The Department of Justice secured a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week, expanding on the original charges against an organization that spent decades positioning itself as the nation’s foremost tracker of hate groups while, according to federal prosecutors, actively financing them.
David Harsanyi, senior writer for the Washington Examiner, co-host of the You’re Wrong podcast, and author of The Rise of Bluanon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the indictment and weigh in on the Graham Planer Senate race and the media industry’s reaction to Scott Pelley’s departure from 60 Minutes.
The superseding indictment details a pattern of payments to individuals operating under aliases who were directed to attend and host extremist rallies, grow and create chapters of hate organizations, recruit members, purchase cross-burning materials, and create racist paraphernalia, with the SPLC setting up fictitious entities to funnel the money. Among the specific payments detailed: $1.2 million to an individual identified as F9 who was in a romantic relationship with an SPLC employee and raised funds for a white nationalist organization; more than $70,000 to a Nazi, KKK, and Aryan Nations leader identified as F-30, who had actually asked the SPLC to help them leave the movement and instead was paid a salary to stay and continue hosting extremist rallies and recruiting members; $155,000 to the former chairman of the neo-Nazi National Alliance; and $350,000 to an officer of the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
Harsanyi said the SPLC played a long-running game that many on the left have used for decades, which is to take a genuinely odious organization like the KKK and place it on the same hate map directly next to a completely innocuous group like Moms for Liberty, conflating the two in ways that get picked up by corporate media and used to deny legitimate conservative organizations access to philanthropic funding, corporate partnerships, and public platforms. He said the indictment reveals this was not merely a cynical classification scheme but an active financial operation, and that the whole enterprise makes perfect sense once you understand the underlying incentive structure: to keep the fundraising flowing you have to keep the hate going, which means you need hate groups to exist and thrive.
On the Graham Planer situation in the Senate race, Harsanyi said Democrats will not turn on one of their own when there is a real electoral price to pay, and pointed to a pattern that includes Eric Swalwell, a Texas congresswoman who called for sending Zionists to concentration camps, and now a New Jersey congressional candidate with documented ties to an al-Qaeda front organization who is being almost entirely ignored by the mainstream press, in a district just miles from Ground Zero, more than twenty years after September 11th. He said the Scott Galloway argument that voters should apply the firefighter standard, meaning you do not ask about a firefighter’s personal history when your house is burning, is both pompous and self-defeating. He noted that the entire Never Trump movement was predicated on exactly the opposite argument, that personal character and decency are disqualifying factors for office. He said an SS tattoo that someone kept for twenty years and only began covering up when running for Senate is not a problematic DM. It is an ideological position.
On Scott Pelley’s departure from 60 Minutes following his refusal to accept the editorial oversight of new CBS News director Bari Weiss, Harsanyi said the media class reaction reveals how completely these institutions have been captured as political operations rather than journalistic ones. He said Weiss is not a conservative firebrand but a left-center centrist who simply does not endorse the full program, and the inability of people like Pelley to work under anyone who might bring even modest balance to the operation shows that these institutions are foundational political infrastructure for the left, not news organizations that happen to have a perspective. He traced 60 Minutes’ decline to the Dan Rather attempted takedown of George W. Bush and said it has been a downhill slide since, noting that the same program edited Kamala Harris’s interview answers to make them sound coherent, which he said required a considerable amount of work.