The Dictatorship

What the DOJ’s Southern Poverty Law Center indictment is really about

Published

2 months ago

April 23, 2026

Apr. 22, 2026, 7:53 PM EDT

ByMichael Edison Hayden

As one of the most high-profile employees of the Southern Poverty Law Center for five years — and as someone who has been outspokenly critical of the organization — I never once heard of the program that allegedly involved paying sources within the Ku Klux Klan, National Alliance and Aryan Nations until the Justice Department published its indictment this week.

What I did hear, frequently, was people in the MAGA movement saying we were some kind of criminal syndicate — part of a sustained propaganda effort to delegitimize the work we did tracking and labeling extremist groups.

Although I find the notion of paying extremists distasteful, even unethical, the indictment feels like the culmination of years of pro-Trump activists consuming and amplifying that kind of propaganda. And, the SPLC, for its part, has called these charges “false allegations.”

One quote from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s press conference about the charges against the SPLC stood out to me as particularly absurd:

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” he said on Tuesday afternoon.

Imagine, for a moment, believing the SPLC — or any other civil rights organization — needed to fraudulently manufacture racism to sell it in today’s America. Just two months ago, the president shared an artificial intelligence-generated video depicting his Black predecessor and his predecessor’s Black wife as primates. In early 2025, the Trump administration suspended refugee admissions from majority non-white countries while investing in a special program to fast-track white South African Afrikaners into the United States. Racism is not a rare commodity in this country to be manufactured — it’s cheap and easy to find.

A closer look at the indictment raises more red flags. For one, the KKK, National Alliance and Aryan Nations have been largely defanged for years. You rarely hear those names now unless you’re a historian focused on the white supremacist movement. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of criminal wrongdoing on its own, but it does show that this DOJ, in 2026, had to reach back as far as 2013 to find a relatively obscure SPLC program — one that, as a former spokesperson, I had never even heard of.

Another issue is the indictment’s suggestion that the SPLC played a role in planning the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, based on the claim that an informant was “part of a leadership group.” The idea that an informant could have planted the seed for a gathering of white supremacists of that magnitude is completely implausible. We don’t need to speculate about the origins of that deadly event: Unite the Right was effectively a sequel to a similar rally in Charlottesville in May 2017, driven by widespread outrage within the movement over the removal of Confederate statues. Unicorn Riot preserved reams of Discord logs attesting to it.

The indictment feels like the culmination of years of pro-Trump activists consuming and amplifying that kind of propaganda.

So, leaving open the possibility that something comes out in the trial that I don’t know about yet, these charges look like a piece of political theater to shore up a wayward MAGA base beleaguered by the scandal around Jeffrey Epstein and an increasingly unwieldy debacle in Iran. It’s a MAGA base that understands the SPLC as one of the primary villains in its propaganda stories and enjoys seeing it suffer.

But if the DOJ argues that paying informants furthers hate, and that this makes the use of paid informants fraudulent, won’t the SPLC’s lawyers simply demonstrate how those efforts contributed to these groups no longer being around? If the SPLC propped up the National Alliance to defraud donors, why is it essentially defunct? Why does the once robust Aryan Nations group no longer exist?

If you’ve read this far and assumed I have an incentive to support my former employer, I don’t. I have a different life now — with a book out, a podcast and teaching. After producing some of the SPLC’s more notable investigative stories from 2018 to 2023, I’ve repeatedly criticized them in media appearances.

As chronicled in my book, “Strange People on the Hill,” the SPLC settled with me out of court after I raised allegations of racial discrimination and union busting against them. I have also publicly accused the organization of deliberately taking a lower profile during President Donald Trump’s second term — hoping to evade the kind of targeting that is befalling it now. The SPLC has done many things over the years, good and bad. It has been invaluable in tracing how MAGA brought fringe racist ideas into the mainstream conservative movement. It has also been clumsy, reactionary and, at times, foolish. This program involving paid informants may indeed be one of those clumsy and foolish chapters.

But to understand why a weaponized DOJ might choose this particular case amid all of the white-collar crimes it isn’t pursuing in America today, you first need to understand the narrative that’s been built around the SPLC for years — and how useful it has become to the corrupt men who run this country.

