From the moment the Trump administration unveiled its politically motivated indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center last month, nearly the entire conservative movement mobilized to accuse the organization of, in the words of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, "manufacturing racism to justify its existence."
Desperate to deny that their movement is filled with racist, sexist, and antisemitic extremists, conservatives immediately began to insist that any such behavior was actually funded and organized by the SPLC, despite the fact that racist, sexist, and antisemitic right-wing extremists themselves acknowledge that this new narrative "doesn't make sense."
Rep. Harriet Hageman has been among the most vocal of the SPLC's critics and has steadfastly used the indictment to gaslight the nation about the organization. This was on full display during an interview she did recently with Winston Marshall, a former member of the band Mumford & Sons who now runs his own right-wing podcast.
"The Aryan Nation, the Nazis, and the KKK are not far-right organizations," Hageman told Marshall. "Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So, I'm going to say they've never been associated with the right, they've always been associated with the left."
Hageman's claim that the Aryan Nation, Nazis, and KKK are far-left organizations is absurd, but it laid the groundwork for her attack on the SPLC.
While the DOJ's indictment merely alleges that one SPLC informant was part of an "online leadership chat group" that helped plan the deadly 2017 "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA, Hageman baselessly insisted that the entire rally was orchestrated and paid for by the SPLC.
"The rally in Charlottesville in 2017, that was funded and organized by SPLC," Hageman claimed. "They paid the guy who did that $270,000.
"It was this SPLC that organized, provided transportation for, and paid the person who did it $270,000," she continued. "I don't call that infiltration, I call that being actively involved in the organization."
When Marshall pointed out that hundreds of people participated in the Unite The Right rally—a large group of whom chanted "Jews will not replace us"—and they couldn't all have been SPLC operatives, Hagemen replied, "I don't know that."
"None of us believe that stuff," Hageman insisted. "None of us believe in racism. None of us believe that you are inferior because of the color of your skin or where you come from or that you are a female or that you are a foreigner. None of us believe that."
"Do I think that there are racists out there? I do," she continued. "I'm not saying that that doesn't exist, but it doesn't exist, number one, on the right and number two it does not exist at the level that they want everybody to believe."
If Hageman doesn't believe that the right-wing movement is riddled with racists, sexists, and antisemities, she ought to take a look at our archive of clips some day.
