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If Trump's DoJ (he did not get around to rename that one yet, did he?) had any hard evidence that made the SPLC an accessory to some crime of a far right org they were infiltrating, they would not go after them for donation fraud.
FBI informers can get promises of immunity which may be dependable to a non-zero degree. The SPLC can make no such promises. So a rational informer will not feed the SPLC information which incriminate himself.
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence. "Hi Joe, bad news. No payments this month, donations have plummeted, people simply do not care about Neonazis. Oh, you are planning to shoot up a synagogue? That is excellent news, I will have an intern prepare a list of impactful targets immediately. Do you need funds or should we rather ship AR-15's to you." <-- not happening.
In the US, you rarely go to prison just for being a member of an organization, liberty and all that. Nor do you go to prison for infiltrating an organization under false pretenses. I do not see anything stopping the right from infiltrating violent left wing organizations. I hear Antifa is a really big domestic terrorist threat. If some MAGA org wants to infiltrate Antifa and figure out their structure, they are certainly allowed to do so, as long as they do not fund serious crimes in the process (which they would not, because they do not want to see ICE agents murdered any more than the SPLC wants to see Jews murdered).
I don't think mustache-twirling villains tend to do this, and I think people who tend to do this don't metaphorically twirl mustaches. It seems to me that a common tendency of any activist - to the point that it should be taken as the default presumption unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary - is to overestimate one's own importance in the activism and the importance to society of the topic around which one's activism is. As such, believing that keeping one's activist organization well funded and running, no matter what, is something that any activist who genuinely, in good-faith, believes oneself to be doing good, can easily fall into.
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Why not? There had been plenty of hoaxes that aim at exactly that - creating an appearance of racism where there was none. The demand for racism on the left vastly exceeds the supply on the right. A simple law of supply and demand suggests manufacturing some must be profitable. One doesn't need to grow a twistable mustache to follow a simple set of incentives.
If there are non-LARPing Nazis around, prison is not the worst they could do to you. In fact, look what non-LARPing extremists on the left did, for example, to Andy Ngo. And several other journalists since. That's only things we know publicly.
What is stopping them is that Antifa will kill them, and Antifa-loving prosecutors won't even investigate it. Just as there is almost no meaningful prosecution of current Antifa violence - certainly not commensurate with the extent of the violence.
They very much do want to see ICE agents murdered, and some already were. More were violently attacked, and still are. SPLC, on the other hand, probably does not want actual Jews to get murdered. What they want is a lot of public calls to get Jews murdered, preferable from some scary-looking people, so that they could "expose" and "monitor" them and get those sweet grants for "fighting" them.
The ICE wall of honour continues to show zero deaths due to enemy action since Jaime Jorge Zapata in 2011. Like a medieval army, the vast majority of service-related deaths are due to disease (COVID-19, cancer from toxic exposure during the WTC cleanup, and one case of dengue while on a field assignment in Indonesia).
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Remind me how they got Al Capone?
"enable" is a stronger word than I'd use. Encourage isn't quite right either. Something like "generate just barely enough existence to keep money flowing and publicize 4chan memes, without causing significant harm to people we care about."
If the options are find a new cause or shut down and find different jobs... I also don't think, say, gay and lesbian actively desired to funnel questioning kids into lifetimes of medicalization, but the institutional survival incentives once they'd won pretty much everything else generated that as side-effect of the new cause area.
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