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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?
If you want to read an eye-opening book about this (but not eye-opening in the way the author intended): Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream by Leonard Zeskind
The author worked for SPLC/Klanwatch for years, and the book is not impartial in the slightest. When discussing informers, he repeatedly takes the tack of "ha ha, you loser white supremacists, your org was infiltrated again!" He explains how David Duke was probably an informer/compromised by the feds given that Duke got arrested with explosives but the charges never materialized, and then somehow the Klan member/donor list "mysteriously" got into FBI hands shortly after that. He explains how a high-ranked Klan member of the Duke era, who repeatedly engaged in public threats of killing law enforcement, turned out to be on the federal payroll. Things like this happen over and over again in the book, but the author never once considers what this says about the nature of those organizations. At some point, anyone with perspective would have to wonder about the reality of these "right wing hate organizations" when high-ranking members and leaders are all being paid by the federal government.
The FBI can lie on financial documents to pay informants. And I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the supposed Nazis are actually LARPing feds, I mean how many Whitmer plots do you need to get suspicious? But plebes are not allowed to do that. People have largely accepted that the FBI can paint outside the lines and ignore the law, because they are the FBI. But if the same authority is granted to every leftist NGO, the right has no chance to survive in this country. So if Trump admin messes this up and doesn't get jail conviction and corporate death penalty for SPLC, this would be an absolutely catastrophic loss. Not immediately catastrophic, but long term - you can not survive if your enemy is allowed to break the law without any repercussions but you have to walk on eggshells.
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).
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).
Turns out, I misremembered Prairieland attack, and the person who was shot in the neck was a police officer, not ICE agent, and he survived. So they tried to murder ICE agents, but they only succeeded in wounding a police officer, and murdering two other illegal immigrants: Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman Fuentes (in a different attack). I was wrong to say antifa succeeded in their attempt to murder ICE agents, they tried, but so far other people and not ICE agents suffered from it. I stand corrected on that point. The rest of the points do not change from it though.
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