The Justice Department’s recent wrongful indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for using paid informants to gather intelligence about violent extremist groups—a tactic routinely employed by the FBI—was widely recognized as a transparently corrupt political attack.
By targeting a nonprofit group with a long record of defending civil rights and criticizing right-wing peddlers of hate and misinformation, the Trump DOJ signaled the lengths to which this regime will go to try to intimidate and silence its critics. House Republicans have now moved to amplify those smears with a hearing featuring right-wing leaders who have tried for years to squelch the SPLC’s work.
The two announced Republican witnesses scheduled to speak at Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee charging the SPLC with “manufacturing hate” have records of hostility toward the SPLC.
Tyler O’Neil is senior editor of The Daily Signal, which was the Heritage Foundation’s news and commentary platform until it went independent in 2024 while pledging “to continue to adhere to the same conservative principles that have guided our journalism for the past 10 years.” O’Neil wrote a 2023 book attacking the SPLC. In previous congressional testimony deriding the SPLC, he used “air quotes” around “domestic terrorism threat,” previewing recent propaganda that the indictment somehow proves that racism and violent right-wing extremism are not real. Not surprisingly, O’Neil’s coverage of the recent indictment reads as cheerleading for the DOJ. The Washington Blade has also called attention to his stridently anti-LGBTQ record.
Carol Swain is a former law professor who has made what Right Wing Watch called in 2017 “a long, strange journey from respected academic to culture-war propagandist.” More information about Swain:
Right Wing Watch noted that Swain employs inflammatory language about immigration, Muslims and other culture war topics. Swain, for example, told a right-wing publication that President Barack Obama “did everything to start a race war.” In 2024, after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Swain lamented that "for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my nation."
Swain has apparently nursed a grudge against the Southern Poverty Law Center since a former staffer called her an “apologist” for a white supremacist after she praised a documentary made by a filmmaker who SPLC said had regularly referred to black men as “EVIL monkeys who are DESTROYING” America.
Swain narrated a 2017 Prager U propaganda video portraying the Republican Party’s well-documented racial “Southern Strategy” as a myth, a video Candace Owens later cited when challenged on her own claims that the Southern Strategy “never happened.” That year RWW noted, “Carol Swain claims that the GOP's ‘Southern Strategy’ had nothing to do with race. History begs to differ.”
Swain slammed Black Lives Matter but defended people who questioned President Obama’s faith and citizenship. She suggested that natural disasters could be divine punishment for rejecting “biblical injunctions against abortion, greed, homosexuality, fornication, and adultery.”
Back in 2017 and 2018, during one of the organized right-wing campaigns against the SPLC, Swain claimed it had “declared itself an enemy of Christians loyal to biblical teaching, and it fights a no-holds-barred propaganda war against them.” Speaking at Family Research Council (FRC) in 2017, she called liberal churches “agents of Marxism” that have “hijacked the civil rights movement.” She told the FRC audience, “We are at war.”
Honorable Mention to Rep. Harriet Hageman
It’s noteworthy that one Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Harriet Hageman, responded to the indictment by telling FRC head Tony Perkins and viewers of his Washington Watch program that SPLC staffers should be “thrown in jail for life.” At a time when racism, white nationalism, and antisemitism are raging on the far-right, Hageman has insisted that racism on the right does not exist.
As Right Wing Watch has reported, the claims from far-right figures that the SPLC indictment proves that racism is not real or that the SPLC organized the deadly white supremacist event in Charlottesville, Virginia, are so ridiculous that they have been debunked by the actual white nationalists who are proud of having organized it.
