on the rest of the nation.

“Yes, we are going to impose it on you,” Wolfe said earlier this year.

“If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just—if it lines up with God’s standards. And I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”

Wolfe, who makes it clear that he finds it critical to fight for a country where people who look like him will always be in the majority, defines a nation as “a common language, common religion, common customs, and ancestral land.”

On X, the would-be Baptist leader posted an image of three young Black men standing together in a city—two of them wearing safety vests—suggesting it portrays “American decline” and asking: “Minneapolis or Mogadishu?”

Yet, when critics find such views to be darkly reminiscent of the “blood and soil” nationalism that defined the cruelty of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the Baptist leader chooses to embrace what he views as less toxic terminology.

“Sometimes, people use the term like ‘blood and soil’ nationalism—I’m not endorsing that term,” Wolfe said in one podcast interview. “It’s a scary term, but that speaks to the idea of a people and a place.”

He continued, “‘Blood and soil’ is just another way to say ‘people and place.’”

Watch clip from Reformation Red Pill below:

It is that worldview that Wolfe brings to the battle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention. The goal, he has explained, is to “bring political grassroots organizing and activism and apply it to these denominational fights.”

That fight will likely rear its head at the upcoming SBC annual meeting in Orlando. Wolfe has publicly announced his backing of Clearwater, Florida, Pastor Willy Rice to be the next SBC president.

As I lay out in more detail below, as Wolfe has prepared for that showdown, he has found strange bedfellows, including among KKK fans and other extremists.

NOTE: This is my analysis of the public controversies that have been whirling around Wolfe online. For more of his perspective—and to judge his beliefs for yourself—I strongly urge you to check out his X account, and CBL account. For other perspectives from Christian nationalism critics, I would suggest the X accounts for , , Eli McGowan, , and Youke.

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‘Go with the Ku Klux Klan’

In April, Wolfe appeared on the Greene Tavern podcast produced by the Nathaniel Greene Society, which describes itself as the North Carolina chapter of the Old Glory Club. A 2025 investigation by the Guardian described Old Glory Club as “a nationwide U.S. network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs” whose members include “prominent antisemitic influencers.”

One of the hosts for that podcast was a pseudonymous extremist who goes by the name Kaiser von Lohengramm. The name appears to be a salute to a character in an anime series that, according to Kaiser von Lohengramm’s own posts, offers lessons about how democracy can be used to end democracy.

The Center for Baptist Leadership’s executive director follows the account on X.

While urging allies to avoid some of the worst antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control, Kaiser von Lohengramm argues that Jews “worship blacks” and ”support mass replacement migration because they are rootless foreigners who have minimal, if any, ties to the lands they live in.”

He openly mocks the historical consensus about the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust and calls Auschwitz “fake.”

In February, he responded to a post by Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols that referred to “the GOP having a Nazi problem.”

“Nazi problem? Or perhaps, a Nazi solution?” Kaiser von Lohengramm asked.

Kaiser von Lohengramm has also argued that “being White should be a requirement for most citizen naturalization,” that “men and women should have different sets of rights, and that LGBTQ acts should be criminalized.”

And the person has openly embraced association with the Ku Klux Klan

Prior to Wolfe’s appearance on Kaiser von Lohengramm’s podcast, I had posted an analysis here on Hate Comes to Main Street headlined: “In Far Right’s Growing ‘Remigration’ Talk, Echoes of KKK America.” It argued, “Listen closely to what far-right figures are now saying about immigration, and you will find few differences from the xenophobic debates of the 1920s.”

Kaiser von Lohengramm responded with a video showing an anime figure in the white robe and hood of the Klan in front of a KKK flag. The audio accompanying the video was a KKK anthem that urges men to “go with the Ku Klux Klan.”

Responding to my suggestions of there being “echoes of KKK America,” the account declared: “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.”

Kaiser von Lohengramm explained my analysis to his followers. “It simply says that the Far Right is making arguments similar to the KKK. In this, he is absolutely correct.”

“What Phil fails to realize as he is an out of touch liberal boomer with one foot in the grave, is that anyone under the age of 35 who is a patriot simply no longer cares, and guilt by association with the KKK is utterly irrelevant.”

He also reposted a 1925 article that I had dug up in which KKK Imperial Wizard Wesley Hiram Evans had argued that “races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals; that any mixture between races of any great divergence is evil; that the American stock, which was bred under highly selective surroundings, has proved its value and should not be mongrelized.”

“Nothing they say is untrue,” Kaiser von Lohengramm wrote. “It’s all there, it’s all accurate. And we must get to the point where we no longer shy away from this, because nothing they say is actually objectionable.”

On top of it all, he posted an image of the so-called Gigachad, the hypermasculine male figure embraced by white nationalists. In the background was a photo of hooded KKK members gathering around a burning cross.

Even though Wolfe routinely uses his X account to challenge ideas that he considers “leftist,” I could find no evidence that he has ever disputed Kaiser van Lohengramm’s controversial views or sought to distance himself from them.

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‘This is make or break for their legitimacy’

Instead, two days after the account openly embraced the ideals of the KKK, the Center for Baptist Leadership’s executive director joined Kaiser von Lohengramm for the Greene Tavern podcast to talk about his SBC project.

Another of the podcast co-hosts during William Wolfe’s appearance was a pseudonymous figure, @Totally_Brandon, whose tweets are closely protected. Despite being introduced as a “fellow Baptist,” if the post below is any indication, it appears his views on race are equally extreme as Kaiser von Lohengramm.

On X, Wolfe urged his followers to tune in to the podcast for a conversation about “how to deal with being smeared as a ‘racist’ by insane leftists.”

“Our enemies are morally reprehensible troglodytes, and all they can do is to try to spin up essentially scare word attacks on us,” Wolfe told the podcasters, referring specifically to my post on the “echoes of KKK America.”

 Wolfe explained his goal was “a better future for the sons and daughters of America and that better future absolutely has to include mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration.”

As I have previously reported, “remigration” is a term originally popularized by a former European neo-Nazi as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. It generally understood as an effort that includes potentially revoking the citizenship—denaturalization—of people who have been in the United States for decades.

“It’s not out of hate for anybody, it’s out of love for the American people,” Wolfe has argued.

