MAGA media gaslights on Charlottesville

Almost immediately after the mob at Donald Trump diehards smashed its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the right-wing noise machine moved into action to downplay what the world saw unfold in real time. Now, five years later, with a giant assist from the Department of Justice, conservative media is again attempting to launder reality through conspiracy about another dark day in the first Trump administration — the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — with some saying the event was a false flag operation. 

In one of the most brazen escalations yet in the administration’s war on its perceived enemies, the DOJ, created in 1870 to enforce the civil rights of formerly enslaved Americans in the South, announced the criminal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization founded in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, and credited with financially crippling the modern Klan.

On April 21, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11 counts — six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. But it is a case built to win on cable news, not court. 

The core allegation, stripped of its melodramatic framing, is that the SPLC used paid informants to infiltrate hate groups and ran those payments through shell accounts to protect the identities of people who were living among Klansmen and neo-Nazis. The SPLC has long relied on informants to infiltrate organizations, sometimes in coordination with federal authorities. As far back as 1996, the New York Times reported that the organization had “spies” embedded in white nationalist gatherings.

The federal government’s legal argument, such as it is, falls apart the moment anyone with prosecutorial experience examines it. Kyle Boynton, an attorney who worked previously as both a federal civil rights prosecutor and an FBI agent, told CBS News, “I don’t think any prosecutor with white-collar experience would look at this indictment and believe it makes out the elements of a crime.” 

To prove the wire fraud charges, the government needs to demonstrate that the SPLC made material misrepresentations to its donors — in other words, that donors gave money expecting one thing and received something meaningfully different. The vague fundraising language cited in the indictment is likely not strong enough to show the organization made affirmative false statements, and the use of paid informants to obtain intelligence about hate groups does not on its face run contrary to its mission statement. While the indictment struggles to identify any actual victims, more than 20 verified donors told The Intercept that using funds to gather intelligence on hate groups was precisely what they expected the organization to do. 

Some experts predict the charges could be dismissed before the case makes it to trial. Former Justice Department fraud section attorney William Johnston, speaking to CBS News, put it plainly: The theory that paying informants to dismantle hate groups somehow contradicts the mission of dismantling hate groups is “very stretched.”

None of this matters to the people who ordered these charges. What the indictment does do, quite effectively, is provide a scaffolding for a broader disinformation campaign. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” And almost immediately, conservative media figures and politicians seized on it as proof of all of their long-standing conspiracies.

On Truth Social, Trump said if the indictment against the SPLC is correct, the 2020 election should be vacated. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News to claim the SPLC “transformed into a criminal organization run by fraudsters who are paying for and inciting the very racism they claim to stand against.” FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News’ Sean Hannity, “The charity that supposedly fought the Klan funded the Klan. The charity that supposedly fought Neo-Nazis funded Neo-Nazis. That’s the ultimate hypocrisy.”

On Fox News’ “The Five,” co-host Jesse Watters called racism in America a “big fat psyop,” while Greg Gutfeld conceded “there probably is a bigot somewhere. But you guys created a false flag, that there was this immense movement going on in this country that then put targets on people like Charlie Kirk’s back, and he’s dead!”

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“Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC,” far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted on X. The organization had previously flagged and reported on the influencer’s white supremacist connections. “Unite the Right Was a Left-Wing Front,” an Epoch Times headline read. Federalist co-founder Sean Davis argued, “the SPLC funded and organized [Unite the Right] while pretending to be scandalized by it.”

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin described the indictment as a “richly deserved humiliation and comeuppance for one of the most toxic organizations in American politics” and concluded that “given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups.” The Family Research Council, designated as a hate group by the SPLC for linking homosexuality to pedophilia and supporting the criminalization of same-sex relations, is now demanding restitution from the SPLC’s endowment.

The SPLC has long been a target of conservative ire, particularly for its designation of certain organizations as hate groups on its “Hate Map,” which charts extremist groups across the country. The Family Research Council and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, among other right-wing organizations, have bristled at the label, arguing that it unfairly equates them with more overtly violent organizations. In recent years, figures like Elon Musk have amplified criticisms of the organization, framing the SPLC as a partisan actor rather than a watchdog.

None of this is to say that the SPLC is above critique. It is a private nonprofit organization, not a government agency, and its decisions about classification and methodology are subject to debate. There are reasonable questions to be asked about transparency, accountability and the ethics of certain investigative techniques. But those questions are not what the indictment is about. This is not a good-faith effort to police the boundaries of nonprofit conduct. It is an attempt to delegitimize an entire category of work — and the irony is almost too neat. The Justice Department, founded in part to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan, is now attempting to destroy one of the organizations that has been most effective at doing exactly that, revealing the complete merger of the federal government with the political project of denying that white supremacy is a real and ongoing threat to American life.

Indeed, the Charlottesville rally did happen. Heather Heyer was killed and more than a dozen were injured when James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Dozens of rally participants were later held civilly liable. Many remain unconvinced that the Justice Department has stumbled onto some grand conspiracy. Richard Spencer, one of the central organizers of the event and the man credited with coining the term “alt-right,” looked at the indictment and essentially said it was too weak to hold. “I’m beginning to feel that the SPLC indictment is much more like the Epstein Binders than a real criminal case,” he said on X. Far-right podcaster and white supremacist Nick Fuentes decried claims that he worked with the SPLC. (Fuentes has been the target of what is known in far-right circles as “fed-jacketing,” the practice of accusing rivals of being government informants. It is a paranoid reflex that turns any hint of infiltration into proof of betrayal. He blamed “a new wave of attacks against me from WashPo, Atlantic, ADL, now the MAGA Crowd.”)

This is the paradox at the heart of the current moment. The people who know the movement best — who built it, marched in it and went to prison for it — are telling MAGA media that they’re wrong. And MAGA media doesn’t care.

The broader right-wing ecosystem has spent years cultivating a worldview in which nothing is as it seems, in which every inconvenient fact can be waved away as staged or manipulated. But that worldview has consequences. It does not stop neatly at the boundaries of partisan convenience. When taken seriously, it begins to eat its own. If the Charlottesville rally was a false flag, what does that say about the people who organized it? If extremist groups are merely props in a liberal morality play, what does that make the influencers who built their brands around them? While darkly amusing, this is genuinely dangerous; movements that believe themselves to be comprehensively infiltrated tend to radicalize further and faster.

Consider the Trump administration’s recent moves. It moved to vacate the convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers found guilty of seditious conspiracy. It promoted a Pentagon official who joked about wearing a Klan hood. The president pardoned the January 6 rioters. 

This is not a series of unrelated decisions. 

If the indictment against the SPLC is dismissed — as multiple former prosecutors suggest it likely will be — the administration will not acknowledge failure. It will claim that weaponized courts and a deep state are protecting their own. The Charlottesville false flag narrative will survive regardless of what a federal judge says, because it was never meant to survive a trial.

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