When the Trump administration unveiled its politically motivated indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the organization of "manufacturing racism to justify its existence."
While the indictment merely alleges that the SPLC committed financial crimes by making payments to informants working in various extremist groups, Blanche's inflammatory framing was designed to create the impression that the well-documented racism, sexism, and antisemitic extremism within the right-wing movement doesn't actually exist.
The SPLC had long drawn the ire of conservatives who are now eager to use the indictment to discredit the SPLC and its decades of work tracking and exposing right-wing extremism and, by extension, whitewash the movement's long history of extremism. .
This is leading to absurd situations where racist, antisemitic, and deeply misogynistic theocratic fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is using the indictment as evidence that "America does not have a racist problem."
"It's so clear that America does not have a racist problem, at least in terms of like pure, baseless, mindless hatred towards minority people," Webbon said on his program last Friday.
"If America really was racist against brown people, black people, whatever, there wouldn't be much money to be made," Webbon claimed. "It wouldn't be lucrative. They wouldn't be doing it. They're only doing it because it's not real."
"There's a lot of money to be made in slaying dragons or pretending to slay dragons that have already been slain," he continued. "Either the dragon doesn't exist at all, and that's why it's lucrative, or—I'm just going to throw this out there—the dragon's actually good and it's actually the king who's commissioned the knights and they're actually the bad guys. This whole witch hunt for white supremacists who hate brown people simply because they're brown, the reason why that's so lucrative and there are NGOs with millions and millions of dollars for that is because the white people in America are predominantly, on the whole, not racist. White people in America are, if anything, I think, too trusting, too gullible, toxic empathy. White people in America are like, 'You know what? I know that this will kill my grandchildren, but can we just import half of the country of Haiti, just to be nice?' So not only is racism non-existent, if anything, we could probably use a little bit more racism in America."
As amply demonstrated by this very video, Webbon himself is proof that racism in America is very real, and this is just the latest a long line of examples from him.
In 2024, Webbon declared that if he were facing the choice between seeing to a black doctor or a white doctor, he's chose the white doctor because "if there’s a chance that one of them was not qualified, and was given a free pass, it’d be the black guy."
When faced with a choice between going to a Black doctor or a White doctor, Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon chose the White doctor because "if there’s a chance that one of them was not qualified, and was given a free pass, it’d be the Black guy." https://t.co/k3ooVKLHYL pic.twitter.com/xTrRhlXeP8
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 23, 2024
In 2025, Webbon told black people to "stop whining" about the oppression they have suffered throughout American history because "it's your fault."
That same year, Webbon urged white parents to have "the talk" with their children about avoiding black people.
In 2026, he said that he would discourage his daughter from marrying a moral, godly, upstanding Christian black man because "I would prefer for my grandchildren to look like me."
Shortly after that, Webbon proclaimed that it is fair to generalize that all black people are impulsive and lazy.
