Making White Supremacy Great Again
What An Indictment Says About Trump’s Motivation
Donald Trump is using the Department of Justice (DOJ) to advance the cause of white supremacy. His “America first” ethos applies to Americans he finds acceptable. It derives less from the Constitution and more from the world of white robes and burning crosses.
On April 21st, Trump’s Department of Justice filed a criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), accusing it of defrauding donors by using their funds to advance racial hatred. The Department’s theory is that, because the SPLC uses paid confidential informants who are with organizations the Center is investigating, the donations support those organizations. The government seeks to prove the SPLC’s actual intent is to support hate groups, not fight them.
The charges were revealed at a news conference by FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“The charges allege the SPLC’s use of paid informants defrauded donors to the organization because the donors were not aware their money would be used for that purpose,” reported Will Carless of USA Today. “According to prosecutors, informants were paid large sums of money to infiltrate some of the nation’s most infamous and dangerous extremist groups. This tactic, Blanche said at a news conference, ‘was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.’”
That legal theory is preposterous; the DOJ engages in the same conduct.
“Paying informants to infiltrate hate groups has, however, been used by federal law enforcement agencies ‘for decades, if not longer,’” wrote Carless, quoting professor Javed Ali of the University of Michigan. “The FBI has long paid, and probably is still paying, confidential sources across the country to gather intelligence on extremist groups, including organizations like those named in Tuesday’s indictment, Ali said.”
The prosecution is legally fatuous, but the indictment has nothing to do with the law. The intent is to dismantle an organization with a history of combating white supremacy.
For more than half a century, the SPLC has battled hate in court, from forcing Alabama to change racist legislative elections to winning monetary judgments which went to the Center’s clients. A listing of judgments totals more than 70 million dollars and is not a total sum.
Adding to the absurdity of the charges, the SPLC historically cooperates with the DOJ. “The Southern Poverty Law Center told a federal court on Tuesday that law enforcement agencies have long known that the nonprofit paid informants to report on the movements of hate groups,” reports Collin Binkley of the Associated Press, “rejecting assertions by the Trump administration that the nonprofit steered money to the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups without the knowledge of authorities.”
“In a statement on Tuesday, Bryan Fair, interim president and CEO of SPLC, said information shared with the FBI has saved lives,” added Binkley. “When threats and other unlawful activity were revealed, the SPLC immediately passed that information to law enforcement officials, local, state and federal and assisted in efforts to prevent violence and stop criminal activity.”
While the action against the SPLC is ludicrous, it has triggered fear and anger among a spectrum of civil and human rights groups – which is, of course, the objective.
“For feminist and civil rights groups,” notes Ms. Magazine, “the indictment is the clearest sign yet of an escalating campaign to intimidate the nonprofit sector, criminalize civil rights advocacy and silence dissent. In their view, the administration is not only attacking outcomes or messages, but working to turn the machinery of government itself against advocacy groups: criminal law, regulatory scrutiny and national security frameworks.”
The SPLC lawsuit is the latest, and most nakedly abusive, attack on civil rights organizations by Trump. The foundation was laid during his first presidential administration.
“Over 3½ years in office,” reported The Washington Post, “he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.”
“This long history is important” wrote German Lopez for Vox. “It would be one thing if Trump misspoke one or two times. But when you take all of his actions and comments together, a clear pattern emerges — one that suggests that bigotry is not just political opportunism on Trump’s part but a real element of his personality, character, and career.”
Who benefits from the Trump administration’s racist agenda? Maybe Trump’s dinner guests at Mar-a-Lago on November 26, 2024 provide a clue.
“Former President Donald Trump is renewing attention to his long history of turning a blind eye to bigotry after dining with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West just days into his third campaign for the White House,” reported the Associated Press, adding, “The former president has a long history of failing to unequivocally condemn hate speech.”
He has a more recent history of locking up brown people in ICE detention facilities. A recent report by UCLA “shows that noncriminal Latinos have become a central target of enforcement, despite claims that policy prioritizes serious offenders. Monthly detentions of Latinos without criminal records increased sixfold compared to the final year of the Biden administration, driven largely by aggressive workplace and public-space arrests.”
Trump’s bogus indictment of the SPLC supports his racist agenda. So does his propensity for locking up people of color. So does his embrace of Christian Nationalism, a term that offends both of its subparts.
The only cure for the nation is to hand Trump and his followers a massive defeat at the polls in November. Make them eat crow.
Jim Crow.