Southern Poverty Law Center

‘Craven Attempt to Silence Dissent’: Trump DOJ Slammed for Indictment of Anti-Hate Group

“Another example of the dangerous, overreaching abuse of executive power so endemic in this authoritarian administration.”


FBI Director Kash Patel speaks alongside Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche during a news conference on April 21, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Apr 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The civil rights and progressive advocacy community is rallying to the defense of the Southern Poverty Law Center after President Donald Trump’s Justice Department indicted the organization on Tuesday on multiple counts of wire fraud and other charges, which the group has condemned as false and politically motivated.

The Justice Department, led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney—said Tuesday that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an indictment charging SPLC with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” The Justice Department accused SPLC, which specializes in monitoring extremist groups and movements, of “funding” far-right white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan by paying people to infiltrate them and gather information.

Bryan Fair, SPLC’s interim chief executive, said the Trump DOJ’s “false allegations” won’t “shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all.” Fair noted that SPLC no longer works with paid informants but emphasized that they “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups.”

Allied civil rights organizations spoke out in defense of the SPLC and warned that the Trump administration’s legal assault on the group is part of a broader attack on those who oppose the far-right and work to protect democracy.

“What is happening to civil rights organizations right now is the most coordinated assault on our sector since COINTELPRO,” Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We are the people who train poll workers, run food banks, fight discrimination, protect the right to protest, and staff domestic violence hotlines. We are the ones who make sure that everyone can live, love, vote, work, study, travel and simply be themselves, free from discrimination. This administration views that as a threat to its power.”

“In order to have absolute power, it must dismantle our rights,” Wiley added. “And that’s why they’re coming after us.”

“We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration.”

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, called the SPLC indictment “another example of the dangerous, overreaching abuse of executive power so endemic in this authoritarian administration.”

“This is a craven attempt to silence dissent by attacking a core civil rights organization focused on combating violent extremism,” said Gilbert. “We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration. We stand in solidarity with SPLC.”

SPLC has repeatedly criticized Trump, members of his two administrations, people in his orbit, and extremist groups—such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—that have supported the president’s efforts to subvert American democracy, including with violence on January 6, 2021.

“To be clear: Trump’s FBI is going after the Southern Poverty Law Center because they infiltrated and exposed the same dangerous right-wing extremist groups that many Trump allies are associated with,” activist Melanie D’Arrigo said in response to the indictment.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement that the Trump administration’s “continued weaponization of the Justice Department to target organizations speaking out against its agenda is anti-American behavior harkening back to the McCarthy era.”

“The Trump administration’s attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a direct threat to the values that make America great,” said Romero. “In this time of unprecedented peril for our democracy, we urge all Americans of good conscience to join us as we stand in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Even the right-wing underworld claims new DOJ indictment is nonsensical

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks next to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel and U.S. President Donald Trump, at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026 REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Joe Conason

April 26, 2026 

ALTERNET


More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.

This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality.

On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced -- at a blatantly political press event -- that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for "wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." The indictment, described by Patel as "massive" and "sweeping," relies on the notion that the SPLC 's use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.


Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions - had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC "kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support."

The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.


The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis.

The indictment also charges that the SPLC "concealed" its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, following similar practices by the FBI and the Justice Department to avoid exposing their paid agents.

To suggest that the SPLC "supported" the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.


Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment."

Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government's attack on SPLC.

Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama, described the indictment as "outrageous" and "pure political retribution" by President Donald Trump. Having taken down white supremacist gangs himself, Jones recalled how the SPLC "helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan's operations in Alabama and beyond" in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile, Alabama, lynching incident.


There are dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files, including major victories against the United Klans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Imperial Klans of America, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party and the Aryan Nations.
It isn't only liberal lawyers who can see through the flimsy accusations in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss' Trump-friendly online publication, conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that "the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the (SPLC's) use of informants amounts to fraud."

Many other right-wing commentators and organizations have welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value more likely to be upheld on the right when convenient and comforting to their own.


The most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives but from the fascist underworld. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.

Curtis Yarvin, the authoritarian gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: "What's cool is that I don't really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn't be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of 'finally getting it.'"


On the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel -- whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders -- the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. They know that the SPLC, far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, is their worst enemy.

"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.

