SPLC Instrumental in Crack-Down on San Diego’s KKK in Eighties
By JW August / Special to OB Rag
The United States Department of Justice has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Mobile, Alabama based civil rights organization has a historically important tie to San Diego, the birthplace of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), forerunners of current day white supremacists. Additionally, the San Diego region has a long history of Ku Klux Klan activity, at one time serving as the base of operations for the Imperial Wizard of California.
President Trump’s Acting Attorney Todd Blanche said the indictment is to address long simmering issues. Some media reports believe the ‘simmering issues’ were generated by conservative Trump supporters. And an angry president.
In San Diego, the U.S. DOJ’s office apparently is out of the anti-hate business. The office has bailed from the San Diego Anti-Hate Crime Coalition which they have co-chaired for years with a DOJ civil rights attorney. They had no representative at a recent meeting and the agenda for an upcoming meeting says the co-chair is now the city attorney office. Neither the district attorney nor the local DOJ office would comment about the no show.
The OB Rag spoke with local attorney James McElroy about the claims made against the SPLC. McElroy worked with the SPLC for decades, he is a former board president for the organization and a career civil rights attorney. He can’t talk about the recent indictment but says the SPLC has a commendable track record, casting light into the “darkness of hate crimes” and domestic terrorism.
Blanche on the other hand said the SPLC – one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups – has been “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” The acting attorney general laid out his line in the sand, with a warning to the SPLC “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”
SPLC’s CEO Bryan Fair said he is “outraged by the false allegations” and suggested this indictment is a cover for a political attack on the Center. He had a revelation Friday morning when Trump, on his media platform said, “The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others.”
It was the SPLC criticism of Trump in de-funding hate crime efforts, that would lead the FBI Director to attack the organization two days later,
Here is how the New York Time’s sees it:
“The criminal probe and indictment of the SPLC appears to mark yet another escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on ideologies or groups that oppose far-right extremism.”
A review of the 18 page indictment exposes a sink hole in the government’s argument — do they have victims? Even to a non-lawyer, it appears they are making a massive assumption that donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center will be angry and upset to learn that their money paid informants to expose racial hatred of extremist groups. If the government does have angry victims to testify, one would hope the public would be allowed to confirm their complaints.
There is a timeline to the latest Trump mind meld, beginning when the SPLC’s criticized Trump for de-funding hate crime efforts. Two days after the accusations FBI Director Kash Patel said the SPLC was a “partisan smear machine” and severed ties with the organization. Then would come the indictment against the SPLC.
It’s common knowledge in law enforcement and the media that SPLC has had a long time working relationships with enforcement agencies on monitoring in-country terrorism and hate groups.
One group labeled extremist is a favorite of conservatives, Mom’s for Liberty. It’s used as an example of the SPLC targeting legitimate conservative causes. In the January report from the OB Rag – San Diego and the Trump Effect, a senior investigator/researcher for the SPLC, Rachel Carroll Rivas, had the history of local hate groups and one was Mom’s for Liberty, which recruited under the banner of “parental rights”. Said Rivas in the story:
“It has been at the forefront of efforts for book banning, countering inclusive student organizations, inclusive curriculum, the teaching of accurate history about slavery, colonialism, and the impacts on indigenous people.”
There has always been risk involved in exposing hate groups, says McElroy “because we were dealing with dangerous people who were very unhappy about what we were doing because what we were doing was effective.”
McElroy knows this from personal experience, he was part of the winning SPLC legal team involved in a civil court action to make Fallbrook’s Neo-Nazi and Grand Wizard of the California Ku Klux Klan Tom Metzger. The law used had been on the books for years but this was a first, where the court found the employer was responsible for the acts of his employees.
In this case the employees were skinheads from his organization, responsible for a brutal racist murder. The civil rights attorney continues, “he was kind of a pied piper for this new phenomenon, at least new in the United States; which were the skinheads.” He explains the skinheads “were his radical foot soldiers, as he put it, that would do the battle in the streets.” The SPLC sued on behalf of the family of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian graduate student. Metzger’s organization took a $12.5 million hit. McElroy says he”had to go to court after we got the verdict to collect the judgment. And I got money from Metzger for 20 years”
This was in 1988, the name of the Metzger creation would become synonymous with “white supremacy movement, the White Aryan Resistance (WAR). They would become the template for racist hate groups that followed, including President Trump’s strong supporters. The Patriot Boys.