Michael Edison Hayden

Michael Edison Hayden is a leading expert on far-right extremism in the United States. His debut book, “Strange People on Blue Light News”— a chronicle of a West Virginia town in the five years following a white nationalist group’s purchase of a local castle — will be published by Bold Type Books/Hachette on April 7, 2026. Hayden also co-hosts the podcast, “Posting Through It,” with new episodes released every Monday and Thursday.

The Dictatorship

Judge denies Kennedy Center request for pause in ruling ordering Trump’s name removed from building

Published

8 hours ago

June 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Judge denies Kennedy Center request for pause in ruling ordering Trump’s name removed from building

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Kennedy Center was running out of options Friday evening to keep President Donald Trump’s name on the facade of the iconic performing arts venue.

A judge earlier in the afternoon rejected a request to pause a court-ordered deadline of Friday to remove references to Trump from the building and other aspects of the Kennedy Center’s operations. The institution appealed that ruling, an effort that was also rebuffed Friday evening.

Scaffolding was erected around a section of the building that includes Trump’s name but the Kennedy Center sought a short extension to complete the work. Shortly after midnight, the Kennedy Center asked a judge to extend the deadline until noon Eastern Time on Saturday because of storms that had swept through the Washington area Friday, causing a delay. Some of the thunderstorms included lightning.

In the filing, the Kennedy Center offered assurance that the “removal work is presently ongoing” and would “conclude in the early hours of the morning.”

Dozens of people spent hours on the plaza in front of the Kennedy Center taking pictures and cheering occasionally as they broke into chants of “take it down.” Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex-officio board member who sued to have Trump’s name removed from the building, was spotted at one point on the plaza as well.

After ignoring the Kennedy Center for much of his first term, Trump has wielded tremendous influence over the venue during his return to office. Just a month into his second term, he ousted the center’s previous leadership and replaced it with a board of trustees that named him chairman. Trump’s name was quickly added to the building.

In his ruling that only Congress could make changes to the Kennedy Center’s name, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper also blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations that had been planned to start in July and last for two years.

The Kennedy Center’s leadership argued in its appeal Friday that the renovation was badly needed and accused the lower court, in terms that seemed similar to Trump’s speech patterns, of interfering in the effort.

“The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below,” according to the appeal. “Indeed, total collapse!”

Even as the Kennedy Center has fought efforts to remove Trump’s name from the building, it has taken steps to comply with Cooper’s initial ruling.

A June 4 memo to staff from the Kennedy Center’s Office of General Counsel said email signatures, letterhead and other documents must reflect the name as “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” or “Kennedy Center.”

The Kennedy Center’s website has dropped Trump’s name. And an earlier email sent to members offering ticket packages for the June 28 Mark Twain Award for American Humor ceremony came from the Kennedy Center without including Trump’s name.

___

Associated Press journalists Anna Johnson, Mark Sherman and Emily Wang in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch wanted an execution that a Trump judge deemed illegal

Published

24 hours ago

June 13, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch wanted an execution that a Trump judge deemed illegal

Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no.

Even then, the court wasn’t unanimous. Justices Clarence Thomas Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed.

What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn’t explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement.

But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.

A Trump-appointed judge had permanently blocked Alabama from killing Lee using the nitrogen method, due to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In her ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks made it clear that she wasn’t stopping officials from executing Lee for the 1998 murders of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson. Rather, she was only barring the nitrogen method while leaving the state free to use others, such as a firing squad.

Yet the state still pressed to execute Lee with nitrogen on Thursday. The next roadblock it hit was a divided appellate panel, which declined to lift Marks’ injunction. Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck dissented, stressing the high bar the justices have set for Eighth Amendment claims and accusing Lee of delaying his claim until the last minute. Luck noted that Lee’s victims didn’t get to choose how they died.

The appellate dissent reflects the Supreme Court majority’s view on capital punishment. So, when Alabama filed an emergency application to the justices on Thursday, it felt like the setting of a familiar scene: A lower court halts an execution, only for the high court majority to let it move forward. We have seen this movie before.

Plus, the court previously permitted nitrogen gas executions in Alabama. In the case of Anthony Boyd last yearJustice Sonia Sotomayor lamented the majority’s refusal to extend him what she called “the barest form of mercy,” which she said would have been letting him die by firing squad, which “would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to 4 minutes.” She issued a similar dissent the year before in the case of Kenneth Smithwhich she concluded “with deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.”