Trump's latest move delights Neo-Nazis: 'It's a win for us'

Jordan Green,

 Investigative Reporter
April 24, 2026 
 Raw Story 

As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of wire fraud for its informant program to infiltrate extremist groups, the news was greeted in neo-Nazi accelerationist circles with glee.

“Frankly, it’s a win for us as we see it,” a Telegram channel for The American Futurist, propaganda project, posted as the news broke on Tuesday. “Let them have their news spectacle; we get the benefit of fewer traitorous snakes in the movement….”

With Patel standing at his side, Blanche charged during the press conference that the Southern Poverty Law Center, known as the SPLC, was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Patel echoed that talking point in an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Wednesday, claiming that the SPLC paid informants inside extremism organizations “specifically for the reason to sow discord and hate into our society.”

The American Futurist channel, authored by former members of the now-defunct accelerationist group Atomwaffen, which is tied to at least five murders, scoffed at the notion that the extremism watchdog group is secretly an ally to violent white supremacists.


“The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism — they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all,” the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted. “What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside.”


The post speculated that the prosecution was motivated by the desire to “kill two birds with one stone: arrest pro-Palestine leftists and smear the US [neo-Nazi] movement as controlled opposition.

“So, do we mind?” the post continued. “No, not at all. We can take the PR hit, and to be frank, any snitches who get rounded up on charges with the SPLC absolutely deserve what they get….”

The Department of Justice press release quotes Patel as saying that while the SPLC was “vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups,” the nonprofit instead “paid the leaders of these very extremist groups — even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.”


The FBI and Department of Justice sidestepped multiple requests from Raw Story for information to substantiate Patel and Blanche’s claims that the funds SPLC paid to informants were used to commit crimes or otherwise manufactured extremism.

The 14-page indictment merely states that the money spent to pay informants “was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.”

The indictment alleges that the informants “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.” One informant said to be involved in the planning chats for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville allegedly “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”


Engaging in racist speech and logistical activities are consistent with the activities of informants used by the FBI itself in its infiltration of violent white supremacist groups going back to the 1960s.

As described in the indictment, the activities of at least one informant appear to undercut the government’s case that the payments benefited the extremist groups. The indictment alleges that the informant, said to be an affiliate of the National Alliance, stole 25 boxes of documents from the group, which were then used to source a story published on the SPLC’s “Hatewatch” website.

“The use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence,” Bryan Fair, SPLC’s interim CEO, said in a video posted on the organization’s website on Tuesday. “In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff. For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups.”


Beginning in the 1980s under the leadership of co-founder Morris Dees, the SPLC sued a succession of violent white supremacist groups and effectively shut them down.

In 1984, the SPLC joined a lawsuit against the United Klans of America for its role in the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile in 1981. Three years later, a jury awarded Donald’s mother $7 million, bankrupting one of the most violent Klan factions, whose members were responsible for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that resulted in the deaths of four Black girls, and the 1965 murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. (Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., one of the Klansmen indicted for Liuzzo’s murder, was an FBI informant.)

To satisfy the judgement in the Donald lawsuit, the United Klans was forced to turn over its Tuscaloosa, Ala. headquarters to Donald’s mother, and she was able to buy her first home with the proceeds from the sale.


In 1990, lawyers for the SPLC, along with the Anti-Defamation League, sued neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger and his group White Aryan Resistance for inciting followers in the death of an Ethiopian immigrant, Mulugeta Seraw, who was beaten to death in Portland, Ore. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $12.5 million, and attorneys foreclosed on Metzger’s house to collect the judgement.

Nearly a decade later, the SPLC sued the Aryan Nations on behalf of a mother and son who were assaulted by the group’s security forces. Shortly after arriving in northern Idaho in 1980 to establish its compound, members of the group reportedly vandalized a Jewish-owned restaurant with swastikas. The Aryan Nations spawned a terrorist spinoff group called the Order that was responsible a murder and a spree of bombings and armed car robberies in the 1980s.

The jury decision in 2000 to award the plaintiffs $6.3 million forced Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler to declare bankruptcy. His group was forced to turn its compound over to the plaintiffs, and funds from the sale of the property were used to build a human rights center in nearby Coeur D’Alene.


