Southern Poverty Law Center and Trump deserve each other | Opinion
The Trump administration and the Southern Poverty Law Center deserve each other. The shady duo got together before a Washington, D.C., grand jury, where Donald Trump attorney general candidate Jeanine Pirro obtained indictments against the so-called “civil rights” group with three quarters of a billion dollars in assets.
In indicting the SPLC for, among other things, using some of its vast fundraising to pay confidential informants in some of the darkest corners of America’s seething hate ecosystem, Pirro has blurred the line between ethically shady and criminal. Yes, paying informants doesn’t pass the smell test, but none of the SPLC’s donors report being harmed by the fact that some of their donations went to literal Nazis.
As wrong as the indictments are — they’re clear retaliation for First Amendment protected activity — the law center is familiar with collapsing the distinction between different categories. For decades, its business model has been to blur the lines between sincere, well-meaning conservative Christians and people so filled with hate that they admire Adolf Hitler.
The grift works like this: Water down your definition of a hate group so much that a local gaggle of parents organizing to keep graphic depictions of oral sex off the shelves of school libraries fits in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan. With your newly overpopulated list of hate groups, report to the press that hate groups in America are growing rapidly. Then use the headlines to raise more money to name more groups to your hate list and repeat the process.
That happened in Greene County in southwest Missouri, where a local branch of Moms for Liberty was targeted by the nationally influential SPLC. The SPLC was so influential that its “data” was used by the FBI to inform its investigative priorities and by the Fortune 500 to make sure they and their employees didn’t give to evil people.
Neither the SPLC nor the Trump administration care one whit that their actions chill the most fundamental of civil rights, the ability to organize politically and speak out.
In the case of the SPLC, though, I think there are even more destructive consequences. When the SPLC targeted itsr hate accusations against regular people and Christians simply trying to follow their faith, they frittered away the power of calling someone racist or sexist or homophobic.
Since so many conservatives were called haters by the SPLC — people like Charlie Kirk and his organizations, along with many others — it meant that conservatives of all stripes didn’t mind working with, associating with and supporting other people who the SPLC called haters, even if in those cases the SPLC’s charges were perfectly accurate.
You can see the results today in a president who is openly racist and is willing to have dinner with young men who deny the Holocaust. You can see the results in leaked group chats among a new generation of young conservatives who have turned racist, sexist and homophobic slurs into their inside joke.
There are plenty of other reasons for the resurgence of hateful rhetoric and ideas on the right — Trump’s leadership top among them. But also, a failure of conservative media and institutions.
The SPLC deserves its new friends in the Trump administration for the fact that in making the false charge that nearly every conservative was a racist, they facilitated racist people and their horrible ideas in infiltrating the mainstream right. No amount of fundraising, no $800 million war chest, was worth the damage the SPLC has done.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
