I Know the SPLC’s Flaws Better Than Most. This Investigation Still Looks Like a Witch Hunt.

MAGA has wanted to take down the SPLC for years. Now it has the DOJ to try.

Michael Edison Hayden

The MAGA DOJ has launched a criminal investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups, according to the SPLC. Few targets are more appealing to the MAGA movement, which has spent years demonizing the organization that has repeatedly called it out for bigoted behavior.

Extremists all over the country are freaking out with schadenfreude over this one.

The AP reports:

The Southern Poverty Law Center previously paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities, often sharing it with local and federal law enforcement. The program was used to monitor threats of violence and was kept quiet to protect informants’ safety.

First, I had no contact with the program at the center of this probe, and neither did anyone I worked closely with. This program seems to be research focused and not journalistic. I don’t know whether it overlapped with my time there, but I believe the program was created before I arrived in 2018.

We need to hear more, and I’ll leave open the possibility that investigators have uncovered something serious that isn’t yet public. But the DOJ appears to be focusing on something old and obscure in order to make MAGA’s long-standing rhetoric about the SPLC as a “criminal enterprise” seem real. Throughout my time there, angry reactionaries regularly replied to my posts online making exactly that sensational claim.

This fits into a broader effort within MAGA to stigmatize reporting on them—or even expressing informed opinions about how their rhetoric lands outside the movement. We took on many bigots who became very powerful. While at the SPLC, I reported on figures who have since become central to MAGA, including Stephen Miller and Jack Posobiec. Given that context, it was almost inevitable that a weaponized DOJ would try something like this. Discrediting the SPLC is a way of retroactively rehabilitating everyone the SPLC ever exposed.

As I wrote in my post “What Happened to the SPLC—and Me,” the organization has deliberately adopted a lower profile in response to the pressures of operating in the authoritarian climate of Trump’s second term. If this probe is as invasive as it sounds, it suggests that keeping a low profile didn’t offer protection.

The SPLC discriminated against me and retaliated when I worked to organize our shop. But my solidarity remains with its workers, who are now facing this investigation at the hands of a government I view as deeply corrupt. I’m sorry that they’re going through this.