Jordan Green is a North Carolina-based investigative reporter at Raw Story, covering domestic extremism, efforts to undermine U.S. elections and democracy, hate crimes and terrorism. Prior to joining the staff of Raw Story in March 2021, Green spent 16 years covering housing, policing, nonprofits and music as a reporter and editor at Triad City Beat in North Carolina and Yes Weekly. He can be reached at jordan@rawstory.com. More about Jordan Green.

German researchers set right the story of a 9,000-year-old shaman's grave

April 4, 2026

NPR
Heard on All Things Considered
By
Rob Schmitz
Avery Keatley

When a 9,000 year-old grave of a shaman was discovered in Nazi Germany, the discovery was quickly politicized to support Nazi propaganda. But new analysis shows that initial narrative was all wrong.

ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:

This next story has Nazis. It's got an archaeological dig.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE")

HARRISON FORD: (As Indiana Jones) That belongs in a museum.

SCHMITZ: And no, it's not about "Indiana Jones." It actually predates the Ark of the Covenant by thousands of years. And bonus, there's a shaman involved. We start our quest in the eastern German city of Halle...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking German).

SCHMITZ: ...Where a tram takes me to the steps of the State Museum of Prehistory. Above its massive wooden doors, carved into the castle-like facade are the words unserer vorzeit, our distant past.

(Speaking German).

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking German).

SCHMITZ: (Speaking German).

Inside, I'm taken to museum archaeologist Oliver Dietrich, and he leads me to the subject of the museum's newest exhibition, the remains of a human from the Mesolithic period, the era of hunters and gatherers. Very few graves like this one have been discovered in Europe.

SCHMITZ: So...

OLIVER DIETRICH: You can call me Oliver.

SCHMITZ: Can I call you Oliver? OK. So Oliver, one of the surprising things I'm finding when I look at this after reading about it...


DIETRICH: Yeah.


SCHMITZ: ...Is I'm surprised at how intact the skeleton is...


DIETRICH: Yes.


SCHMITZ: ...For being 9,000 years old. This looks like a complete skeleton.

DIETRICH: This is basically a complete skeleton, so we have had a lot of luck, and it's not least due to a very impressive grave construction.

SCHMITZ: An elaborate grave discovered in 1934 when a construction crew was digging to build pipes for a spa garden. The crew called this museum. It sent an archaeologist to the site, and they told him he had 3 hours to dig out what he could. Dietrich shows me a series of graphics chronicling the dig.

DIETRICH: He digs into the earth like this. He sees that the skull is here, yeah? And he just wants to get the skull out, digs around here. He sees the skull.

SCHMITZ: Poor guy has, like, 3 hours to do all of this.

DIETRICH: Exactly - starts excavating in the site, which we wouldn't do today - yeah - because - very, very wrong.

SCHMITZ: After breaking nearly every excavation rule in the book, he brought the remains back to the museum, where even more archaeological rules were broken thanks to who was in power.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ADOLF HITLER: (Speaking German).

SCHMITZ: The National Socialists, otherwise known as the Nazis, were a year into their rule under Adolf Hitler, who delivered speeches like this one, which promoted the idea of a Germanic master race


(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)



HITLER: (Speaking German).



(CHEERING)



SCHMITZ: Archaeologists were a big part of Hitler's nationbuilding propaganda program, and they were looking for evidence that Aryans came from Germany. And that's why the Nazis sent their archaeologists to this museum. They quickly declared these remains, which were likely those of a member of Europe's Indo-European ancestors, to be, instead, those of an Aryan man from the Neolithic period.



DIETRICH: They were looking for Germanic ancestors, and they would have liked them to come from Scandinavia. So with Indo-Europeans, they come from India, probably. It's not so nice for National Socialists. So...



SCHMITZ: So then the archaeologists who then interpreted this find, who are under Nazi influence, basically said, OK, this is most likely a man. He was blonde-haired, blue-eyed...



DIETRICH: Yes.



SCHMITZ: ...Aryan, 100% Aryan.



DIETRICH: Exactly.



SCHMITZ: In the years after World War II, archaeologists reviewed the remains and corrected the Nazis. First, this was not a man. Then in the 1970s, they used radiocarbon dating that concluded the remains were 9,000 years old, dating back to the hunter-and-gatherer Mesolithic, not the agrarian Neolithic period. And then, most recently, they conducted a DNA test.



