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The SPLC has been federally indicted on six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. And the charges were filed in the Middle District of Alabama. 14-page indictment PDF here.
In brief, the indictment alleges that the SPLC raised money under false pretenses by claiming to fight right-wing extremism, instead funding extremist informants with roughly $3 million dollars of donor money. The informants included members of the KKK and an organizer of the infamous Charlottesville unite the right fiasco. They allegedly did this using illegal means, creating fictitious cutouts and lying to banks to open phony bank accounts to obscure the flow of funds from the SPLC to their informants.
I can't help but feel some schadenfreude here - "no one is above the law" also applies to left-wing NGOs who think they can larp as spies. They even named one of their cutouts Center Investigative Agency... It seems like they flew very close to the sun thinking that their brand and political affiliation would shield them from scrutiny. Project Veritas got a lot more heat for doing a lot less.
From a layman's perspective the indictment seems pretty compelling but I'd be curious to hear what the legal commentators here think. Of course this is only one side of the argument, but those statements to the bank in particular seem quite incriminating. Also, what exactly would be the consequences for the SPLC if the DOJ succeeds on some or all counts?
This is why I voted for Trump. Thé SPLC is my enemy, and driving them out of the face of the earth is a good thing.
I have two objections. One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility. Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair. But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other. Heck, even Iran and Israel are not in that stage. Unlike chess, neither war nor the culture war are zero sum games where hurting your enemy and helping your side are identical.
Every move in the culture war has two separate properties, one how much it brings your side closer to their objectives and one how much it escalates the conflict. Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump. My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
Organizations like the SPLC, the Proud Boys and so forth exist because what they do is mostly legal and significant fractions of the population support them. Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
The ongoing existence of the SPLC also contributes to a decline in civility. Civility is a difficult thing to build, easy to destroy.
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The lawfare against the NRA did massive damage to the already-wobbly organization, and to the extent it moved its political arms to third groups (eg SAF), the soup-and-nuts fundamentals work - training programs, lead abatement, range insurance - still remains badly crippled and under the control of Blue Tribe administrators. I’m not sure there’s going to be any way for a non-NRA org to take over them, given the pressure applied against banks and insurers that only the NRA’s self-insurance warchest has allowed them to survive under.
That’s… kinda the problem. “It doesn’t work” is a testable hypothesis, and only survives so long as it almost never works. “It’s a bad escalation” only works if you can persuade people that refusing to push the button means it remains unpushed; that’s clearly not true and can’t become true without a Time Machine.
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I think seeing it as just 2 teams is more simplistic than is warranted here. I see this not as Trump or his ill attacking my side, but rather shooting out a cancer that's been rapidly and successfully killing the healthy parts of my side for decades. It'd be preferable to go to a surgeon who has expertise and incentive to keep the rest of us healthy and alive, but when all the surgeons have decided to join the cult of the cancer that values the cancer itself over the host, that's hard to come by.
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