Frequently exposing extremists and other bad actors over the course of his four-decade career as an investigative reporter, Nashville-based broadcast journalist Phil Williams recently launched the Substack-based publication Hate Comes to Main Street.
Holding the far-right to account hasn’t been easy.
“I’ve been investigating hate now for almost three years,” Williams said in a 35-minute Substack Live interview on Monday. “This is tough business. I have security at home that you would not believe. I have faced death threats many times. My family has been threatened.”
So Williams knew just where to look to monitor the far-right’s response to the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the storied civil rights group and anti-hate watchdog.
“I really started going back into this dark world of white nationalism and various hate groups, and they were just mocking MAGA,” Williams said.
The organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville roasted the theory that the racist riot that they created was an SPLC-fabricated “hoax,” as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed. Williams profiled some of these reactions in a must-read article titled: “Another ‘Epstein Binders’: White Nationalists Mock MAGA Spin on SPLC Indictment.”
One of them, Richard Spencer, called Charlottesville revisionism a “convenient conspiracy theory or limited hangout served up by the government to allow conservatives to indulge in victimization.” Another organizer who goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus, and was prosecuted for burning an object with the intent to intimidate, rhetorically excommunicated his peers who bought into the MAGA mythology.
“Every ‘right-wing’ influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me,” Invictus wrote.
Williams also observed a darker set of reactions from a man affiliated with a neo-Nazi terror group known as the Atomwaffen Division, who sifted through the indictment to unmask SPLC informants.
This former neo-Nazi believed that “these informants were pretty successful in dismantling hate.”
That far-right extremist’s examination of the indictment is significant: The wire fraud charges against the SPLC hinge upon the allegation that the civil rights group falsely claimed to donors that they were “dismantling” hate groups when they actually enriched and manufactured them.
Watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter, and catch up on related analysis from All Rise News here and here.