In the movie playing in the head of the Center for Baptist Leadership’s executive director, he and his Greene Tavern allies will one day be celebrated as heroes.

“Eventually Phil Williams will be forgotten,” Wolfe insisted. “But if we are able to turn this country around, everybody who fought for that will be remembered.”

The next day, Wolfe’s appearance on the KKK-friendly podcast was called out by an X account operated by a woman, known only by the name Youke, who frequently highlights the racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, Nazism, and misogyny of Christian nationalists.

“Have you also noticed,” Youke asked, “that for these guys racism is a made-up sin unless it’s anti-white racism, then it suddenly becomes very real and very sinful? Don’t ask me how that logic works. They make the rules.”

Other Christian nationalism critics quickly weighed in.

“Fellow SBCers: we need to keep this garbage out of our convention,” wrote Southern Baptist thinker Neil Shenvi.

Wolfe quickly responded to Shenvi’s criticism by posting a clip of former SBC president J.D. Greear’s commitment to increasing diversity in the convention as an example of what he believes to be the real “garbage.” (Editor’s note: This line was corrected to show that Wolfe’s post was in response to Shenvi’s.)

Blake Callens, who penned The Case Against Christian Nationalism in response to the writings of political thinker Stephen Wolfe, agreed.

“Will there ever be a more blatant example of something demanding the SBC remove someone from its convention than AmRef’s William Wolfe going on an openly-racist Klan-promoting podcast and, with zero remorse, mocking a worthy rebuke?” he asked on X. “This is make or break for their legitimacy.”

Wolfe never responded to the criticisms and, when I publicly asked if he had any comment, the would-be Baptist leader replied as he often does—with insults.

Meanwhile, the person with whom Wolfe associated recently celebrated the notion that “the KKK is alive and well in Tennessee.”

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‘TTP’s leaders are antisemites and racists’

In February, William Wolfe spoke at a Houston-area conference hosted by the far-right True Texas Project, a group so extreme that many mainstream Republicans have publicly denounced them and boycotted their conferences.

”TTP’s leaders are antisemites and racists. Their horrible statements are enshrined on the internet for all to see,” said Hunter Bonner, chair of the Marion County Republican Party in Texas, in a recent post on X.

Bonner continued, “You cannot call yourselves ‘Christian Conservative’ and then hold galas and anniversary parties that invite white supremacists and people who hate Jews to speak.”

In fact, multiple news reports have noted how many mainstream Republicans have steered clear of the True Texas Project, formerly known as the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, since its leaders appeared to embrace the arguments of a gunman who slaughtered 23 people at an El Paso Walmart.

His manifesto blamed a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

“I don’t condone the actions, but I certainly understand where they came from,” commented Julie McCarty, who now serves as the True Texas Project’s CEO.

Her husband Fred, who serves on the True Texas board, was even more emphatic, writing in a Facebook post: “You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back.”

In 2021, Julie McCarty also questioned a pastor’s call “to bless Israel.”

“I’ll admit I struggled with that,” she wrote on Facebook. “Some of our toughest battles today, including LGBTQ, gambling, media, news, movies, etc, are against corporations run by Jews.”

On X, Fred McCarty posted a meme that echoed similar antisemitic tropes.

“Kanye West has been in the news recently for claiming the jews ‘control the banks and media platforms,’” it read. “The jews have denied those accusations before immediately banning him from the banks and media platforms.”

But the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership apparently felt no qualms about associating with the group.

Speaking at a Valentine’s Day gathering, Wolfe had what he portrayed as a horror story of having gone into a DMV in North Carolina where, as he remembered it, he was “the only person in line that day speaking English.”

“That just rubbed me the wrong way because I have three boys and I’ve got a fourth boy on the way, and my boys all look like me—and I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities,” Wolfe continued.

He added, “I want my boys to grow up in a country where they don’t look like they’re the foreigners here—and that’s a good and normal and reasonable thing.”

It was a line that drew applause from the True Texas Project attendees.

Then, in a follow-up podcast interview, Julie McCarty asked Wolfe to help Christians feel less guilty about wanting “my kid to go to a school where kids look like him” or choosing “to go to a church where people look like me.”

“There is this guilt that is put on us, and maybe we don’t want to even admit that we feel this way because then we have to admit the guilt,” she said.

Wolfe’s response: “I think it’s just pretty natural. It’s just natural.”

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‘Give all these (non-White) people a little push’

Among William Wolfe’s fellow speakers at the True Texas Project event was Cyan Rose Quinn of the aptly named White Papers Policy Institute. While WWPI tries to present itself as a right-wing think tank of sorts, it selectively touts statistics on the harm of immigration while refusing to analyze the benefits.

Quinn’s 30-minute talk focused on the white nationalist group’s proposed plans for remigration.

“So, the phrase comes from migrating here—they can remigrate back just as easily,” Quinn told the audience.

Read the White Papers Policy Institute’s website carefully, and it becomes clear that they are indeed pushing an agenda for ethnic cleansing in America. For example, articles on the group’s website propose:

• Reviewing citizenship applications going back more than 30 years, deporting anyone who received any government assistance prior to becoming citizens—no matter how productive they may be today.

• Cutting ties with the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, revoking the citizenship of its people. It argues, “The island has a distinct language (Spanish), distinct faith (Catholicism), and distinct national and ethnic identities that are not shared with the ethnic American nation.”

• Keeping Hispanics who are considered White, but offering financial incentives for the descendants of American slaves—what they call “Foundational Black Americans”—to relocate to Africa. It estimates the country could get rid of 18 million Black Americans through that process.

Part of Quinn’s presentation was a pseudoscientific argument that harkened back to the bogus eugenics debates of the 1920s. Her implication was that people with non-European DNA might corrupt American culture

As an example, she bizarrely argued—with no real evidence—that people in West Virginia are more likely to oppose historic zoning overlays that prevent them from having chain-link fences because of their Scotch-Irish bloodlines.

Watch an excerpt below:

“Essentially, what we’re getting at is that people create the culture that they live in, and biology creates people who then create that culture that we know and love and really enjoy to visit,” Quinn claimed.

As I have previously reported, according to a December 2023 podcast posted on the white-nationalist Counter Currents website, the creation of the White Papers project was the work of a man who identified himself as James Karlsson.

