Republican officials’ crusade against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a continuation of the MAGA movement’s efforts to obscure and lie about the reality of white supremacy in the United States.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is no stranger to Jim Crow-style investigations (however unsuccessful), announced on Monday a probe of the organization that made its reputation for exposing white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
“The radical, woke SPLC was funding the very groups it was claiming to oppose. My office will ensure that the organization is held accountable for its blatant deception,” Paxton said in a press release. “Donors of the SPLC deserve to know if they have been manipulated into supporting a non-profit that gives millions of dollars to the KKK and other groups that they thought they were opposing.”
GOP attacks on the SPLC, the most prominent being the Justice Department’s reportedly rushed indictment of the group for fraud, stem from allegations that the organization lied to its donors about what it was doing as it was secretly funding (by paying confidential informants) the groups it claimed to fight. These allegations have come at a cost to the SPLC. Since the indictment, investment firms like Vanguard and Fidelity have prevented customers from using their respective charitable donation platforms to make payments to the organization .
In response to that suit, the SPLC pleaded not guilty and has pressed to have the grand jury transcripts released. The organization has also “called the accusation ‘provably wrong,’” The Associated Press reported, adding that the group “said federal officials have long known about the program and that information has been shared with law enforcement.” That the SPLC has assisted law enforcement for quite some time is a fact even the Trump administration was forced to concede.
Following that litigation and a similar probe by Alabama’s attorney general, Paxton is using his office to open a new front in a campaign to portray anti-racist organizations as the real racists. When Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a civil probe of the SPLC, he said, “We look forward to learning more about the inner workings of an organization that we have long believed was rotten, but until recently, has been impervious.”
The attacks on the SPLC were kicked off by a Republican administration that has embraced white supremacist propaganda, dismissed the threat of white supremacy or tried to blame racism on the Democratic Party. Republicans have used their attacks on the SPLC to downplay the existence of racist extremism or to portray it as a liberal contrivance, and in some cases, to falsely claim right-wing extremist groups like the KKK were actually created by liberals.
What appears to be driving this effort is not only the SPLC’s tracking of racist extremism, but that this tracking placed right-wing groups that Republicans support, such as Turning Point USA, under a microscope.
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