The SPLC indictment rewrites the history of the Trump era

As you’ve no doubt heard, the Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud — specifically, for secretly paying leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups with donor money while publicly billing itself as the nation’s foremost watchdog against extremism.

Alarmingly, the indictment alleges that one of the SPLC’s paid informants was a member of the leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The infamous rally saw neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and militias come together in an open display of organized right-wing extremism, becoming a national inflection point early in President Donald Trump‘s first term. Its aftershocks shaped the decade of politics that followed: Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” remark — later debunked as a mischaracterization despite his explicit condemnation of neo-Nazis and white nationalists — became a weapon his critics wielded for years. Joe Biden cited