The antifascist Anonymous Comrades Collective later outed him as James William Kreger from Howell, Michigan.

Kreger’s name surfaced, according to the collective, in a leak from the short-lived neo-Nazi organization known as the Nationalist Coalition. The group also unearthed documentation linking Kreger to the neo-Nazi National Justice Party.

Now age 27, Kreger enlisted Quinn, another white nationalist activist, in 2023 to become the spokesperson for the effort. The 36-year-old White blonde presents an unexpectedly pleasant face for the white nationalist project.

Antifascist researchers have previously linked Quinn to the American Identity Movement, an offshoot of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa. She later went to work for the white nationalist Counter Currents website, where she wrote positively of her interactions with confirmed white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

During that 2023 Counter Currents podcast, Kreger and Quinn outlined their plans for the White Papers Policy Institute.

“The entire project of White Papers is to convince White people that we just have to give all these people a little push, and they’ll walk out the door,” Kreger told the white nationalist podcasters.

And Quinn agreed. “Overall, I’m definitely in favor of the secession of the non-White population back to their countries of origin,” she said.

Listen to clips below

 It is not known whether Wolfe, who follows the White Papers Policy Institute on X, knew about Quinn’s background.

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William Wolfe’s response?

Because of my determination to be absolutely accurate in this analysis, I have attempted to link to all key details in this post.

In addition, several days prior to publication, I reached out to Wolfe through an X direct message and an email to the Center for Baptist Leadership to give him a chance to comment on questions about what I have characterized as his strange bedfellows. I also followed up with a tweet urging him to look for my messages.

So far, I have not received any response from the man who has labeled me as “far worse than anyone on the Christian nationalist ‘right’ by a country mile.”

And, putting himself up on a pedestal, Wolfe has included me among the “ankle-biting” accusers who are “beneath [him] and not worth engaging.”

Still, the offer for him to respond to my questions remains on the table.

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“What we have here,” the federal prosecutor argued, “is a foiled murder plot.”

It was a plot where a neo-Nazi allegedly talked in cryptic terms with an undercover FBI employee about “pawns that needed to be taken off the board.”

One of the pawns that the man, then 20-years-old, wanted to remove from the game was an independent journalist who had become a source of frustration for him and his white-supremacist gang, the North Bama Brigade.

And the neo-Nazi was allegedly clear that he was not talking about just harassing the journalist and two other men he identified as the “pawns.”

“What good is harassing a pawn and not removing it?” the man told the FBI operative.

That testimony earlier this year from a Huntsville police detective, who serves on the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, helped convince U.S. Magistrate Judge Herman N. Johnson Jr. to keep suspect Aiden Daniel Cuevas and his accomplice, Andrew Cole Nary, locked up until their trial on federal firearms charges.

As I reported back in February, the two men are accused of attempting to buy illegal, military-grade weapons as part of an effort to create a paramilitary unit capable of taking out “high-value targets.”

Last week, Guardian reporter Sean Craig—in a story headlined “US neo-Nazi plotted to kill journalist who reported on him, testimony reveals”—broke the news about the disturbing allegations from a January preliminary hearing for Cuevas and Nary in the Northern District of Alabama.

Craig shared the transcript with Hate Comes to Main Street.

Out of concern for the safety of the journalist, the Guardian did not identify him, nor will I. It is someone whom I personally know and respect, and with whom I have occasionally collaborated.

The transcript shows investigator Chris Hluzek testified that the North Bama Brigade is a self-identified neo-Nazi, white supremacist group, which came out of another outfit known as the 2119 Crew. Aiden Daniel Cuevas had confided about “his plans for the North Bama Brigade, how he wanted to take over North Alabama, establish leaders in different communities,” Hluzek testified.

Andrew Cole Nary, the investigator said, had previously created his own group, Automata, that was an offshoot of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. “Their goal was to, at that time in North Carolina, create a white ethnostate within a smaller government within that area,” Hluzek explained.

Nary’s attorney, Jerry Barclay, argued that his client was not the one doing the talking about taking pawns off the board.

“I think, as we go along, we’ll see that there was some terribly unwise decisions and statements that shouldn’t have been made—and some huffing and puffing and trying to be a part of a crowd—but I don’t think he has or has had the actual intention to cause the type of harm that the government suggested,” he said.

According to the testimony, the North Bama Brigade is an offshoot of the Tennessee Active Club.

Followers of my work may remember the Tennessee Active Club—run by neo-Nazi Sean Kauffmann—was the group that injected itself into the Franklin, Tennessee, mayoral race in 2023 in support of candidate Gabrielle Hanson.

One of the neo-Nazis who showed up at a candidates forum (seen below in a mask) has been mentioned in court filings as being a part of the North Bama Brigade, although he was not charged with Cuevas and Nary.

Kauffmann, who is not implicated in this plot, is currently sitting in a jail in Perry County, Tennessee, awaiting trial on domestic violence charges. His bond was revoked last December after he shot a bird at my station’s camera in open court.

Like myself, the journalist mentioned in the testimony had reported on the activities of the Tennessee Active Club and had faced previous harassment.

Here is how the Guardian described concerns “over increasing efforts by far-right extremists to intimidate, and in some cases attack or endanger, members of the press who seek to cover them”:

“They view journalists as enemies of the people, as part of the other,” said Jon Lewis, a researcher at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “The years-long campaign by the right to demonize and delegitimize the media inevitably has real world consequences. Right wing extremists also feel increasingly emboldened seeing allies in the [US] administration openly echo their extremist rhetoric.”

…

In March, members of a Montréal-area neo-Nazi active club who the Canadian journalist, , identified, showed up at a music venue where her boyfriend was performing to confront her about her reporting.

In the US, notorious Tennessee neo-Nazi leader, Sean Kauffmann, has in recent years organized efforts to intimidate journalists at the Southern Poverty Law Center publication Hatewatch by encouraging fellow extremists to send them antisemitic and racist slurs, videos of race-motivated mass murders and images of lynchings of Black men, the outlet reported. The Tennessee Active Club, which he leads, also circulated the home addresses of multiple journalists.

Another far-right Telegram channel, which the SPLC reported was run by a member of the US white supremacist group Patriot Front, targeted at least nine journalists by releasing information including their home addresses, phone numbers and photographs of them, leading to stalking and harassment in some cases.