DIETRICH: And genetics can tell you exactly how she looks like. So she is not a white Aryan man. She's a dark-skinned colored woman. So it's exactly the contrary from everything the National Socialists wanted her to be.



SCHMITZ: The Nazis were wrong.



DIETRICH: They were wrong.



SCHMITZ: And this dark-skinned, dark-haired, light-eyed woman, says Dietrich, was a woman with status. She was a shaman. Dietrich and I stand in front of a glass case. Surrounding her skeleton are various objects, which were part of her costume, starting with a skull cap made of deer antlers.



DIETRICH: So she wore a mask, an ornate, which was made up of different things. We have these boar tusks. They were worn, like...



SCHMITZ: Oh, yeah.



DIETRICH: ...On the breast...



SCHMITZ: OK.



DIETRICH: Like - yeah. And then we have all kind of teeth. And they were also part of her shaman's costume.



SCHMITZ: Part of this exhibit also has 200-year-old shaman costumes from Siberia that have the exact same element - a shaman tradition spanning at least nine millennia of human history. But this shaman, says Dietrich, was a little different.



DIETRICH: There was a notch at the base of her skull, and the two vertebrae below were misformed. So they were not like they should be in - like they are in our bodies.



SCHMITZ: Dietrich and the museum's team of archaeologists say, these two deformities suggest that when she tilted her head back, a key artery was pinched, cutting off blood to her brain, inducing a rapid-eye movement called nystagmus and possibly inducing hallucinations.



DIETRICH: The shaman enters in the state of trance, of altered consciousness, and when he comes back, he can say, spirits talked to me, and this is a solution to our problem. So that's most probably what she did.



SCHMITZ: ll with a simple tilt of her head. It was like a superpower. Dietrich calls it a trick, and it suggests that it gave this shaman a lot of status. In fact, at the shaman's grave site along the Saale River, Dietrich's team have found offerings of deer skullcaps and other elaborate arrangements of animal bones that date back to at least 600 years after her death.



So she's almost like a figure that is revered to the point of almost being worshiped.



DIETRICH: Yeah, she is a venerated ancestor, I would say.



SCHMITZ: OK.



DIETRICH: And maybe we are at the brink of an ancestor cult here. Yeah, that's really something that changes in this time, because hunter-gatherers - they have their shamans, and they are remembered, but they are not remembered that long.



SCHMITZ: Dietrich says, at the time the last offerings were left for her, the world was changing. Humans were roaming less and settling near reliable food sources. The first signs of agriculture and then written language emerged soon after this period. But what's clear from his team's discoveries, he says, is that stories of this shaman were passed from generation to generation over several centuries, an oral tradition that was lost and then piece by piece rediscovered, interpreted for political gain and reinterpreted using science - an oral tradition that continues with this very story.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)


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Stephen Miller and the Passover Message

Robert Koehler

 April 2, 2026

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Stephen Miller, President Donald J. Trump’s repellent senior advisor, deputy chief of staff, and director of the interagency Homeland Security Council, posted on social media two months ago:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

Miller called for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government. “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history,” he said.

Miller was presumably exposed annually from an early age to the Passover story from the biblical Book of Exodus, ritualized according to the textual telling in the Haggadah every year at this time around the seder table. Here we learn that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years and had none of the rights accorded the non-Jewish members of that society – such as they might have been living under the pharaonic god-kings. They were, you know, a “labor class” without rights.

The lesson commonly drawn from the story since ancient times is that slavery – having a designated labor class with no capacity to influence the conditions of servitude – is, you know, really abhorrently bad. This has engendered an ethic of inclusivity, an embracing of the other, that has been a core value of Jewish culture.

Let’s revisit the stirring admonition from Leviticus 19:34: “But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

This is resoundingly rejected by Miller, an Ashkenazi Jew whose family escaped Russian pogroms and the Holocaust. His forbearers along with millions of diaspora Jews arrived on our shores in the late 19th and early 20th century fleeing oppression born of bigoted exclusion by the dominant societies of the countries where they had been living and here aspiring to social and political inclusivity. They slaved away in sweatshops in this country while living in some of the most appalling conditions of poverty in the world, struggling for full participation in a pluralistic society in a nation where they would be full members.

