The Southern Poverty Law Center may not, we hope, be long for this world. The Trump administration’s new indictment has exposed the organization’s practice of funneling millions of dollars through fake bank accounts to “informants” sitting in senior positions at the very “hate groups” it claimed to monitor. Even if the SPLC survives, the criminal proceedings may leave it so damaged and exhausted that it sheds most of its influence.

Others have charted out the potential financial incentives behind the SPLC’s alleged misconduct: the demand for “hate” in America exceeds the supply, so to create sufficient far-right activity to keep donations flowing, the SPLC was perhaps ready to pay off the operatives it supposedly fought. The SPLC meanwhile contests any wrongdoing and maintains that its informant program saved lives and was known to the legal authorities.

It is important that we understand the real stakes of this battle. The fate of the SPLC is not merely a question of whether it has acted unlawfully. It is not a test of the left’s right to grift. Because the SPLC is more than just a grift, far more, and its need for far-right bogeymen isn’t just so it can keep neurotic Upper East Side housewives writing checks.

To focus only on this indictment undersells the immense damage the SPLC has done to the American republic, and the immense importance of bringing that damage to a halt. The truly noxious crime of the SPLC is not that it exaggerated the scale of “hate” in American life. Rather, it is that the SPLC conjured “hate” as some society-wide emergency in need of constant policing, and then exploited that fake emergency to silence political opponents, roll back American freedom and entrench a repugnant new caste system in American life.

Approximately zero Americans live in serious fear that a “hate group” monitored by the SPLC will so much as make a public appearance in their lives, let alone cause any harm.

Their favorite target, the Ku Klux Klan, has been a non-factor in American politics for literally a century, since its costume-selling pyramid scheme collapsed along with its membership in the mid-1920s. When has anyone ever worried about buying a home in a........

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