One of those journalists, NewsChannel 5 Nashville’s Phil Williams, reported that Kai Liam Nix, the man behind the channel, sent him threats demanding the network air a white supremacist video.

“Obviously, what these acts are trying to do is intimidate you out of doing your job,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies political violence and social and political polarization in the US.

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Check out the Guardian’s work:

A final note: Sean Craig and Wiley Cope are doing incredible work covering the threats of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Here are just a few examples of their reporting that I highly recommend:

• June 2025: ‘Wolves in sheep’s clothing’: how a neo-Nazi cell infiltrated a martial arts school in Tennessee

• October 2025: Revealed: how a Russian fight club expanded into the US with the help of American neo-Nazis

• February 2026: US federal contractor hired white supremacist leader for wildfire relief

• April 2026: Members of neo-Nazi ‘active clubs’ join combat events at secretive Virginia compound

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He defines himself as a Christian nationalist, and Republican state Rep. Monty Fritts wants to be the next governor of Tennessee.

But what would being a Christian nationalist mean in terms of the policies the second-term legislator would push if given the chance?

This week, to his credit, Fritts agreed to chat with me about the implications of his beliefs. (Please watch the full, unedited interview below.)

Here’s what he revealed:

Yes to church bells, no to Muslim calls to prayer

Fritts would like to ban Muslim calls to prayer in Tennessee communities and, if given the chance, he would ban Islam itself. He makes an argument that has repeatedly failed in the courts that Islam is not a real religion and, therefore, Muslims do not deserve protection under the First Amendment.

“And I'm not picking on just Islam,” he added. “I would offer that for Buddhism or Hinduism or many of these other pagan religions. I would like to see them not exist in the United States of America.

He continued, “I would like to see that everyone would refer to Christ as King. That would be my goal.”

Watch excerpt below:

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Criminalize abortion, ban morning-after pill

Fritts signed onto a bill this past legislative session that would have treated abortion as murder, subjecting anyone involved in the process—including the women—to potential imprisonment, potentially even the death penalty.

That includes rape victims.

Fritts would also deny the morning-after pill to those women who are sexually assaulted.

“As I understand it, that chemical, that medication can also become an abortifacient,” the candidate for governor told me. “And so, to administer those either with tax dollars or without when there’s a chance that you could be ending a life, I think that’s murder. I think we shouldn’t do it.”

Four years ago, the Food and Drug Administration clarified that the morning-after pill does not cause an abortion—it stops the pregnancy.

Fritts is apparently not convinced.

Watch excerpt below:

Still, I wondered, What does the Republican candidate think Jesus would do.

“You think Jesus would tell a raped woman she has to get pregnant and have a baby of a rapist?” I asked.

“Well,” Fritts answered, “she’s already pregnant if she’s pregnant if that’s the case—and I think that he did consider life to be absolutely precious.”

And there’s more…

• Monty Fritts would also like to end same-sex marriage and criminalize certain sexual activity among same-sex couples—”based on the authority of God’s word and the natural design of it.”

• In his Christian nationalist world, he would subject doctors who perform gender reassignment surgeries to imprisonment, potentially even death.

• Fritts’ standard in deciding whether to follow court orders would be whether he agrees with them and thinks they are in keeping with God’s word.

• He favors deporting every undocumented immigrant, as well as any person in the United States on a visa, and ending all legal immigration for an unspecified period of time.

• Still, Fritts said he rejects traditional Christian nationalist notions that America must, by definition, forever remain majority White.

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Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center have asked a federal judge to dismiss the fraud and money laundering indictment of the legendary civil rights organization, calling it “the very definition of a vindictive prosecution.”

In a motion filed Tuesday, SPLC lawyers argued the recent SPLC indictment is part of “a top-down, retributive campaign” in President Donald Trump “directed his Justice Department to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC. “

“To carry out the President’s directive, others in the Administration targeted the SPLC, which now faces criminal charges for exercising its First Amendment right to identify, report on, and criticize extremist hate groups,” it argues.

“The Administration has falsely accused the SPLC of being ‘anti-Christian,’ of aiding the Biden Administration’s ‘weaponization’ of the Department of Justice, of participating in political violence, and, most recently, of helping to ‘rig’ the 2020 election against President Donald Trump.”

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Last month, Acting Attorney General Todd 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.”

The SPLC’s motion to dismiss argues that Trump himself “publicly proclaimed the improper political motive behind the case, branding the SPLC a ‘Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue and many others’ and claimed that when the allegations are proven ‘the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

The president has also claimed the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “was all funded by the Southern Law,” an apparent reference to the SPLC. He also asserted the SPLC funded this “total fake” event “to make me look bad.”

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As I previously reported (see below), key Unite the Right organizers have emphatically denied those allegations against their long-time nemesis.

According to the motion, prosecutors “did not interview any current employees of the organization nor make any request of the SPLC’s counsel for any voluntary interviews of employees. They had already determined to seek an indictment without ever reaching out to counsel for the SPLC.”

“In fact, in the days immediately following the announcement of charges, whistleblower reports filed with congressional lawmakers accused top Justice Department officials of pressuring prosecutors to rush an indictment of the SPLC, despite significant concerns about the merits of the case,” it says.

As part of my Hate Comes to Main Street project, I am now experimenting with expanding my reach to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. (Subscribe now!!!)

And I am working with a consultant to help me better tell my story and the story of this new expansion. Below, you can watch a segment of what will be a longer-form video we hope to publish in the coming weeks.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

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Three months… and going strong!

Last week, I hit the three-month milestone for this independent publication, and I am really proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish.

That same week, my NewsChannel 5 photojournalist partner Bryan Staples and I had put the finishing touches on a two-part investigation—one about the role of extremists in a school shooting, the other about the warning signs for parents—when Bryan hit me with a well-timed question.

“What do you do to decompress?” he asked.

It was a question that caught me slightly off guard—because, to be honest, I have been charging ahead at full speed, leaving little time for anything else. I am as committed to my day job as ever, while also building something new here at Hate Comes to Main Street.

And to be clear, I am loving every minute of it.

After nearly three years of focusing on the rise of hate and political extremism in our society, I feel an urgency to use the knowledge that I have gained to sound the alarm for others. (See below my contribution to a CBC documentary.)

