‘The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.…’ (via NPR) 

For some time, the Southern Poverty Law Center had slipped down my own charity priority list. Not because its mission had become less important, but because it had become exceptionally well funded. When an organization is sitting on very large assets, the case for my marginal dollar is weaker than it is for leaner groups doing urgent work with far less cushion. That calculation may now need revision.

I have no interest in pretending to know the ultimate legal merits before this case is litigated. But I do know this: when the Trump administration, with its long record of contempt for independent watchdogs, civil-rights enforcement, and any institution unwilling to bow to its politics, turns federal power on one of the country’s best-known civil-rights organizations, the issue is no longer just ordinary charity triage. It becomes a test of whether civil society will be cowed.

This is not a plea on the ground that SPLC is suddenly destitute. It is not. By its own recent audited financial statements, it remains extraordinarily well capitalized. That matters. I am not asking anyone to suspend judgment or ignore the fact that SPLC has resources most nonprofits can only dream of.

But that is not the point. Trumpism does not need its targets to be poor in order to damage them. It needs only to make resistance expensive, exhausting, and politically fraught. An indictment of this kind can impose heavy costs even on a wealthy organization: legal expense, management distraction, donor intimidation, reputational damage, chilled partnerships, and the diversion of time and money away from substantive work. A movement that thrives on bullying institutions into silence counts on precisely this kind of secondary effect. It counts on people deciding that support has become too controversial, too messy, or too embarrassing.

That is exactly when support matters.

You do not have to believe that SPLC is perfect. I do not. You do not have to believe that every judgment it has made over the years has been wise. I certainly do not. The relevant question is whether organizations that monitor violent extremism, litigate for civil rights, and challenge abuses of power should be left to fight alone when a vindictive administration puts them in its sights. The Trump movement has made clear, over and over, that it regards independent institutions not as legitimate participants in democratic life but as enemies to be weakened, discredited, and, where possible, crushed.

For me, the answer is no.

So my view has shifted. SPLC once seemed to me a less urgent destination for charitable dollars because it was flush. Now, despite that wealth, supporting it has become more compelling as an act of civic and political resistance. Not because it is poor, but because it is under attack; not because it lacks reserves, but because it is being made to spend them defending its right to function; not because every criticism of it is baseless, but because the larger Trumpist project is plainly to isolate and punish adversarial civil-society organizations one by one until fewer and fewer remain willing to oppose it.

If you are inclined to give, give with clear eyes. Do it knowing that SPLC is not a shoestring operation. Do it because you think institutions like this should not be politically terrorized into passivity. Do it because a democracy cannot remain healthy when an authoritarian movement uses the machinery of the state to harass its critics and make examples of its opponents. Do it because one way to answer that kind of politics is to refuse the intimidation and support the people and institutions it is trying to break.