Bravery Has a Name: The SPLC

Bryan Fair, the bravery of telling the truth under oath, and the price of refusing to look away

^{Photo: Left to Right: Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, SPLC; Dr. Alveda King, Chair of the American Dream, America First Policy Institute; Mr. Ryan Bangert, Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Special Counsel to the President, Alliance Defending Freedom; Ms. Mary McCord Executive Director, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy Protection; Visiting Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Photo Credit: Juan Proaño.}

Today I Witnessed True Bravery

Three weeks ago, I sat in the Rayburn House Office Building and watched the House Judiciary Committee put the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on trial without a courtroom. I wrote then that We Are All SPLC Now. Today I went back, and I am here to tell you that I unequivocally stand by my initial statement.

That first hearing, on May 20, belonged to Maya Wiley. The president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the daughter of civil rights leaders, speaking for the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition, founded in 1950 and now more than 240 organizations strong, sat in the same chair Bryan Fair occupied today and testified honestly and without fear of reprisal. We are living through a coordinated attack on civil rights nonprofits, she testified, and it has unfolded in sequence: first the law firms that provide pro bono counsel to civil rights and civil liberties groups, then the foundations that fund the work, and now the organizations themselves, the ones that make sure voters can vote, children can learn their own history, and unions can protect workers. SPLC was chosen, in her words, “not because it is dangerous, but because it is effective.” And she distilled the absurdity of the committee’s entire premise into a single sentence I have thought about every day since: “The SPLC is far too busy fighting hate to manufacture it.”

Bryan Fair, a constitutional law professor who took a one-year leave from teaching to lead SPLC through the hardest chapter in its fifty-five-year history, sat at the witness table for a hearing the Majority titled “Manufacturing Hate, Part II.” Think about that title for a moment. Before a single question was asked, before he was permitted a word in his own defense, the committee had already printed its verdict on the hearing notice.

What I witnessed over the next four hours that followed was true bravery. Not the loud kind. The steady kind. Bryan sat under unrelenting attack from Chairman Jim Jordan and a procession of members who came not to learn but to perform, to twist facts, rewrite history, and turn a civil rights institution into a prop for a campaign performance. They interrupted him. They demanded answers to questions they knew he was legally barred from answering, then feigned outrage at his silence. They insinuated that the man whose organization bankrupted the United Klans of America was somehow in business with the Klan.

And through all of it, Bryan did not flinch. He did not raise his voice. He did not trade insult for insult. He answered what he could answer, declined what the courts require him to decline, and when the moment called for moral clarity, he delivered it without apology. He told the committee plainly that SPLC has never lost its north star: a fair and just society for every person.

I have spent my career around people who talk about values. Today I watched a man demonstrate them, with unquestionable morals, compassion, and a compass that did not waver under pressure most of us will never face. We should all learn from it. I believe we just witnessed a turning point in this fight.

This Is Not a Prosecution. It Is a Targeting.

Let us be honest about what is happening, because the facts speak with one voice.

On April 21, a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an eleven-count indictment against SPLC. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee injected itself into a pending criminal case, announcing hearings and subpoenas. When SPLC asked for the reasonable thing, a delay until the case is resolved so its leader could testify freely, the Majority refused. They wanted Bryan constrained. A witness who cannot answer is a witness who can be portrayed as evasive. That was the plan.

On May 26, SPLC’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive prosecution, political retaliation for the organization’s research on extremism and its criticism of this administration. That motion does not stand alone. It stands in a pattern that any honest observer can now recite from memory: the investigations of James Comey, of New York Attorney General Letitia James, of Federal Reserve officials, of universities, of law firms, of foundations. Congressman Jerry Nadler named that pattern out loud in today’s hearing, and he was right to.

And the courts are beginning to say it too. Earlier this year, a federal judge found that the Justice Department’s prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was driven by a vindictive motive, that the second-highest official at DOJ (at the time), Todd Blanche, and now the nominee for Attorney General, launched a criminal case to punish a man for winning a lawsuit against the government. That finding exists. It is on the record. So when SPLC tells a federal court that its indictment is retaliation dressed up as law enforcement, it is not speculating. It is describing a documented practice of this Department of Justice.

Ranking Member Raskin put the obscene contrast on the record in his opening statement, and I took careful note. This is the same Justice Department that “moved to vacate the convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy.” The same department behind what Raskin called a “$1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to turn January 6 foot soldiers into mega-millionaires.” The same department that staffed itself with figures like Jared Wise, “who urged rioters to kill police officers on January 6.” Sit with the full picture: an administration that pardoned more than 1,600 January 6 defendants, that is moving to enrich them with taxpayer money, has criminally indicted a civil rights organization for paying informants to report on violent extremists. The people who freed the seditious conspirators are prosecuting the people who track them. That is not law enforcement. That is the protection of a constituency.