And it really is exciting to experiment with new ways of reaching the public.

Broadcasting, as you may have noticed, is now undergoing the same economic upheavals that newspapers experienced years ago. For me, it seems prudent to expand to other platforms so that I have options; while I likely would have a job at NewsChannel 5 as long as I would like, nothing is guaranteed these days.

So, THANK YOU to EVERYONE who has supported me in this exciting new endeavor! Whether you are a free subscriber or if you have chosen to put down a few dollars to be able to comment on my posts and support this work, please know how grateful I am. (And, as I’ll note shortly, I still need your help.)

Still, in response to Bryan’s question, I need to do better about taking time to decompress from this world of hate.

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What’s next—and what you can do

First, I’m giving myself a little breathing room this coming week, as I prepare next steps and what I believe will be groundbreaking new material. If you support my work and sense how taxing it can be, I know you will understand.

Below, I have linked to the most popular posts from the first three months of Hate Comes to Main Street. I am sure that there may be important stories that you have missed. Please go back, then tell me what you think!

Secondly, my plan is to expand the frequency of guest essays, especially drawing on stories of people who have successfully stood up to hate in their communities. The “Hate in a Hallmark Town” post by was so well written and well received that I have asked others to add their voices.

Stay tuned for those personal stories in the near future.

FINALLY, please help me by continuing to subscribe and encouraging others to subscribe!!!

My literary agent tells me that my book proposal about my journey into the world of hate will go to publishers any day now—and demonstrating an ability to develop an audience is an important consideration in that process.

And, as always, if you have any thoughts on my work, please leave a comment. Your suggestions and your words of encouragement keep me going.

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Call it a far-right grudge match.

In one corner, Jason Kessler, the leader of the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

In the other, Gavin McInnes, founder of the notorious Proud Boys.

Kessler, a one-time member of the Proud Boys, and McInnes began openly feuding after the 2017 gathering erupted into violence. McInnes, not wanting to openly associate with neo-Nazis, had urged his Proud Boys to stay away.

And when the dust had settled, McInnes had Kessler on his podcast to chastise him for setting the stage for neo-Nazi Alex Fields to drive his Dodge Challenger into a group of antifascist protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

“And I think this blood, the blood of this girl, I mean, it's obviously on the hands of the guy driving the car, but it's also on your hands!” McInnes told Kessler.

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These two clearly do not like each other

Now, following the Trump administration’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the two far-right figures are once against butting heads. McInnes recently suggested that Kessler might have been on the SPLC payroll, and now the Unite the Right organizer is suing the Proud Boys founder for defamation.

McInnes “expressly acknowledged … that his accusation regarding SPLC payments was based on ‘vibes’ and not evidence,” Kessler wrote in the complaint that he filed on his own without a lawyer.

The lawsuit continued, “An accusation of criminal conduct made without evidence and acknowledged as groundless by its author constitutes, at a minimum, reckless disregard for the truth.”

Kessler, a resident of West Virginia, filed the lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Cabell County, West Virginia. An attorney for Gavin McInnes, who lives in New York, has asked to move the case to federal court in West Virginia.

(Hat tip to Molly Conger, creator of the Weird Little Guys podcast, who was the first person to stumble across the federal court filings.)

At the center of the lawsuit are questions about who might have been the undercover informant identified in the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center as “F-37.” According to the indictment, the person was involved in a leadership group chat for Unite the Right.

During an April 22, 2026, podcast referenced in the complaint, McInnes was asked to speculate about who F-37 might be.

“It sounds like Jason Kessler,” the Proud Boys founder replied. “I’m 95 percent sure that Jason was getting SPLC money. But again, that’s just my theory, and I’m basing it almost strictly, almost exclusively, on vibes.”

But Kessler’s lawsuit says that, along with similar claims made by McInnes elsewhere, was all a lie.

“Plaintiff did not receive illegal wire transfers from the SPLC,” the complaint insists. “Plaintiff did not act as a paid operative, informant, or agent of the SPLC. Plaintiff did not orchestrate or stage the Unite the Right rally as a covert operation conducted on behalf of the SPLC or any other organization.”

As Molly Conger notes in her Weird Liitle Guys podcast, the details in the SPLC indictment about F-37 do not match the Unite the Right organizer’s history.

Kessler, who was filed liable by a civil jury for his role in Unite the Right, claims McInnes’ statements have resulted in a decline in sales of a book he wrote about Charlottesville, as well as “severe reputational injury” and “emotional distress.”

McInnes announced in 2018 that he was leaving the Proud Boys.

Richard Spencer also disputed allegations

In fact, as I previously reported, another key Unite the Right figure, Richard Spencer, appeared on the same podcast with McInnes and noted that the SPLC indictment does not claim that Unite the Right was an SPLC plot, as President Donald Trump and key MAGA figures have claimed.

“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.’”

Meanwhile, in a new filing, SPLC attorneys have asked a federal judge to review grand jury transcripts and recordings to see if the panel might have been misled by prosecutors in the indictment of the legendary civil rights organization

.

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In the world of politics, there’s an often-told story about Lesley Stahl’s time covering the White House for CBS News during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It’s a tale about the power of carefully crafted visuals in shaping public opinion.

As the story goes, Reagan’s team was masterful about putting the president into highly staged events where the images themselves delivered messages that had been conjured up by the administration’s PR spin machine.

Stahl and her team had used video from those events in what she thought was a hard-hitting report about Reagan’s presidency.

“I did a piece that was, where I was quite negative, to be honest with you, about Reagan—and yet the pictures were terrific, and I thought they’d be mad at me, but they weren’t. They loved it,” Stahl later told documentarian Bill Moyers.

A White House official brushed aside her concerns about them being angry, assuring her that viewers did not get her intended message.

“They didn’t hear you. They only saw those pictures,” he told Stahl.

Reagan’s media master Michael Deaver explained to Moyers, “In the competition between the ear and the eye, the eye wins every time.”

That lesson has never been more critical as journalists attempt to investigate a hate that now wraps itself in wholesome images of men getting fit and, like the KKK of the 1920s, in the glory of the American flag.

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‘Fun in fascism’

Forty years after Stahl’s difficult lesson, she and her 60 Minutes team may have been played again—this time, by a handsome, 36-year-old, violent white supremacist determined to remake his public image.

