Lots of People Are Lying About the SPLC Indictment: Here's the Evidence
It's almost as if the people most excited by the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center have not read the indictment--or they really don't care.
Give Donald Trump’s Justice Department credit: They were able to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center on one set of facts, while spinning a completely different yarn about the legendary civil rights organization.
And the right-wing spin machine is absolutely making stuff up.
As you will see below, that is objectively true.
Payments to informants or hate groups?
First, play very close attention to the specific allegations approved by a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama. The indictment says that, over a 10-year-period, SPLC (1) “secretly funneled $3 million”… (2) to informants… (3) “associated with various violent extremist groups.”
But note the blaring graphic (above) that was displayed by Fox News: “Southern Poverty Law Center Accused of Funneling $3M+ to Extremist Groups.”
Get the difference? “To informants” versus “to extremist groups.”
Fox host Kayleigh McEnany declared that the money went “to some of the very same extremist hate groups it claims to have been fighting—what a charge!”
She later claimed that SPLC paid the money “to incite racially charged events.”
NONE of that is in the indictment returned by the federal grand jury.
In fact, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said as much when pressed by a reporter at the DOJ’s hastily called news conference about whether the money had gone to fund the groups’ operations. (Watch below.)
“Look, I want to be careful to keep any comments that we make inside the indictment, and so what the indictment lays out is payments to individuals who had leadership positions within these organizations,” Blanche said.
“That’s what the grand jury found.”
Of course, it did not help that Blanche also made loose comments, such as: “In no fundraising efforts that the investigation found did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we're gonna give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’"
But that version of events—”a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan”—is NOT in the indictment.
SPLC money used to fund ‘false flags’?
From there, the right-wing spin machine went into overdrive.
In a tweet to his 239 million followers, Elon Musk flatly declared that the Southern Poverty Law Center had “funded a large number of false flag ‘right wing’ organizations and events. Total scam.”
That is NOWHERE in the indictment.
”HOLY CRAP!” Internet provocateur Nick Sortor blared. He falsely claimed that FBI Director Kash Patel said SPLC paid KKK leaders “to stage ‘HATE CRIMES.’”
If any of Sortor’s 1.5 million followers bothered to closely watch his video, they would have seen that Patel never claimed any “hate crimes” were staged as a result of the SPLC’s informant program—nor is that in the indictment.
Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh told his four million followers that the Southern Poverty Law Center “funded ‘right wing hate groups’ and organized fake right wing protests so that it could turn around and fundraise off of them and use them as a pretext to crackdown on conservatives nationwide.”
Again, no DOJ official ever made that claim, nor is it in the indictment.
Walsh, by the way, has faced criticism from the SPLC for what it called his “general hate” and “violent rhetoric.”
What about Charlottesville?
Preposterous claims about 2017’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally—which ended in 32-year-old being run over and killed by a neo-Nazi—immediately caught fire. Perhaps, they saw it as a chance to brush back criticism of their own activities.
Alt-right figure Jack Posobiec told his 3.3 million followers: “Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC.”
Nobody ever said that, nor is that in the indictment.
SPLC, it should be noted, had previously reported on how it said Posobiec’s rise was “tied” to the white supremacist movement. (Posobiec has now posted that—because I used SPLC as a resource in the past—that, by definition, means I “lied.”)
Likewise, Federalist co-founder Sean Davis informed his 632 thousand followers that the SPLC had ‘bankrolled the Charlottesville ‘white supremacy’ riot.” Again, that is nowhere to be found in the charges.
On Fox News, Jesse Watters argued, “Charlottesville was astroturfed. They paid a guy, not only to organize it, but to bus people in.”
Again, that appears to be pure fabrication!
Then, there wasThe Blaze, which is already under scrutiny for falsely accusing a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6 pipe bomber.
It announced “BOMBSHELL” news that “Charlottesville violence allegedly was a leftist-funded ‘false flag.”
As previously noted, that’s not supported by the indictment.
Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon declared that “Alex Jones was right” about Charlottesville being a “false flag.”
Again, not true!
And right-wing podcaster C.Jay Engel pronounced the news as “total vindication for the Alt Right,” claiming “hate crimes are fake. They don’t exist.”
Also false!
Ask the Charlottesville defendants
By the way, the accusations are not sitting well with the people actually involved in Charlottesville.
Just one example from the person who now calls himself “Augustus Invictus”:
“I have, as a lawyer, represented more than a few of them in court, as we have all been hounded by law enforcement (henchmen of the SPLC and ADL) for years. I cannot count the number of people I know whose lives have been destroyed over the past 9 years because we dared to unite all the disparate factions of the right-wing in order to protest the destruction of White America.
”Every "right-wing" influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me.”
What the indictment actually says
Instead, the details provided in the charges prepared by the Department of Justice are, by comparison, much tamer.
According to the indictment, one of the group’s informants was ONE “member of the online leadership chat group” that planned the “Unite the Right” rally. It claims the source “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
That’s it!
He was (1) in the chat—NOT in charge of organizing the rally—and (2) he organized transportation for SEVERAL attendees. Not dozens of attendees. Not scores of attendees. Not hundreds of attendees. “SEVERAL” attendees! And it does NOT say that SPLC had him arrange the transportation.
That’s the actual quote from the grand jury.
According to the indictment, the informant got paid about $30,000 a year to provide information for SPLC’s intelligence-gathering operation—obviously not enough to bus in hundreds of right-wing protesters, provide room-and-board and other expenses for what was the largest hate gathering in decades.
The truth is, as the record shows, SPLC had tried to sound the alarm about the potential danger in the days leading up to the gathering:
“Unite the Right” is expected to draw a broad spectrum of far-right extremist groups – from immigration foes to anti-Semitic bigots, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, Patriot and militia types, outlaw bikers, swastika-wearing neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members – all of whom seem emboldened by the Trump presidency.
The “summer of hate” gathering of racist extremists from all corners of the country will face counter-demonstrations pledged by hundreds of anti-racist, antifa activists, including so-called anarchists, civil-rights community organizers and Black Lives Matter members.
…
The looming social chemistry on a hot summer weekend — 115 miles from Washington, D.C. — seems to point to the clear possibility of violence. Riot-equipped Virginia State Police will augment local police and sheriff’s deputies.
And not to be left out…
Tennessee’s 5th District congressman, Andy Ogles, now claims all of this is also somehow proof that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been secretly bankrolling the Patriot Front’s flash-mob protests.
“They are trying to vilify white people. This is EVIL,” the diehard MAGA Republican posted.
Will we ever get back to anything even remotely resembling normal political discourse?
What do you think?
(EDITOR’S NOTE: One paragraph was amended slightly to emphasize what the indictment did NOT say. The initial post had the wrong number of followers for Sean Davis and misidentified Matt Walsh’s website.)
631K - k means thousand, right? If it was million, it would say "mil", right?
Please verify your claim that Sean Davis has 632 MILLION followers.