Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted by a federal grand jury on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering for allegedly using over $3 million in donor funds to secretly pay informants inside extremist groups like the KKK.
On this episode of “Rufo and Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman, both of whom have been targets of the SPLC, trade stories and discuss the significance of these indictments.
The SPLC, says Rufo, “is this amazing story of the organized left creating this phantasm of the radical right and then fighting that phantasm that they themselves have created.”
The powerful role the SPLC has inhabited on the left, says Keeperman, hinges on telling liberals “who the bad guys are” and thus who they are “allowed to hate.”
But it goes further than just slapping damning labels on conservative individuals and organizations.
If the SPLC targets you, it proceeds to attempt to “ruin your reputation, ruin your ability to earn a living, and then send out [its] goons by proxy and by arms’ distance to physically hurt you if you show up anywhere in public,” alleges Rufo, citing the SPLC’s targeting of American political scientist and scholar Charles Murray, who suffered both professionally and personally after the advocacy group labeled him an extremist.
Rufo keenly recalls the first time the SPLC targeted him.
In the early 2020s when he was on his anti-critical race theory campaign, he found himself in the organization’s crosshairs, and it genuinely frightened him.
“I felt the fear,” he admits.
“You have this sense like, OK, I better fight hard because these people are trying to knock me off the board altogether — ruin my reputation, ruin my ability to support my family.”
Rufo’s fight proved successful. “I was able to kind of rebuff those initial challenges and actually kind of boomerang them and turn them into a badge of honor, a fundraising appeal to my supporters. … I was able to get them to retract certain claims that they were making against me to show in essence that I was able to make them back down,” he recounts.
That was just the first attack though.
Over the last few years, there have been over “a dozen” attacks on Rufo, but they no longer elicit the same fear as the first time.
“You actually develop a kind of immunity through exposure,” he says, calling the recent charges against the SPLC “both shocking and not shocking.”
“It’s both a blow to their effectiveness, but it’s also just really another nail in the coffin.”
To hear more, watch the full episode above.
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