The recent episode of the legendary CBS News program focused on what has legitimately become a grave concern—white supremacists and other extremists who show up following natural disasters to help hard-hit communities. More specifically, they come to help the White people in those communities.

As Stahl noted in her introduction, these so-called “disaster tourists”—a lackluster title, in my opinion, given the subject matter—come “to sow doubt in government, soften their own image, and gain followers.”

Stahl’s “big get”—as key interviews are described in the business—was Robert Rundo. The self-described fascist from Queens, looking clean-cut and buff, smiled throughout the conversation as he skillfully ducked and weaved when talking about the dangerous Active Club movement he leads.

Extremism experts have described those Active Clubs as “neo-Nazi militias … hiding in plain sight.” That characterization, however, appears nowhere in Stahl’s piece.

Instead, Rundo—who has reportedly drawn lessons from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—was allowed to spin the reinvention of his movement.

“We get together with the boys, we box, we travel,” Rundo told Stahl with a toothy grin.

The 60 Minutes correspondent was more curious than combative. “You think of it as fun?”

“Of course,” Rundo replied, his face beaming. “There’s fun in fascism.”

Rundo’s Telegram channel later celebrated the 60 Minutes decision to focus on the Active Club movement’s rebranding—what it calls its “3.0 aesthetic.”

“Once again it proves the point: it’s not about what they say,” one post declared shortly after the CBS broadcast. “The 3.0 aesthetic is the real power. No matter how they try to spin it, it still looks good. Stay active out there and we will break through to the white youth world wide.”

The Telegram channel also reposted the “fun in fascism” moment and wove it into a separate pro-fascism video. And they created a celebratory meme, with the text: “White teenagers want to have fun again. Is fascism the answer?”

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Counting the seconds

While obviously well intended, I suspect the 60 Minutes investigation would be an appropriate research project for a communications scholar, measuring public perception as was done following the historic Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate. Audiences who watched the debate thought Kennedy won, while people who listened on the radio gave the edge to Nixon.

(If any member of academia decides to test my hypothesis, please let me know. It might help others to know how to best cover the rise of hate.)

During the nearly 13-minute video, 60 Minutes devoted more than four minutes to Stahl’s relatively light-handed interview with Rundo in which he presented himself as the all-American guy next door. That total also includes b-roll showing the fit fascist and his white supremacist “boys” working out.

“The more macho wholesome image, Robert Rundo thinks, gives young men permission to adopt his fascist philosophy,” Stahl said. To illustrate the point, the story showed the same images that were called helpful for recruitment.

During those 13 minutes, Stahl sheepishly asked Rundo about his well-documented criminal history—”Did you stab somebody?”—and let him redefine himself, as white supremacists now tend to do, without any real pushback.

“I’m a nationalist,” Rundo insisted.

“What does that mean?” Stahl followed up.

“Means I put my people first.”

“Would you say ‘white supremacist’?”

With a hint of a smile, Rundo answered, “No, I think that’s a slanderous term.”

Another 90 seconds focused on photos and videos of extremists helping people who had been left homeless by tragic weather events—the same images that, according to Stahl’s report, “can reach a whole new, large audience.”

Ironically, the 60 Minutes report likely exposed those images to an audience unlike any who had ever seen them before. Undoubtedly, some viewers applauded such groups for going into communities where help was needed, regardless of their politics.

But when it came to visuals of the hate that Rundo represents, Stahl’s 60 Minutes report devoted:

• A mere five seconds to a photo of the Active Club leader in police custody,

• Followed by ten seconds of video of him punching a man on a California beach “pounding and pounding” after, as Stahl described it, “he got into a series of fights with anti-Trump protesters at rallies.”

That’s just 15 seconds of negative imagery out of more than 750 seconds total.

But even the violent ten seconds of fight video were immediately followed by another ten seconds of a shirtless Rundo shadowboxing in a waterside park, using 60 Minutes’ own cameras to project his preferred image.

Stahl’s narration continued, “He was on the lam when he got this idea to launch a more clean-cut White pride group.”

As extremism expert Alexander Ritzmann told me in an interview posted below, Rundo’s Active Club strategy is more than just changing the movement’s vibe.

“The essence of the Active Club strategy is to fool law enforcement into believing that this is just about sports,” Ritzmann said.

“They want to avoid the five o’clock in the morning SWAT team raids that they had experienced previously.”

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The rest of the story

While 60 Minutes only told viewers that Rundo “got into a series of fights with anti-Trump protesters at rallies,” he was actually sentenced to 24 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to violating federal anti-riot laws.

An opinion from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals describes Rundo and his white supremacist thugs chasing down and attacking counter-protesters from behind, delivering brutal beatings. At one event, a police officer attempted to intervene in a violent assault, and Rundo punched the officer twice in the head.

It was all part of an effort, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice, “to further his white-supremacist ideology by plotting riots and engaging in violence at political rallies.”

“On various social media platforms, Rundo and others posted messages and photographs of themselves preparing for or engaging in violence, accompanied by statements such as ‘#rightwingdeathsquad,’” the DOJ statement added.

60 Minutes made no reference to Rundo’s “right-wing death squads” or the criminal activity that has been attributed to various Active Clubs around the world, as noted by a recent report from the Counter Extremism Project:

• In Germany, police raids targeted suspected members or affiliates of AC Ostwestfalen in October 2025. Their arsenal of weapons “suggests a cell moving beyond unarmed combat training.”

• An AC-organized fight event in San Diego was followed by a violent episode where “members of one participating chapter allegedly took part in an assault in Huntington Beach.”

• “In an FBI undercover operation spanning 2025, agents infiltrated a network allegedly tied to a Tennessee AC node. According to a federal criminal complaint, members of this milieu discussed building a paramilitary ‘urban assault’ unit and plotted to obtain illegal firearms.” (Read my report here.)

• In Sweden in August 2025, “members associated with Aktivklubb Sverige carried out a spree of racially motivated assaults. At least three people were attacked based on perceived ethnicity.” The group posted video showing them “conducting live-fire training with an AR15 rifle and a shotgun.”