Lee’s case was different, as his lawyers and a key outside advocate explained to the justices. His lawyers said it was “unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They said that unlike prior cases where lower courts issued temporary stays for inmates, this one had a permanent injunction that followed “a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”

That key outside advocate was Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, a Supreme Court expert who filed an amicus brief. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. “After all,” Vladeck wrote, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”

To be clear, the justices can still reverse Marks’ ruling in a future round of litigation. Or, as the judge noted, the state can execute him by other means. The question on Thursday night was whether the court would make the case moot by letting Alabama execute Lee before the state’s appeal could be fully vetted in an orderly fashion. With that in mind, it would almost be unremarkable that the court rejected the state’s emergency application, if it weren’t for the fact that the justices had previously intervened to help governments conduct executions over lower courts’ objections.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that three justices voted to let Lee’s execution go forward as planned, its unconstitutionality notwithstanding. Of course, while none of the justices explained their views, we can presume that the three dissenters are prepared to disagree with the lower courts’ constitutional analysis if and when the case comes back to the high court.

Next week, the justices are set to issue another round of opinions from cases argued this term, as we creep toward the end of June, when some of the court’s most contentious decisions have historically come.

Have any questions or comments for me? Pleasesubmit them through this formfor a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal Blog and newsletter.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

The Dictatorship

Spencer Pratt concedes LA mayoral race with combative message

Published

24 hours ago

June 13, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Spencer Pratt concedes LA mayoral race with combative message

Jun. 12, 2026, 5:10 PM EDT

Ex-reality TV star and MAGA-backed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt angrily conceded the race Friday in a combative video in which he derided, and appeared to threaten, the women who finished ahead of him.

Nearly four days after The Associated Press projected Councilmember Nithya Raman will advance to the November general election to face incumbent Mayor Karen BassPratt announced that “the campaign portion of my mission to save Los Angeles is coming to a close, and I’m moving on to the next, more interesting phase.”

With 99% of ballots counted as of Friday, the AP put Pratt in third place, with just more than a quarter of the vote — 3.5 percentage points behind Raman and nearly 9 points behind Bass.

Pratt initially stood in second as returns came in on primary night, but his lead over Raman steadily narrowed as mail-in ballots were counted. By Sunday, she had overtaken him by less than 1 percentage point.

President Donald Trump and other MAGA supporters suggested Pratt’s apparent reversal of fortune proved fraud, but elections experts say it is California’s voting systemcoupled with the city’s small Republican voter base, that explain his third-place finish.

What, exactly, Pratt’s next chapter in civic life will consist of is unclear. But if his Friday announcement is any indication — he called Bass and Raman “dumb and dumber” and “corrupt communists” — it will include continued attacks on his former opponents. And contrary to Pratt’s pledge that he would leave the city if he lost, he suggested he will instead stay put in LA.

“A lot of dim-witted jerks thought I was in this for a grift, that I was going to roll up and leave town if I didn’t get into City Hall,” Pratt said in the video. “Hey, morons, I didn’t get in this for political power. I got in this to expose this corrupt machine, and nothing has changed.”

Addressing Bass and Raman, Pratt added: “I will be lighting you up every single day, and now I don’t have to worry about offending BLN viewers. I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war.”

Filled with expletives and images of fires, violence and homeless encampments, Pratt’s video channels the same angry populism he ran on. His Republican supporters —including Benny JohnsonTrump administration official Richard Grenell and the chair of the LA County GOP — cheered his final message as a candidate.

Best known for his role as Heidi Montag’s bad boyfriend on MTV’s “The Hills,” Pratt launched his surprise mayoral campaign in January, a year after his family home burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire. While his platform initially focused heavily on what he and his supporters characterized as the failures that led to the damage caused by the fires, Pratt expanded his campaign to focus on forcing homeless people off the streets, cleaning up alleged “fraud” in the city’s finances and saving abused dogs on Skid Row.

With his massive online following and social media savvy, Pratt catapulted himself from long-shot candidate to one who earned Trump’s support and managed to outraise both Bass and Raman.

In the video, Pratt also said he possesses “some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.”

A spokesperson for Raman’s campaign declined to comment to MS NOW on Pratt’s message. Spokespeople for the Bass campaign did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.