The SPLC's New Direction
A lot of conservatives are failing to notice some major changes at the SPLC
There are some big changes in the counter-extremism world going on, and a lot of people are operating with outdated assumptions. The biggest change is that today we are seeing several successful prosecutions for seditious conspiracy, a charge that used to be exceedingly rare.
There are two things I think we should pay attention to at the Southern Poverty Law Center as well: first is their interest in the informant problem, something the SPLC never used to concern itself with. They hired Jason Wilson, whose excellent reporting on The Base for The Guardian strongly implied that group was some kind of operation under the supervision of the feds. And in their work on Alex Jones, they’re discussing the FBI informant problem in relation to Millennial Matt and Nick Fuentes.
The second interesting wrinkle is they went after the New York Young Republican Club, which is a place where far-right guys and the pro-Israel crowd intersect. These two things seem to point to a significant new direction for the SPLC’s reporting: they’re still lefties and they still have beef with the Christian right, but they’re operating in a different way.
In the past the SPLC was a recipient of significant funds from Bernie Madoff’s fraud via the Picower Foundation, a fact noticed by most of their right-of-center critics. That’s where their thinking stops, though: the SPLC took money tied to a huge financial criminal. But what does this fact really imply? Madoff was a fixture of mainstream Zionism—he had an affair with the CFO of Hadassah.
In the aftermath of the Morris Dees scandal several years ago, people with names like Cohen, Brownstein, and Potok moved out, and people with names like Nelson, Wilson, and Douglas moved in. The new president and CEO came from Amnesty International, an organization known to be at odds with the Israeli government—she has called Israel a human rights violator herself. I’m not saying it was turned, I’m saying this is what it looks like when an organization is turned.
The same applies to the SPLC as applies to a lot of these #MeToo scandals. Feminism and women’s rights is the pretext—the subtext is cleaning out corrupt networks.
It’s a timely adjustment on the SPLC’s part, because there’s a bull market on the right at the moment for what you might call kosher white nationalism—which is to say, far-right influencers who never criticize Israel and counter-signal against doing so. Lots of anons do this. They’ll say the Palestinian cause is “left-coded” or that Israel is an ethnostate therefore they have common ground—"ethnostate envy” is a very real thing.
This is a change from the mid-2000s, when George Michael’s book on the convergence between white nationalists and militant Islam was published. The Islamophobia industry was in full swing back then, and the links he documents were never much more substantive than a handful of nutjobs visiting Tehran or reciting the Shahadah, but it was a great argument for frightening people, like something out of a pulp novel—the klan is in league with al Qaeda!
This shift by the SPLC probably makes it more difficult for other counter-extremism organizations like the ADL to do agent provocateur stuff, a phenomenon for which there is documented evidence in the case of James Mitchell Rosenberg. I’ve already written about him in Jacobite, perhaps we’ll revisit it, but my read as a general matter is that the Israeli state has long seen uses for far-right people: they can scare liberal Jews into sympathy with the Israeli government, or into cutting checks. As Israel becomes much more right-wing itself, there is an increasing ideological harmony between these two camps as well.
I’ve noticed a few Antifa groups putting out statements enjoining far-right guys to leave their groups, give an account of what they’ve done, and promising not to harm anyone who’s done this. That’s good. These people have to be given an out, because if they don’t have one, they can easily get controlled by foreign actors. Giving people outs is an important part of deradicalization that’s hard to implement in the age of social media, where it’s easy to brand people with scarlet letters.
Update: Ken Silva makes a good point.
Another great piece thanks.