I do not write this as an outside observer. LULAC knows this playbook because LULAC lived it. Thirty-Four days after this administration was sworn in, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into our organization. For eleven months, February 2025 to January 2026, we carried that weight while continuing our work. We are still here. But I will never forget what it felt like, and I will never pretend it was about justice. It was about pressure. What SPLC is enduring now is the same pressure, scaled up, with criminal exposure attached.

The objective was never hidden, and the lawyers and coalition defending SPLC has named it precisely: the administration does not need a conviction to win. It needs donors frightened, resources drained, and watchdogs muzzled. The indictment is the message. The hearing was the megaphone.

Fifty-Five Years on the Front Line

^{Phone: The four girls killed during the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Clockwise from top left: Addie Mae Collins (aged 14), Cynthia Wesley (aged 14), Carole Robertson (aged 14) and Denise McNair (aged 11). Photo Credit: Wikipedia}

To understand why this organization was chosen as the target, you have to understand what it SPLC actually done, because the history the committee tried to rewrite today is one of the proudest in American civil rights.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971, in the cradle of both the Confederacy and the Civil Rights Movement. When the United Klans of America, the same Klan organization whose violence murdered four little girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, terrorized Black families across the South, SPLC took them to court and sued them out of existence. That is not a metaphor. The largest Klan faction in America was dismantled not by a government agency, but by this nonprofit and its lawyers.

The work never stopped, and neither did the danger. SPLC’s headquarters was firebombed by Klansmen. Its founders appeared on assassination lists. Its staff have absorbed decades of death threats for the offense of telling the truth about organized hate. Bryan reminded the committee of all of this today, not as grievance, but as context: this organization knows political violence intimately, condemns it unequivocally, and has paid for its work in ways its congressional accusers never have.

And the work is not abstract. Bryan brought the proof into the hearing room. Sitting behind him was Tanya Gersh, a Jewish mother from Montana who was buried under a campaign of antisemitic terror by white nationalists, phone calls in which all she could hear was the sound of gunshots. SPLC stood with her and won a $14 million judgment against the neo-Nazi who orchestrated it. Beside her sat Karen Finn and her son Eron, a young man with autism who faced expulsion from school for behavior connected to his disability, until SPLC sued, and Eron graduated. That is who this organization fights for: the targeted, the disabled, the poor, the immigrant, the outcast. That is who the Majority spent this morning attacking.

For the communities LULAC serves, Latino families who know what it means to be scapegoated, surveilled, and threatened, SPLC’s research and litigation have been a shield for decades. When they tell you SPLC manufactures hate, remember who manufactured the bomb at 16th Street Baptist, and who shut down the organization that built it.

The Hypocrisy Was the Point

^{Photo: Rep. Brandon Gill (TX-26) holding photograph of Sec. Pete Hegseth, Department of War. Photo Credit: Juan Proaño.}

I want to walk through what the attacks actually looked like, because the double standards were not incidental to this hearing. They were its architecture.

Start with the committee itself. House Judiciary Republicans have spent years telling America that the gravest threat to liberty is the “weaponization of the federal government”, that prosecutions must never be political and that Congress must never put its thumb on the scale of justice. Today, that same committee used its power to amplify a pending federal prosecution of a civil rights organization that criticizes the President, after refusing to let the courts go first. They did not merely tolerate weaponization. They performed it, on camera, under their own banner.

Then there is the informant program. Members spent the morning insinuating that SPLC’s confidential informants inside hate groups amounted to “funding the Klan.” When Chairman Jordan demanded to know whether it was “all about the money,” Bryan’s answer was seven words: we did it to protect our staff and to protect the public. Pressed later by Congresswoman Hageman, he was just as plain: “We don’t fund the KKK.” Congressman Joe Neguse made it more clear by pointing out that the FBI itself has long collaborated with SPLC, even listing the organization as a partner. A North Carolina Democrat gave the indictment’s legal theory its proper name: an “Alice in Wonderland theory,” under which paying an informant to infiltrate an extremist group is treated as supporting it, even though, as she put it, “the FBI pays informants all the time.” And Mary McCord, who spent two decades at the Justice Department, including leading its National Security Division, confirmed under oath that paid informants are standard, longstanding practice in terrorism, trafficking, and child-exploitation prosecutions, and that informant-derived evidence routinely appears in federal indictments and trial testimony. If SPLC’s program is a crime, so is half of federal law enforcement.

