President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., spread misinformation on social media on Tuesday regarding a nonprofit being targeted by his father’s Justice Department — and got promptly roasted for it.
“LOL, what a plot twist that SPLC was funding the KKK… as Democrats always have,” the younger Trump posted on the social media platform X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ coming true in real time.”
As CNN"s Hannah Rabinowitz reported on Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was indicted over a discontinued program in which they paid confidential informants to provide information about white supremacists and other far right organizations. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed in the indictment that the SPLC “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Blanche’s claim is part of a long-running and debunked far right conspiracy theory claiming racism in America is predominantly directed against white people rather than Black people. To validate this conspiracy theory, they claim that nonprofits like SPLC which monitor white supremacy and other forms of organized hate are creating tensions rather than chronicling them.
Despite these claims, historians like the New School’s Federico Finchelstein and Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol pointed out to this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2024 that Trump emulates Nazi Germany’s infamous leader Adolf Hitler in his violent rhetoric and scapegoating of marginalized groups. Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told this journalist in response that he and the historians were “disgusting” for comparing Trump to Hitler.
For his part, Blanche is a controversial acting attorney general because he has allegedly ended crypto investigations despite his six-figure crypto investments and worked with Trump to suppress the investigation into the president’s longtime friend (who allegedly facilitated him sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl), the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Under Blanche’s predecessor as attorney general, Pam Bondi, the Justice Department has repeatedly targeted Trump’s political enemies including Democrats New York Attorney General Letitia James, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Sen. Adam Schiff.
In response to the younger Trump’s tweet, a user known as GenXGirl celebrated by asking about the non-government organization the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), asking “When is the ADL getting indicted?” X user Peter Gordon also celebrated, writing “the walls are closing in. We will be free of this treasonous, traitorous cabal soon. Keep your father safe so we can see it through.”
Similarly a user called Shane Shu quoted the late far right activist Charlie Kirk referring to the SPLC as a “hate group.” Shu then quoted the Bible “Luke 12:2 (NIV): ‘There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.’”
Yet even though X is owned by the pro-Trump oligarch Elon Musk (just as CNN was recently purchased by the pro-Trump oligarch David Ellison), the younger Trump was still roasted on X under his very own tweet.
Two users, Diane Toucan and Scott Yarbrough, posted about Epstein, implying that the SPLC investigation is an attempt to distract from Trump’s alleged child sex scandal. A user called Mia Thermopolis observed that “yall figured this out cause you’re part of the KKK right?” Similarly a journalist called FoiaFan quoted Trump referring to neo-Nazis and other white nationalist as “very fine people” after they rioted in Charlottesville in 2017.
Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to obscure their own partnership with white nationalists by projecting their behavior onto Democrats, the history of white nationalism in America is more complicated.
From the Civil War (1861 to 1865) until the 1932 presidential election, the Democrats were associated with the South, which tried to secede from the United States in order to preserve slavery after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. By 1932, however, the Democrats nominated a racial moderate, New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his promise to provide economic relief during the Great Depression began a gradual transition of Black and other racial and ethnic minorities to the Democratic Party. After the 1964 election in which Republicans nominated for president a candidate, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who opposed bills to guarantee racial civil rights, Black and other racial minority voters became overwhelmingly Democrat, which they have remained ever since.
Trump’s hostility to the SPLC is not only based in racial animus, but also in their hostility to civil rights for LGBTQ groups. Speaking to this journalist for Salon in 2022, the SPLC broke down the degree to which far right narratives like those propagated by Trump and his supporters have actually spread bigotry in this country.
“In a recent study conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tulchin Research to examine the extent to which the extremist beliefs and narratives that mobilize the hard right have been absorbed by the wider American public, we found concerning trends with regards to anti-LGBTQ sentiments,” the SPLC said in 2022.
“In the study, the 1,500 respondents were asked if they believe ‘gender ideology has corrupted American culture.’ The term ‘gender ideology’ is widespread on the right, and generally refers to a belief that LGBTQ people are a threat to children and families and that men and women should adhere to ‘traditional’ notions of masculinity and femininity.”