As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of wire fraud for its informant program to infiltrate extremist groups, the news was greeted in neo-Nazi accelerationist circles with glee.
“Frankly, it’s a win for us as we see it,” a Telegram channel for The American Futurist, propaganda project, posted as the news broke on Tuesday. “Let them have their news spectacle; we get the benefit of fewer traitorous snakes in the movement….”
With Patel standing at his side, Blanche charged during the press conference that the Southern Poverty Law Center, known as the SPLC, was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Patel echoed that talking point in an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Wednesday, claiming that the SPLC paid informants inside extremism organizations “specifically for the reason to sow discord and hate into our society.”
The American Futurist channel, authored by former members of the now-defunct accelerationist group Atomwaffen, which is tied to at least five murders, scoffed at the notion that the extremism watchdog group is secretly an ally to violent white supremacists.
“The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism — they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all,” the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted. “What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside.”
The post speculated that the prosecution was motivated by the desire to “kill two birds with one stone: arrest pro-Palestine leftists and smear the US [neo-Nazi] movement as controlled opposition.
“So, do we mind?” the post continued. “No, not at all. We can take the PR hit, and to be frank, any snitches who get rounded up on charges with the SPLC absolutely deserve what they get….”
The Department of Justice press release quotes Patel as saying that while the SPLC was “vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups,” the nonprofit instead “paid the leaders of these very extremist groups — even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.”
The FBI and Department of Justice sidestepped multiple requests from Raw Story for information to substantiate Patel and Blanche’s claims that the funds SPLC paid to informants were used to commit crimes or otherwise manufactured extremism.
The 14-page indictment merely states that the money spent to pay informants “was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.”
The indictment alleges that the informants “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.” One informant said to be involved in the planning chats for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville allegedly “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
Engaging in racist speech and logistical activities are consistent with the activities of informants used by the FBI itself in its infiltration of violent white supremacist groups going back to the 1960s.
As described in the indictment, the activities of at least one informant appear to undercut the government’s case that the payments benefited the extremist groups. The indictment alleges that the informant, said to be an affiliate of the National Alliance, stole 25 boxes of documents from the group, which were then used to source a story published on the SPLC’s “Hatewatch” website.
“The use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence,” Bryan Fair, SPLC’s interim CEO, said in a video posted on the organization’s website on Tuesday. “In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff. For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups.”
Beginning in the 1980s under the leadership of co-founder Morris Dees, the SPLC sued a succession of violent white supremacist groups and effectively shut them down.
In 1984, the SPLC joined a lawsuit against the United Klans of America for its role in the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile in 1981. Three years later, a jury awarded Donald’s mother $7 million, bankrupting one of the most violent Klan factions, whose members were responsible for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that resulted in the deaths of four Black girls, and the 1965 murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. (Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., one of the Klansmen indicted for Liuzzo’s murder, was an FBI informant.)
To satisfy the judgement in the Donald lawsuit, the United Klans was forced to turn over its Tuscaloosa, Ala. headquarters to Donald’s mother, and she was able to buy her first home with the proceeds from the sale.
In 1990, lawyers for the SPLC, along with the Anti-Defamation League, sued neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger and his group White Aryan Resistance for inciting followers in the death of an Ethiopian immigrant, Mulugeta Seraw, who was beaten to death in Portland, Ore. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $12.5 million, and attorneys foreclosed on Metzger’s house to collect the judgement.
Nearly a decade later, the SPLC sued the Aryan Nations on behalf of a mother and son who were assaulted by the group’s security forces. Shortly after arriving in northern Idaho in 1980 to establish its compound, members of the group reportedly vandalized a Jewish-owned restaurant with swastikas. The Aryan Nations spawned a terrorist spinoff group called the Order that was responsible a murder and a spree of bombings and armed car robberies in the 1980s.
The jury decision in 2000 to award the plaintiffs $6.3 million forced Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler to declare bankruptcy. His group was forced to turn its compound over to the plaintiffs, and funds from the sale of the property were used to build a human rights center in nearby Coeur D’Alene.
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