Now that he has benefitted from the activism of his forbearers and attained residency in the inner sanctum of the citadel of power he is dedicated to ensuring that others, particularly people of color, cannot be welcomed into the same privileged circle of full citizenship as he, essentially supporting the Egyptian side of that ancient conflict.

Further revealing his deeply odious philosophy, in January, Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN that:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The only iron in this discussion is between Miller’s ears.

His nearly unimaginable moral monstrousness exhibits an arresting consistency. If it is righteous for any stronger person to brutalize a weaker person, then one must be always vigilant, in essence perpetually paranoid, because assailants may be lurking anywhere and there is no respite, no protection, that a humane society or government can, or what is more, ought to even aspire to provide.

There are other worlds, like mystical nesting vessels, co-existing right here in the same space and time as the one Miller proclaims we live in, that are invisible to him and his supporters due to stunted and distorted dimensions of human consciousness. The world of most of the folks I hang out with features awareness of our mutuality as fellow beings sharing a fragile planetary biosphere where, in the poignant words of the poet Auden written at the outset of the second world war, “we must love another or die.” I encourage anyone who has not read his poem September 1, 1939 in a long time to revisit it now.

As the late Buddhist monk and revered teacher Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates:

“There is a tendency to be individualistic in us, a seed of egoism, but that isn’t all that is in us. There is the other seed, the seed of togetherness, the desire to help and be kind to others. If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.”

Which seed are you watering?

Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

SEE 

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/passover-song.html

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Pagan Origins of Easter 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PASSOVER

Stumbling Along in Hitler’s Footsteps

Dave Lindorff

 April 2, 2026

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World War II, at least in Europe, can be blamed on a single man — a dictator who gained absolute power because of the fecklessness of democratically elected politicians in his country. Afraid to challenge a politician popular with much of their lumpen proletarian base, they hoped to be rid if him by making him head of the representative body that was supposed to control him. They even granted him unusual emergency powers, in hopes that he’d mess up and be destroyed politically.

They gave this power to a man who had a thuggish cult-like following and who had earlier been jailed for organizing a failed putsch that was intended to topple the government and put them and their leader in power, The violent coup attempt failed, with some putschists and a few police killed. Their leader, who fled and hid out for two days was arrested. Tried and convicted of treason, he remained popular among his followers, and only served 9 months of his five-year sentence before being released.

Had Adolph Hitler, whose popularity was owed to his scapegoating the blame for Germany’s economic woes onto Jews, Communists, Socialists and European countries, been kept in jail to serve his full sentence, and had he been properly barred from running for national office because of his record of treason and fomenting revolution, he might  never have been able order the annexation of Austria, the takeover by force  of the German-speaking “Sudetenland” region of Czechoslovakia, or the invasion of Poland. That last decision set the war in Europe in motion because of mutual assistance pacts that obligated France and Britain to come to Poland’s defense,  Thus began the war that ultimately led to the destruction of most of Europe and much of Asia and to the deaths of over 60 million people, most of them civilians, in what remains most terrible and bloody conflict in human history.

If this story sounds oddly—and disturbingly—familiar, it should, for it is being repeated before our eyes right now in the United States of America and the Middle East. In this version, a more porcine and less articulate, but at least as narcissistic and psychopathic a man, Donald Trump, was returned to the presidency in 2024 by the slimmest of pluralities and, despite his having four years earlier attempted to foment a coup to overturn the election of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Once his oath of office vowing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States had been sworn to, he took advantage of a July 2024 ruling by a stacked right-wing Supreme Court  majority. That ruling, Trump v. United States granted all presidents absolute immunity from prosecution for any of their “presidential acts,” and pardoned all the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cultist insurrectionists, who four years earlier had, upon his orders, stormed Congress, hoping to prevent Congressional  certification of the 2020 election that Trump had just lost. Subsequent to that, Republicans, with control of both houses of Congress, but still nearly all afraid of this modern-day “Hitler’s” cult followers’ ability to deny them renomination as candidates in their next re-election bids, acted much like like the cowards in the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1933: they granted Trump the powers of an absolute monarch, unconstrained by Constitution, courts or even moral qualms.

