The Far-Right Responds to the SPLC Indictment

On Tuesday of last week, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a grand jury had indicted of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on 11 charges involving wire fraud, making false statements to federally insured banks, and money laundering. In making the announcement, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the allegations as acts of fraud perpetrated against the SPLC’s donors, insofar as paying informants amounted to channeling money toward and generally propping up the white supremacist organizations that the SPLC says it intends to fight.

The following will be a brief roundup of some of the ways that far-right groups and individuals have responded to the indictment so far. I believe these shed some light on the complicated but ultimately symbiotic relationship between the Trump administration and the far-right activist and pundit cohorts. At the same time, their responses help clarify certain fault lines within their coalition.

The common thread is a basic assumption that there is not and has never been a serious threat from the far right. On the contrary, they almost uniformly believe that the SPLC, the Biden administration, and the entire liberal establishment have only ever promoted or even invented racist and fascistic ideas and groups as a way of pursuing their own ends, namely by instilling fear as a means to attain political power and financial enrichment. It is an idea that not only lets lots of people off the hook, but it also promotes indifference and passivity in the face of actual threats. At the same time, it also justifies still more far-right aggression, as it allows far-right actors to frame their attacks as defensive actions.

Before getting into the details, I think it is worth stating unambiguously from the outset that, while there are lots of well justified reasons to criticize the SPLC (I’ve publicly raised a number of these myself), the current DOJ case against the organization is completely bonkers. It is not being executed in anything that even resembles good faith, and its purpose is most likely not even to win in court, but rather to validate the long-standing right-wing assumptions indicated above. The DOJ’s actions here represent a serious threat to rights-based activism generally and antifascist work in particular. Specifically with respect to this suit and all its implications, the SPLC needs tobe defended; we can and should continue to address its organizational shortcomings in other contexts.

MAGA and Its Margins

The vary act of bringing a suit and getting a grand jury indictment is already paying dividends for a variety of far-right actors (despite Pam Bondi’s track record, the bar for such an indictment is incredibly low). The SPLC has been a target of conservative-to-far-right actors for decades, and their critiques have never been short on inflationary language or conspiratorial allegations.

With that in mind, online crackpot Laura Loomer is now saying that “The Trump administration has proven the SPLC actually orchestrated the Charlottesville rally to line their own pockets, manufacture fake hate crimes, and frame President Donald Trump!” This is about as clear and concise an encapsulation of the far-right SPLC conspiracy theory as I can imagine. It seems to be how Loomer has interpreted the claim in the indictment that an SPLC informant “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC”, and it is hard to imagine anyone taking that in precisely the direction Loomer did if the ideas behind her statement weren’t already in her head prior tot he indictment.

The equally credible Alex Jones says that “The DOJ Has Now CONFIRMED That The Biden Admin Was In Full Command Of The SPLC!” He gets there through some really weird, circuitous logic (never change, Alex!) involving the Biden DOJ’s 2021 *National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism*, which described white supremacy as a major threat. In combination with the Biden administration’s communication with the SPLC, therefore, “the Biden DOJ and others were coordinating with the Southern Poverty Law Center, just during that administration, to run the white-supremacy groups and commit crimes,” according to Jones.

Within Jones’ myopic understanding of the US political landscape, it is easy to believe that “white-supremacy groups” don’t really exist as independent entities. That is because, while he believes that many people to his left are literal “demons” and traitors, he also regularly insists that those who are any much further to the right than he is — most notably the neo-nazi group Patriot Front — aren’t genuine actors who believe what they say, but rather “feds” operating at the behest of those same demonic traitors.

Loomer, by contrast, actually has no problem believing that neo-nazis do, in fact, exist in the US. Given that she is arguably the MAGA right’s most prominent Jewish influencer and an aggressive Zionist to boot, she has been a frequent object of loathing from people whose views are even more radically racist — not to say eliminationist — than her own. Yet despite the antisemitic overtones of the theory that far-right violence is an invention of a sneaky left-wing cabal, she is nonetheless committed to it.

The White Nationalist Intellectuals

That theory and its importance among far right actors was thoroughly worked out this week in an essay by white nationalist intellectual Greg Johnson. A prolific writer and publisher of genteel neo-fascist pablum, Johnson provided three reasons why he was thrilled by the DOJ’s new indictment:

As White Nationalist, I have an interest in knowing who the infiltrators and informants are. First, we need to purge them. It would be nice if some of them do jail time for their crimes. Second, it would be good to know what damage they did. Perhaps movement organizations and individuals can pursue damages in court. Third, it would help us create a more accurate psychological profile of such traitors, so we can keep them out in the future.

It is at least conceivable that informants’ names might be revealed in discovery (if this case ever gets that far), but Johnson doesn’t seem to understand that the informants themselves aren’t on trial in this case and aren’t facing any “jail time” at all. At the same time, I personally endorse his desire to develop a “psychological profile” for prospective members of white nationalist organizations as it’s hard to see that leading anywhere other than more paranoia and distrust among fascists — something they abound in already.

