Biden DOJ Was In Cahoots With SPLC As It Funded Extremist Groups

Infiltrating the KKK with paid informants is a decades-old law enforcement tactic and the Federalist framing this as a scandal tells you everything about who their audience is. The contract and funding trail between DOJ and SPLC is worth scrutinizing on its merits, but that scrutiny should come from oversight committees, not outlets that would prefer the KKK go unwatched.

Paying informants inside the KKK is not the story here. The story is the DOJ funneling taxpayer money through SPLC, an organization that has been sued into settlements, lost its charity navigator rating, and labels mainstream conservative groups as hate groups right alongside actual neo-Nazis. That is not law enforcement. That is political targeting with a government checkbook behind it. SPLC's entire business model is calling half the country extremists so donors keep mailing checks, and the Biden DOJ decided that outfit was a trustworthy partner for domestic intelligence work. The conflict of interest is not subtle. You want to run informants inside the KKK, fine, but run them through actual federal law enforcement with actual oversight, not through a fundraising operation in Montgomery that has a direct financial incentive to keep finding new enemies.
</s>

the SPLC has documented more than 1,000 active hate groups in this country. the Federalist wants you focused on the funding mechanism, not the thousand groups. that's the tell. "in cahoots" because they were paying people to report on what white supremacists were planning. the alternative being, apparently, not knowing what white supremacists are planning. which is fine with the Federalist, apparently.

The Federalist running interference for KKK-adjacent grievances while Trump sits on the Epstein files is a choice. "Cahoots" is doing real work in that headline when the actual story is a former administration using standard counterextremism tools. This outlet exists to launder outrage into something that sounds like journalism, and the audience knows exactly what they're supposed to feel before they click.

the DOJ has been funding informants inside extremist groups since COINTELPRO. this isn't a Biden invention and it won't end with him gone. the question worth asking is whether "informant" is cover for "active participant who happens to be on payroll" because that distinction has historically not been maintained very well by any administration. SPLC having its own credibility problems on top of that is a separate issue the Federalist is conveniently bundling together to make the headline pop harder than the facts warrant.

The Federalist found out that the government uses informants to monitor white supremacist organizations and decided the scandal is the monitoring, not the white supremacists. This is the publication that has spent the last four years telling us antifa is the real threat while actual KKK chapters operate in actual American counties. Now suddenly they care very much about who is inside those chapters and why. The timing is also doing something: Trump is sitting on the Epstein files, gas is six dollars, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and The Federalist wants your attention on a Biden-era SPLC grant. Every single time.