Trump’s MAGA cult is kept stoked by his endless fear-mongering about a nonexistent “tidal wave” of immigrants of color —“murderers and rapists” that he claims are “diluting the blood” of “real” (meaning White) Americans.

It’s nonsense, but the hate-spewing tactic works just as well in 2026 on the down-trodden MAGA working class-whites in the US looking for some group to blame for their failure to earn a decent living, as it worked 1933 for Hitler on the downtrodden German masses in the depths of the Great Depression years of the 1930s.

At this point, with the  president claiming, without any objection from his party, which controls both houses of Congress, that he doesn’t need permission from Congress or the UN Security Council, he has launched an all-out war of choice on Iran, a country that poses no risk to the US, half a world away. It’s a war a large majority of Americans oppose, yet a sycophant Congress won’t even debate a War Powers Resolution that could bring it to a halt.

Like Hitler, Trump, who is known to have long admired the impetuous Nazi Führer,  is taking his own council in his war decisions, allowing genocidal Israel to do much of the bombing with its now honed and practiced lack of concern about mass casualties of civilians.  And like Israel, he has adopted the idiotic policy of murdering the enemy’s leaders—a practice called “decapitation.” It’s a short-sighted tactic long opposed by military leaders  and outlawed in the Geneva Accords because, as Trump is discovering, doing so makes it difficult if not impossible to negotiate an end to the fighting.

HItler basically lost his war before he started it, by failing to first plan on how he would obtain the massive amounts of oil needed to fuel his huge war machine — something he never managed to do successfully. Similarly Trump failed to realize how easy it would be even for a heavily bombed Iran to shut down shipping through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the entire world’s oil supply and creating a massive global and domestic US economic, diplomatic  and political crisis.

Hitler, whose military experience was limited to his having been a private and a corporal during WWI was also overconfident in the power of his modernized military and his Aryan soldiers, and dismissive of his generals. He didn’t believe the Soviets, with their Slavik peasant army, could resist and defeat this massive Wehrmacht. He likewise assumed wrongly that he could conquer Britain quickly, either through mass bombing or a cross-Channel invasion. Trump, who had no military experience having dodged the Vietnam-era draft by claiming to have “bone spurs” on his feet, has similarly miscalculated how hard Iranians, faced with an existential threat to their nation, would rally to resist the US onslaught.

Like Hitler, Trump thinks he knows everything, and he clearly doesn’t.

Germany before the war had in its excellent universities some of the top physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians in the world. Some of them, like scientists in the US, Britain and eventually the USSR, were warning that there was a way to produce a super bomb based upon releasing the energy found inside the nucleus of the uranium atom. In the US, Britain and the Soviet Union, these warnings led to secret crash programs to develop an atomic bomb—ironically out of a fear the Nazis would get an atomic bomb first. But Hitler blew off his scientists’ dire warnings, dismissing the idea of such a weapon, as well as the theory of quantum mechanics that underlay it, as “Jewish science.” He refused to provide the funding for such a costly “crackpot” idea..

In a similar manner, the smug know-it-all current US Commander-in-Chief, who has bragged of having “The highest IQ of any president in history,” ignored expert advice from the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence people that Iran would not be a pushover like Venezuela or ISIS in Syria. An ancient civilization with a unified language and national pride as well as an educated population, Iran has showed it will resist, and has the means to do so, proving this with its precision strikes on US bases across the Middle East, and with little evident public protest from the population being bombed.

We are at this moment being misled in the US by a man whom Rex Tillerson, the corporate CEO who served as Secretary of State for the first two years of Trump’s first term,  once inappropriately but aptly  labeled, “a moron.”

We can only hope that Trump’s blundering into a war the US cannot win, will not end up killing as many innocent people as Hitler did with his World War II blunder of invading Poland and later the USSR. And we can only hope that this biggest disaster of his political misadventure in The Middle East will drive  him out of office and end a most shameful chapter in US history — one that hopefully will also school Americans about the danger of supporting grandiose charlatans to rule as as kings.

There were good reasons American farmers craftspeople and others from all walks of life in the colonies took up arms against the most powerful military in the 18th century world: to throw off the yoke of King George’s tyranny,

This article by Dave Lindorff appeared originally in ThisCantBeHappening! on its new Substack platform at https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com/. Please check out the new site and consider signing up for a cut-rate subscription that will be available until the end of the month.