Johnson is pretty representative of the white nationalist/neo-nazi spectrum in that he resents the refusal by more mainstream conservatives (which by now includes most of MAGA) to more explicitly endorse an overtly white nationalist agenda. It is a complaint that sounds completely detached from reality in 2026, but here we are. Johnson writes, “The hallmark of the ‘normie’ conservative is the conviction that ‘racism’ and identity politics for white people are simply evil. Of course, this only applies to white racism and identity politics. The GOP routinely panders to non-white racists and identitarians, as does the rest of the political mainstream.” Johnson therefore sees nefarious objectives behind the SPLC indictment:

Thus, when the Justice Department discovered that the SPLC had not just been watching and infiltrating “hate groups” but actually putting money in their coffers, directing their messaging, helping to organize their events, and then raising funds off of the results, they naturally regarded this as a way to kill two birds with one stone: take down the SPLC for fraud and smear the far Right as being astroturfed by the Left.

Here he simultaneously validates the theory that the SPLC was acting as puppetmaster for groups on the far right — a camp he openly identifies with and in which he plays a leading role — yet he asserts that the allegation that his own cohort is someone else’s puppet is just a smear.

Johnson is nonetheless thrilled by the indictment, writing that “The SPLC, one of the banes of our existence, will be weakened by this. It may even be destroyed. … Thus the Trump administration has done our movement a huge favor. Thank you, President Trump.” Whereas Loomer and others argue that the SPLC, the Biden administration, and others have tried to tarnish Trump’s image by linking him with organized white nationalism, Johnson — a prominent, self-identified white nationalist leader—wants to make it clear that, yes, Trump is definitely giving them a real boost by going after the SPLC.

Jared Taylor, the white nationalist stalwart who, among other things, was cited as an inspiration for the 2015 murder of nine Black churchgoers in a Bible-study group in Charlotte, South Carolina, has a different read on the SPLC indictment. Referring to the DOJ’s claim that the SPLC defrauded its donors, Taylor pointed out in a podcast this week that “the idea that the SPLC was deceiving its donors and claiming to dismantle groups while actually funneling into them — that doesn’t make sense to me. They were paying people to go spy. And that’s the sort of thing that these so-called watchdog groups do.” His tone is obviously rather harsh, but the gist has actually been borne out by a group of SPLC donors who have signed a letter stating that paying informants was well within what they expected their donations to be used for.

Taylor goes on to acknowledge that he differs from many of his own comrades, who are absolutely thrilled that the SPLC is facing a new challenge, yet he insists that “frankly, I don’t think that they did anything legally wrong.”

Nonetheless, Taylor and co-host Michael J. Thompson (who uses the alias “Paul Kersey,” a name borrowed from the Charles Bronson character in the Death Wish movie franchise) stick closely to the same underlying assumption as everyone else named here: the far right poses no threat, and the SPLC (among others) only stokes fear of right-wing actors for its own interests. Describing SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, for instance, Taylor says that he is “in the Mail Order Hall of Fame because he’s so good at raising money by scaring people.”

Rounding out the discussion, Thompson cites a tweet from self-described neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, who agrees with Taylor that there doesn’t appear to be any legal case to be made, however Yarvin believes it’s “cool” that “the DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it kind of can.” This from the people whose camp has been insisting for years that banning neo-nazi accounts from privately owned social media outlets is an unforgivable violation of the right to free speech.

The Neo-Fascist Activists

Meanwhile, the people who are ideologically closest to the organizations that the SPLC allegedly paid informants to report on seem to be responding with more resentment than glee. This seems to be because, like the constant stream of denials that neo-nazi or white nationalist groups can even exist as autonomous organizations, the indictment has a way of denying even the most basic degree of agency to a cohort that regards itself as the heroic descendants of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Leif Erikson.

In a podcast on April 23, Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice said that “I’m enjoying the fact that [the SPLC is] under scrutiny, but it frankly doesn’t, at this point, seem like that strong of a case.” From there, he goes on to accuse “the conservative right wing” of believing that “every quote-unquote ‘white supremacist’ group is just kind of made up, and there’s nothing real to it”. In other words, his response is not so much reveling in the SPLC’s difficulties, but rather attacking the people who, like Alex Jones and Laura Loomer, can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there are real people who openly think like Palmgren does.

Nathan Damigo, the founder of the now-defunct neo-nazi organization Identity Evropa and a leading participant in the Unite the Right rally, recently posted on Telegram that “Rightoids will see one or two paid SPLC informants and claim the entire movement is fake, all while ignoring the hundreds of millions Trump and other Republicans receive annually from Zionist jews and mega corporations.”

In the midst of all this, the Patriot Front leadership, which has expressed bitterness for several years now at MAGA conservatives’ insistence that Patriot Front must be a “fed op,” has said little about the recent DOJ announcement except to defensively point out that “The indictment notably excludes any mention of PF.”

When all is said and done, it is hard to escape the sense that the problem for them is that their feelings are hurt. They try so hard to instill fear in the hearts of their enemies, and now the world is being told that the fear they seek to generate is actually a fraud produced by someone else. They’re largely unemployable outside of their own movement, so they don’t have much alternative but to commit for the long haul even though they are not celebrated like the heroes they believe they are.

This might sound crazy, but maybe — just maybe — they’ve sold their souls for something that is actually just bullshit.