Not only was there no mention of such activities in the 60 Minutes report, there were:

• No images of the victims of Attack Club violence;

• No photos of arsenals seized by police;

• No mugshots of white supremacist thugs after their acts of lawlessness had finally caught up with them; and

• No confronting Rundo with the harshness of his own words.

Instead, his visual propaganda won the night.

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Democracy grievances

Even when Stahl pressed Rundo about his fascist ideas, he took advantage of the moment to espouse sentiments clearly designed to appeal to disgruntled American men who see themselves as having been failed by democracy.

“It’s such a scam, democracy,” he told Stahl.

“It’s politicians that get lobbied. They never have the interest—[is there] anything that’s important that they ever ask us? No.”

In the end, Robert Rundo used his appearance before a network TV audience to deliver a performance indeed worthy of Joseph Goebbels—and 60 Minutes did far too little to counter efforts to normalize his hate.

Were 60 Minutes’ failures the result of the much-maligned efforts by Bari Weiss to remake CBS to be more MAGA friendly—or did the 60 Minutes team simply fail to fully appreciate that they were playing into Rundo’s propaganda?

Certainly, if anyone should have recalled the lessons about the power of visuals in television storytelling, it should have been Lesley Stahl.

What do you think?

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Watch my interview with Alexander Ritzmann about Robert Rundo and the Active Club movement below:

The name sounds innocuous enough: Active Clubs.

But Alexander Ritzmann, senior advisor with the Counter Extremism Project, warns the estimated 187 Active Club chapters in 27 countries are really “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” There are an estimated 78 chapters across the United States.

“This is not just a … nationalist sports club,” Ritzmann told me. “In its essence, it’s the strategy to build a neo-Nazi militia.”

Here is how a March 2026 report by Ritzmann summarized the Active Club movement:

“Active Clubs (ACs) are a decentralized, transnational violent network of extreme-right/white supremacist groups that publicly promote combat-sports, fitness training, and white brotherhood. However, their own communications and several documented activities indicate that the AC-strategy actually aims to create a militant network of combat-ready men and small cells. To avoid early scrutiny by law enforcement, they cultivate a mainstream-friendly fitness aesthetic to ‘hide in plain sight.’”

The founder of the Active Club movement, Robert Rundo, was just featured in a 60 Minutes episode focusing on “disaster tourism” where white nationalists and militias show up following natural disasters to help White people.

What was not fully conveyed is what Ritzmann says is Rundo’s secret agenda.

I began by asking Ritzmann about a recent report in the Guardian that “a network of militant neo-Nazi active clubs from around the US has been participating in riot-style combat events with other white nationalist groups Virginia as part of what their founder called a ‘tip-off point for a fascist cultural revolution.’”

Please watch, then tell me what you think.

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An autocratic figure needs to seize political power and take away the right of women to vote because, when left to their own devices, women “vote for being raped,” a trio of Christian nationalist pastors agreed in a recent podcast.

Pastor Joel Webbon, who heads what appears to be a well-funded podcast operation near Austin, Texas, posted his conversation online last week with Arizona Pastor Dale Partridge and far-right British cleric Father Calvin Robinson.

The conversation is part of a highly controversial video series produced by Webbon’s NXR Studios. NXR is short for “New Christian Right.”

“We want to take women’s votes away because we love women, right?” said Robinson, whose extreme views have led to him becoming a religious figure repeatedly in search of a denomination willing to accept him.

“And we love our society, and we want to be providing and protecting for women, right? Not because we hate them.”

“Right,” agreed Webbon, a Reformed Baptist pastor who leads Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas.

“It’s because we love women—and we know that when women can vote, they vote for being raped.”

WHAT?

Did he really say what I thought he said—women “vote for being raped”? Unable to process such a horrific declaration, I have replayed it again and again, posted it here online, and still have not been able to stop checking what my ears told me.

Webbon did not explain how he reached that startling conclusion. Neither Robinson nor Partridge disputed his suggestion.

Watch excerpts below:

Instead Partridge, a Reformed pastor who leads Kings Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, argued that women are “easily manipulated by evil men.”

“You want to get to my wife, you have to go through me,” Partridge said. “You’re not going to get her emotions manipulated. You are going to have to manipulate my emotions, and I’m less likely to be manipulated.”

He continued, “That’s the threat, is that they can’t control men the way they can control women—which is they reason why they want the women vote.”

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‘We gotta take the vote from them’

The podcast reflects an increasingly popular view in Christian nationalist circles that female suffrage was a fundamental misstep in American history, and they are determined to put men into power who will turn back the clock.

In fact, Robinson argued that taking away women’s right to vote—through whatever means necessary—was critical to defeating feminism.

“That means that men have to stand up and take ownership again, take responsibility again,” he continued. “It means we can’t wait for women to say, ‘We don’t want to vote anymore.’ We’ve gotta take the vote from them.”

Webbon agreed he did not “see any path aside from the full removal of feminism.”

“As long as we have democracy, coupled with universal suffrage, you’ll constantly be going against the grain,” he continued. “You’re constantly going to have half of the population voting for temperance, tolerance, suicidal empathy.”

The question, they agreed, was how to accomplish their patriarchal vision for America—because women would never acquiesce to being disenfranchised.

“I don’t think you’re going to get people to vote away democracy,” Webbon said.

Robinson interjected, “But it does happen.”

“It can,” Webbon agreed.

“But my point is that … I think that it has to be taken. I think that men—virtuous, ambitious, masculine men—have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is [to] their detriment.”

Webbon has predicated that Christian nationalists will take over the Republican Party by 2032.

Asked for a model for America, Robinson pointed to Germany’s Weimar Republic, where Adolf Hitler was democratically elected and then seized power.

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‘Social media is not good for women’

Comparing social media to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, Dale Partridge also argued men should be on X because “this is basically the newspaper of the day” and “when you get to see what’s happening around the world, it will red-pill you.”

Women, on the other hand, should avoid such online platforms because they are too weak to process the battles taking place online, Partridge insisted.

“We are talking about the public square, and we are in a fight for ideological, theological warfare—and it’s not the place in most circumstances for women to be out there,” the Arizona pastor added.

“We don’t see it in the Scriptures, we don’t see it throughout history, and all of a sudden we see it in mass now.”

Watch excerpts below:

The only potential good from women being on social media, Partridge insisted, would be if they confined themselves to looking for recipes, advice on “how to be a submissive, joyful wife,” or “older women teaching younger women how to love their husbands and how to love their children.”