And the program’s record is not theoretical. Maya Wiley testified three weeks ago that SPLC delivered a forty-five-page threat assessment to the FBI before the Unite the Right rally, warning of the violence to come, and at today’s hearing, Bryan confirmed it under oath, along with something more: intelligence from SPLC’s informants, shared with the FBI, helped prevent a planned 2019 attack on a synagogue and a gay bar in Las Vegas. It is in the public filings. Sit with that. The organization this committee accuses of fueling Charlottesville is the organization that tried to warn the government about Charlottesville, and the program it calls a fraud has saved countless of innocent lives. The technique becomes a crime, apparently, only when civil rights lawyers use it to protect the public.

Chairman Jordan’s signature insinuation, that it was all about the money, deserves forensic analysis, which I will get to shortly. But note the inversion: members of a political party whose leader has raised hundreds of millions of dollars stoking division and hate accused SPLC of fraud because Americans donated after a deadly white supremacist rally.

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett put the selective outrage in its starkest terms, more than three hours into the hearing, and the room went quiet when she did: “We’re so upset about Charlottesville all of a sudden, I’d be interested to know which one of you had something to say about Charlottesville when it happened, because your fearless leader said there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’” Then she named the other silence: the Oversight Committee has shut down hearings to avoid the Epstein files, “yet still no indictment of a single Epstein defendant, but we have one for SPLC.”

Another Democratic member distilled the entire enterprise into one unanswerable question: “Republicans haven’t had any of these [neo-Nazi] groups come before this committee to prove they’re not spreading hate. Where are those hearings?” Count it: two hearings for the watchdog. Zero for the watched. The committee charged with protecting Americans from extremism has subpoenaed the trackers of the Klan and never the Klan.

And then came the moment I will remember longest. Congressman Tiffany tried to corner Bryan over SPLC’s designation of Moms for Liberty, expecting a defensive crouch. Instead, Bryan, speaking as a father, turned the frame inside out: an organization claiming to champion parental rights is in fact overriding them, deciding for him and for millions of other parents that their children may not learn the full history of this country, including its history of hate. His closing line was three words long: that’s not liberty. It was the cleanest exchange of the day, and the Majority had no answer for it.

The lesson of the day: when your case requires this many double standards to stand up, you do not have a case. You have a campaign.

The Period in Question: What America Was Actually Living Through

^{Photo: Unite the Right Rally, Charlottesville. Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden flags. Photo Credit: Wikipedia.}

The indictment and the committee fixate on a window of time, 2016 through 2017, as if SPLC’s growth in those months were inexplicable absent fraud. So let us remember what that period actually was, for everyone, on every side.

Donald Trump was elected in November 2016 after a campaign that called Mexican immigrants rapists and promised a Muslim ban. Within days of his inauguration, the travel ban triggered chaos at airports and spontaneous mass protests. In August 2017, hundreds of torch-bearing white nationalists marched through Charlottesville chanting Nazi slogans, and one of them drove his car into a crowd and murdered Heather Heyer. The President responded that there were very fine people on both sides.

Americans across the political spectrum reacted to this era the way Americans always react to moments of perceived crisis: they organized, and they donated.

On the right, donors poured money into organizations warning that a radical left was seizing the culture, campus groups, legal foundations, think tanks promising to fight back. Conservative media built audiences on the threat of antifa and “the mob.” That mobilization was real, it was lucrative, and it was their right.

On the progressive and pro-democracy side, donors poured money into organizations promising to defend civil rights, civil liberties, immigrants, and the rule of law. The ACLU, voting rights groups, legal defense funds, and yes, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the country’s most recognized tracker of the white supremacist movement that had just marched openly through an American city.

Both responses were rational. Both were sincere. Both were protected by the First Amendment. People give money to causes when they are afraid for their country, and in 2017, nearly everyone, on every side, was afraid for the country for one reason or another. That is the context the committee erased today, because the context destroys the theory. SPLC’s donors were not deceived into believing organized hate was resurgent. They watched it on live television.

Follow the Money, All of It

Now to Chairman Jordan’s favorite number. Yes: SPLC’s contributions rose from roughly $51 million in 2016 to roughly $132 million in the fiscal year ending October 2017, about a 160 percent increase, in a fiscal year that contained both Trump’s election and Charlottesville. Apple’s CEO gave a million dollars. So did George Clooney’s foundation. JPMorgan gave half a million. These were not victims of a con. They were Americans responding to what they had just seen.

If a revenue surge in that period is evidence of “manufacturing” a threat, then the standard must apply to everyone. So apply it.

Turning Point USA, one of the conservative organizations whose hate-map designation Republicans spent these hearings protesting, took in $4.3 million in contributions in 2016. By fiscal 2022, its annual revenue was over $80 million: a 1,775% increase, averaging more than 50 percent growth every single year, raised on warnings about a leftist threat to America’s youth. Roughly half its money in one recent year came from just ten anonymous donors. Has the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Turning Point’s communications? Indicted it for elevating a threat to mislead donors? You know the answer.

