The ‘anti-extremism’ movement has always been a con

Every now and then, there’s a news event that feels simultaneously insane and entirely logical. The stink swirling around the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is just such an event. At first blush, the suggestion that the centre has been ‘fund[ing] the extremism that it claimed to be fighting’ seems wild. But then it hits you – such duplicitous antics, if true, would be wholly in keeping with an activist class that continually inflates the far-right threat in order to make itself feel purposeful and virtuous.

The allegations are startling. The SPLC is an American civil-rights outfit famous for tracking extremist organisations. Now it stands accused of pumping cash into those organisations. It was indicted yesterday on federal charges of fraud. The US Department of Justice alleges that the centre improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and neglected to tell its donors what it was up to.

Millions of dollars were allegedly funnelled into groups like the KKK and the National Socialist Party of America. The SPLC ‘paid members of these extremist groups’, said the acting US attorney general Todd Blanche yesterday. To that end, he says, it was doing ‘the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing – not dismantling extremism but funding it’. One envisions wealthy liberals switching on NPR in their Tribeca pads only to discover that their charitable bucks may have ended up in the pocket of a lowlife in a white hood.

The possibility that the turbo-smug coastal elites were unwittingly giving money to literal Nazis is almost too good to be true. These are people who look down on the ‘rednecks’ who voted for Trump as dim minions of the new fascism. Yet it’s now alleged that one of their own beloved organisations pumped $3million into groups with names like Aryan Nations. I don’t know much about Aryan Nations but it doesn’t sound nice.

The SPLC denies the charges. It says it will ‘not be intimidated’ by the Trump administration. It’s worth noting that there’s little love lost between Trumpists and the SPLC. The centre started life as a civil-rights law practice in 1971 before morphing into a huge outfit that keeps tabs on extremism across America. Some on the right accuse it of targeting not only genuine loons but also normal groups, like Turning Point USA. It is ‘liberal’ intolerance made flesh, they say, with its tendency to treat everyone to the right of David French as an Adolf-in-waiting. It’s a ‘partisan smear machine’, says FBI director Kash Patel.

Hopefully the truth will out as the fraud case progresses. But I’m interested in what this simmering scandal tells us about bourgeois activism right now. The possibility that the SPLC is Jussie Smollett on steroids requires analysis. He’s the actor who falsely claimed to have been roughed up by a pair of racists yelling ‘This is MAGA country!’. Is the SPLC the institutional version of such vain self-delusion, blowing up the threat of extremism in order to fatten both its bank balance and its sense of virtue?

If it’s true the SPLC ‘funded extremism’, that would only be a monetary expression of what has for a long time been its core mission – namely, threat inflation. For years now, the centre has promiscuously expanded the definition of extremism, lumping in normies with Nazis. It maintains a ‘hate map’, showing all the nutters in America, which apparently includes not only Sieg Heiling ‘Aryan’ freaks but also Christians who aren’t fond of gay marriage.

Just four months before Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September last year, the SPLC branded him and Turning Point USA as ‘hard-right’ promoters of ‘hate’. It has also designated the Alliance Defending Freedom a ‘hate group’. Anyone who has ever met those Christian folk will know how ludicrous this is. Even Moms for Liberty, which doesn’t want schoolkids to be taught ‘critical race theory’ or that there are 72 genders, has found itself on the SPLC’s map of hate. If it’s extremist to oppose telling seven-year-olds that people with dicks are women and people with white skin are privileged, I guess I’m an extremist.

The aim of such extremism-mongering is transparent. It’s about criminalising moral opinions that the credentialled classes find offensive. And it’s about keeping groups like the SPLC flushed with cash and busy with cases. It’s a job-creation scheme for the do-gooding classes. If the SPLC ‘funnelled millions’ into extremist groups, that would perversely be in keeping with its demented mission to keep the ‘hate’ bandwagon rolling.

Groups like the SPLC don’t only inflate the far-right threat. They also deflect from one of the true extremist scourges of our time – Islamism. The SPLC has long had a blind spot on Islamist extremism. Worse, it has branded those who oppose Islamism as ‘extremists’. A few years ago it drew up a ‘Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists’, which included the mighty Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This is a black immigrant woman who has stirringly made the case for liberal values against the despotism and misogyny of Islamism, and who has been threatened with death for doing so. Yet in the Kafkaesque hellscape that passes for ‘activism’, it is she who is a ‘propagandist’ whose ‘damaging misinformation’ is a menace to public life. This is moral inversion at its most despicable.

We have the same problem in the UK: ‘anti-extremists’ who are wilfully blind to Islamist extremism. On Saturday, as yet another Jew-hater was prepping a petrol bomb to hurl at a London synagogue, the Guardian published a long-read on the ‘return of fascism’ illustrated with white working-class men waving England flags. Islamists are firebombing synagogues. They killed Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. They’ve massacred children at a pop concert. They’re on our streets calling for more violence against the Jewish State. And yet ‘the virtuous’ myopically fret over the white far right. From the Guardian to the SPLC, the preening activist classes inflate fantasy threats and downplay real ones, to ensure that nothing as pesky as the truth will meddle with their narcissistic crusading. Now that’s dangerous.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.