“Outside of that, the vast majority of social media is not good for women,” he added. “It’s a place of gossip, it’s a place of warfare, it’s a place of temptation, it’s a place of comparison.”

Robinson added, “And all that happens is men fall into that, and men become gossips, and men become tempted, and men become effeminate.”

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Tip of the iceberg

Of course, such controversies are not new to Joel Webbon, who has argued:

• “Those of Jewish descent are generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.” The “leading cause of antisemitism” continues to be Jewish behavior. Jews should not be allowed to hold public office in America.

• Nick Fuentes was justified in mocking the Holocaust “because Holocaustianity has been weaponized as a false religion to ensure that White people cannot have a country.” The Holocaust was “probably not as bad as we’ve been told,” and Hitler probably “didn’t even know” about it all.

• Gender equality is part of a Jewish plot to “eradicate White people.”

  Women should be put to death for making false sexual assault allegations, claiming “#MeToo would end real fast” if that occurred.

• ”There are not enough Black men in America, Christian men who know enough theology to be qualified to pastor Black churches.” As a result, Black Americans need to “go find a good, God-fearing White church” to attend.

• If Christians are “not being called a Nazi, an antisemite, a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot, then they are not simply not fighting hard enough.”

And the list could go on and on and on.

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‘What worries me about Christian nationalism’

Such Christian nationalist notions, religious scholar Bradley Onishi recently told me, go to the heart of the danger that Christian nationalism poses to democracy.

While some view the movement as “just loving God and loving country,” Onishi argued that most Christian nationalists believe “I think I should get more of a vote and more of a say than you.”

“That’s what worries me about Christian nationalism more than anything,” he concluded. (You can watch the full interview below.)

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While white nationalists like Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler are celebrating the hard times that have befallen a longtime nemesis, they are becoming increasingly agitated that the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been used to discredit their own work.

President Donald Trump, his Justice Department, and a host of MAGA influencers have seized upon the indictment of the legendary civil rights group and a reference in one paragraph to an SPLC-paid informant who was involved in the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Because that person is not named, it has resulted in a firestorm of speculation that is, unfortunately, surreal and confirms a lot of my worst feelings about human beings,” Kessler said in a weekend interview with the white-nationalist Political Cesspool radio show and podcast.

“They are so deluded. They have so many opinions that are based on nothing but really conspiracy theories—and people who should know better don’t.”

Listen to Kessler in excerpt below:

Kessler, who called the SPLC “a really corrupt, heinous organization,” was Unite the Right’s lead organizer. He has been a frequent target of the group’s investigations into hate and political extremism.

In announcing the SPLC indictment, Trump’s Justice Department accused the non-profit organization of “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” Wyoming GOP Rep. Harriet Hagemen released a viral video that claimed Unite the Right “was an SPLC operation.”

The indictment, accusing the SPLC of fraud and money laundering in its payments to undercover sources, references an informant who was paid $270,000 over nine years. It says the person was in a “leadership chat group” for Unite the Right and helped coordinate transportation for “several” attendees.

Kessler insisted the MAGA spin about that paragraph is completely wrong.

“It’s portrayed as if the entire $270,000 was going to stage Charlottesville as this hoax and it was used to transport people from all over the country to, you know, defame conservatives or something,” Kessler said.

“And that’s not the case.”

Kessler said that there were many so-called “leadership chats” that had very few real leaders in them. The one that is likely implicated, he said, was on Discord. He compared those organizational efforts to the planning for a college keg party.

“The leadership discussion is not full of all of these big names that people are throwing out,” he insisted.

“Most of these people were anonymous. They weren't leaders. It was just, ‘Hey, who wants to help out with this?’ It was as organized as if you were organizing a keg party at a college fraternity.”

Listen to Kessler in excerpt below:

As I previously reported, another Unite the Right organizer, Richard Spencer, has expressed similar views.

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‘The final insult’

Another prominent Charlottesville figure, who now goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus and was convicted on criminal charges for his role in the violence, agreed. His previous name was Austin Mitchell Gillespie.

“Nothing the government is saying right now is legit,” Invictus said in a separate interview on the same radio show and podcast.

He likened it to someone coming into Birmingham, Alabama, years after Dr. Martin Luther King marched there to claim King’s efforts were all a hoax.

“No one would tolerate that—White or Black. That is a clear injustice. No one would take it, but that’s exactly what happened in Charlottesville,” Invictus said.

“And then, years after everybody’s, you know, dragged through the mud and gone through criminal trials and had their lives ruined, then the Justice Department comes out with the final insult.”

Listen to Invictus in excerpt below:

He accused the DOJ of leading people to believe that “none of it was real, these people were paid actors, paid by the SPLC.” In truth, Invictus said, the Southern Poverty Law Center “was destroying our lives at the time.”

He called it “the ultimate insult after everything we’ve been through.”

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‘Doubt has been introduced’

On the same show, Atlanta lawyer Sam Dickson, who has represented the Klan and other hate groups, acknowledged the criticisms of the SPLC indictment.

“I don’t think that there’s any truth to the spin put on … the indictment, which has been picked up on by the moderate, normie conservatives that the SPLC was financing the hate that it pretended to oppose,” Dickson said. Instead, he insisted there was no doubt that “the money was used for the purpose of destroying individuals and organizations and getting information.”

Still, he insisted, “That doesn't change the fact that it's of use to us to have them attacked by the government, and I would like to see it go as far as possible.”

Another white nationalist figure, Lydia Brimelow, also expressed skepticism about the charges. Brimelow, her husband Peter, and their group VDARE were also targets of numerous SPLC investigations.

Referring to the Charlottesville rally, Brimelow agreed, “It was not organized by the SPLC, and it was not an op.”

Still, she celebrated the bloody eye the indictment gives the group that she has long considered an enemy and the fact that "no matter what happens at this point, enough has happened that it is damaged.”

“A headline like ‘The SPLC is Funding the KKK and Organized the Deadly Charlottesville Rally’ is something that normal people are gonna remember,” Brimelow told the program’s host.

“Doubt has been introduced—and I think that’s very valuable regardless of how far down they fall as a result of the indictments.”

Listen to Lydia Brimelow in excerpt below:

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