The ACLU saw nearly $80 million in online contributions pour in after the 2016 election, including $24 million in a single weekend after the travel ban, and watched its membership double to 1.2 million. Same period. Same dynamic. Same fear-driven generosity, from the other side of the aisle’s perspective. No indictment, because there is nothing to indict. Crisis-responsive giving is not fraud. It is citizenship.

And then there is the President himself, the most prolific monetizer of legal crisis in American political history. Federal filings show that two of his best fundraising days of the entire 2024 campaign were the day of his New York arraignment and the day after his Georgia mugshot. The mugshot alone produced $4.18 million in twenty-four hours; within hours of leaving the Fulton County jail, his campaign was selling the booking photo on t-shirts, mugs, and posters, over $2.9 million in merchandise. After his conviction on thirty-four felony counts, his campaign reported $52.8 million in a single day.

Hold these facts side by side. A civil rights organization’s donations rose after a white supremacist murdered a woman in the street, and that, says Chairman Jordan, is fraud. The President’s donations spiked, by deliberate design, on each of his own indictments, and that, says the same party, is a movement. They built a business model on legal jeopardy and then criminalized a nonprofit for receiving donations after a tragedy. The hypocrisy is not a footnote to this story. It is the story.

Justice Runs Through a Courtroom, Not a Hearing Room

Here is something the Majority and I should be able to agree on, because they have said it themselves a thousand times: in America, guilt is decided by courts, not by Congress, and the accused are presumed innocent.

SPLC has pleaded not guilty. It has answered the indictment publicly and in its filings: it did not lie to its donors, and it did not fund hate groups, it infiltrated them, as law enforcement does, to expose and dismantle them. Its motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution is before a federal judge. A trial is tentatively set for October 5 in Montgomery, fittingly, the city where SPLC has been winning courtroom fights against organized hate for half a century.

And the government’s fraud theory has a hole at its center that Ranking Member Raskin exposed at the first hearing: not a single SPLC donor has come forward claiming to have been defrauded. Not one. Compare that to Trump University, the fraud case the President settled for $25 million after more than 8,000 plaintiffs joined the litigation. Real fraud produces real victims who say so. This indictment has produced press releases.

That courtroom is where this belongs. SPLC deserves what every American deserves and what this administration demands so loudly for its own allies: the opportunity to confront the evidence, cross-examine the accusers, and lay out its defense before a neutral judge under rules that do not permit five-minute speeches disguised as questions. Bryan could not fully answer the committee today because the law and his lawyers forbid it, a constraint the Majority deliberately engineered and then exploited. In court, there will be no such trap. The full record of SPLC’s work, honestly examined, will stand on its own. I said that in April. After watching Bryan testify, I believe it more today.

Until then, every hearing, every subpoena, every attempt to pressure the financial institutions that handle SPLC’s donations, pressure serious enough that Representatives Maxine Waters and Jamie Raskin formally warned Fidelity, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab not to restrict their customers’ giving, should be seen for what it is: an attempt to win outside the courtroom a case the government may well fear losing inside one.

We Are Still All SPLC

^{Photo: From Left to Right: Juan Proaño, CEO, LULAC; Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, SPLC; Maya Wiley, President and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Virginia Case Solomon, CEO, Common Cause; and Meredith Sumpter, President and CEO, Fair Vote.}

When Bryan closed his testimony, he reached for Fannie Lou Hamer: nobody’s free until everybody’s free. He chose those words knowing exactly where he was sitting, in a committee room of a Congress where some members would rewrite the history Mrs. Hamer bled for, facing an indictment from a Justice Department whose own conduct is under judicial scrutiny, just weeks before he returns to the classroom to teach the Constitution he had spent the morning defending.

That is what bravery looked like today. Not defiance for its own sake. Fidelity, to the truth, to the law, to the people sitting behind him whose lives his organization changed, and to a fifty-five-year-old promise that hate in America will be named, tracked, and confronted no matter who finds it inconvenient.

Three weeks ago I wrote that We Are All SPLC Now. Today I watched a brave man carrying that burden on his shoulders so we won’t have to. LULAC’s 575,000 members stand with Bryan and SPLC. We stand with the professional staff at SPLC who keep doing this work under threat. We stand with Tanya Gersh and with Eron Finn and with every person who has ever needed someone unafraid to take the haters to court. We have been investigated by this Justice Department ourselves, and we are still here, still loud, and still unafraid.

They believe that if they can break the Southern Poverty Law Center, the rest of us will fall quietly in line. They have made a serious miscalculation. The civil rights community has survived firebombs, assassination lists, and a hundred years of men in powerful rooms insisting that the real problem is the people fighting hate rather than the hate itself. We outlasted all of them.

We will outlast this too. See you in Montgomery.