Southern Poverty Law Center indicted for fraud, money laundering

bediger4000

By Trump's personalist DoJ. Presuming good faith on the part of Trump admin feds is a journalistic mistake.

jonahbenton

Todd Blanche, Trump's personal lawyer, digs the DoJ deeper into irreversible reputational debt.

xrd

SPLC activities: "...including filing litigation on voting rights and prisoner rights." I can imagine these actions would be inconvenient for the Trump administration.

drob518

They were paying KKK members and Nazis. The scam was roughly the same as firemen paying arsonists to justify their salaries.

xvxvx

“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” There was always something suspicious about the SPLC, almost like a big brother of the ADL. Both organizations profit greatly from the very thing they supposedly fight. Why dismantle something when you can turn it into a cash cow? The past decade has been a real eye opener for me. It pays to critique absolutely everything, especially those deemed above reproach. There are less than 4,000 neo-Nazis in the US, and less than 8,000 KKK members. 12,000 equates to just 0.0035% of the U.S. population, the same number as people who suffer from dwarfism. Combined, the SPLC and ADL are worth about a billion dollars.

jauntywundrkind

I guess we might see as the case actually starts up, but I tend towards this basic posture: > Infiltrating hate groups with informants is something that goes way back to the civil rights era and before. It's never been something only the government can do, especially when the government is more likely to be showing up for the white power happy hour every third Thursday at Chili's. https://bsky.app/profile/andycraig.bsky.social/post/3mjzzezd... And to be extremely skeptical of this administration working in good faith. The lawfare to destroy the good, to destroy institutions, by the very worst, is just out of control. The expression of power of the rich to destroy has gone up and up and up, and they keep getting by even as they destroy load bearing elements of society: > I will say, frivolously suing a nonprofit for fraud has become A Thing recently. See, e.g., James Huntsman's suit against the Mormon Church or Elon Musk's against OpenAI. > But rich people wasting money to punish nonprofits they no longer like is one thing;* the government doing it is another. https://bsky.app/profile/smbrnsn.bsky.social/post/3mk224wrzm... The FBI had been paying the SPLC to do just this sort of thing, until the new extremist administration stepped in. The people waging this case know all that. The donors new the work the SPLC did. And it's quite clear they can't be expected to show receipts, and safely show where all the money goes. https://bsky.app/profile/tomjoscelyn.bsky.social/post/3mk25s... More despicable illegitemate mis-governance as usual by the most chaotic evil US government we have ever had.