A former Southern Poverty Law Center insider calls the Trump administration’s effort to create a bogus narrative around the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally “offensive,” especially to the people of Charlottesville.
The Trump Justice Department recently indicted the legendary civil rights group on fraud and money laundering charges and, even though it is not alleged in the indictment, publicly accused the SPLC of orchestrating the deadly protest.
“It’s incredibly offensive for one thing,” said Michael Edison Hayden in an interview for Hate Comes to Main Street.
“We know exactly who did this down in Charlottesville. It’s a huge offense to the people there who are still emotionally recovering from what happened.”
Hayden, who worked at the SPLC between 2018 and 2023, is the author of a new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town. The story includes his tenure as an investigative reporter for the non-profit organization. He even served as an SPLC spokesperson.
SPLC paid informants?
In the interview, Hayden—who has sometimes been sharply critical of SPLC management—told me he knew nothing about the system of paying informants that is at the heart of the Department of Justice’s allegations against the group.
SPLC now says that program was discontinued a few years back.
“I never heard of it my entire time there—never! No one ever mentioned it to me. I never had to speak about it,” he added.
“When you’re talking about the ins and outs of a major organization, you do get background information about stuff you don’t talk about, right? … I literally never even heard of this program.”
Who was ‘Unite the Right’ informant?
In the case of the Charlottesville informant, one paragraph in the indictment references a person who somehow got into “leadership chat group” for the rally allegedly helped arrange transportation for “several” of the 500-1,000 attendees.
MAGA influencers have alleged—without evidence—that the paragraph proves the Southern Poverty Law Center organized the rally and paid for transportation.
“Some of these chats were pretty accessible,” Hayden said.
“Sometimes they would involve just a link posted somewhere. So we don’t know if this is just some random guy who was feeding information to the SPLC and getting money for it … who happened to be lurking in the background.”
In fact, as I first reported, “Unite the Right” organizer Richard B. Spencer has speculated the informant “will be someone whom no one remembers.”
Mike Hayden and Stephen Miller
We also talked about a major investigation in which Hayden was involved at the Southern Poverty Law Center that galled the Trump administration.
In that case, he obtained a cache of emails revealing how White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller had “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories, and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”
“He was sending links to Breitbart to try to change the conversation on conservative media to something that was more nativist—you could argue more white supremacist,” Hayden told me.
After that, Republicans made a commitment to go after the SPLC.
“It was obvious that the SPLC would be in the sights of this administration when they came back,” the author concluded.
Much more in video
In the interview, we talk much more about:
Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the quaint tourist town that was torn apart by the arrival of extremists with the white nationalist group VDARE;
VDARE’s influence on modern American politics;
The intense stresses that come with investigating hate groups; and
What Hayden thinks Americans can learn from what he has seen.
I think it’s a fascinating conversation.
Please watch, then tell me what you think.
