The term “Orwellian” is liberally tossed around as people attempt to explain the proclamations, Executive Orders, and actions of the second Trump administration. The entire nation was provided an Orwellian lesson immediately after the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, when administration officials labelled the victims, without providing any evidence whatsoever, as domestic terrorists. Not satisfied with that, the Department of Justice then declined to cooperate with state agencies in an investigation of the killings.
On Tuesday, April 21, the Department of Justice announced that a grand jury in Alabama had returned an 11-count indictment against the storied Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that has dedicated 55 years to combatting racial injustice in the South and in more broadly countering racial hatred, bigotry, and discrimination across the country. The Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi groups, along with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have been targets of SPLC litigation or education campaigns. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys, declared that the SPLC was manufacturing racism to justify its existence.
Take a moment to think about this assertion. The fact that over the years, the SPLC used donor money to infiltrate the KKK, garnering information that the SPLC frequently shared with the FBI and local authorities, is turned on its head and rendered as material support for the KKK!
As I read various reports about the indictment, I thought of a chapter, “The Law Becomes A Man,” in The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s seminal book about Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union. During the height of the purges, Soviet prosecutors crafted laws that could be used to criminalize the most innocuous behavior; under the infamous Article 58, almost anything — action or even inaction — could be construed as hostile to the state.
Writing on April 23 in The New Republic, Matt Ford noted that accusing the SPLC of manufacturing racism “is akin to claiming that anti-abortion groups are secretly funding abortion clinics or that the Sierra Club was buying oil and gas leases in Texas. Blaming white nationalist violence on the groups that oppose it may have been the entire point.” As with other recent DOJ indictments, this one may rest on dubious legal grounds, but even if the entire indictment fails, the message to every civil society group in the country is crystal clear: You could be next. The SPLC likely has the resources to defend itself; other groups may not be so positioned.
The United States Department of Justice was created during the Reconstruction era by President Ulysses S. Grant for the express purpose of combating the KKK, and ensuring that the civil rights of formerly enslaved Americans were protected. Although the new federal department was often unpopular, Grant’s administration went after the KKK vigorously, arresting and charging far more Klansmen than it had the capacity to prosecute.
What a long, strange trip it has been. The people’s legal arm, the Department of Justice, is siding with the KKK. We have tumbled through the looking glass.
