Thread by @DataRepublican

🧵🚨 THREAD: How the Charlottesville rally and SPLC birthed an entire billion-dollar-plus "democracy" ecosystem 🚨

11 federal counts. Wire fraud. Money laundering conspiracy. But here's what the SPLC headlines are missing:

• The indictment describes a paid informant in the leadership chat that PLANNED Unite the Right
• That informant "helped coordinate transportation" to the rally... at SPLC's direction
• There is ONE publicly identified organizer whose documented role was transportation coordinator
• His Discord posts about running over protesters were made 26 DAYS before Heather Heyer was killed by a car
• The indictment says postings were made "under the supervision of the SPLC"
• Charlottesville then became the founding event for a billion-dollar political machine
• SPLC installed itself as that machine's definitional gatekeeper

I report. You draw your own conclusions.

As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇

It is NOT confirmed fact that Chesny, who appeared to be encouraging running over protesters, was SPLC's informant.

But the indictment (paragraph 11a) describes informant F-37, and it matches Chesny:

• Member of the online leadership chat that planned Unite the Right
• Attended Charlottesville (at SPLC's direction)
• Made racist postings (under SPLC's supervision)
• Helped coordinate transportation for attendees

Now here's why this matters beyond the fraud charges.

Charlottesville became the single most consequential founding event in modern American political infrastructure. Every one of these organizations says... in their own words.... that they exist or were transformed because of August 12, 2017.

👇

Stand Together (Koch network):

"August 12, 2017 was a tipping point."

Koch. Soros. Ford. ADL. In one coalition. Because of Charlottesville.

ADL founded "Communities Overcoming Extremism: The After Charlottesville Project." Literally named after the event.

Listen First Project: "The tragic events in Charlottesville, VA compelled Pearce to leave his marketing job and invest full time."

First event? "Listen First in Charlottesville."

Integrity First for America. Founded 2017. Single purpose: sue the Unite the Right organizers. Backed at founding by LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman ($1M+). Won. Wound down. One event. One lawsuit. One entire organization.

UVA Democracy Initiative (now Karsh Institute). $12.9M from 17 donors. "Direct response to the white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville."

All of that traces back to one event. Then in September 2022, Biden held the "United We Stand" summit. Merrick Garland launched "United Against Hate" the same day.

Three days before the summit, SPLC wrote a letter to Susan Rice asking to "define the terms and goals of our continued collaboration."

And the ecosystem listened.

National Civic League webinar: "Mapping America's Healthy Democracy Ecosystem." Over 10,000 organizations cataloged. An audience member asks how they decide who gets excluded.

Listen to the answer. Spoiler: it's SPLC.

The org that defined who was a hate group asked the White House to make that role permanent.

The org that set the standards the entire ecosystem adopted is now charged with paying the people it was tracking.

The org whose informant was allegedly in the planning chat for the event that justified building the machine raised $132 million in the fiscal year that included Charlottesville.

We need to ask...

If the organization at the center of America's entire post-Charlottesville "democracy" infrastructure had a supervised informant (or worse, agent provocateur) inside the event that justified building that infrastructure...

... what does that make the infrastructure?

THREAD END.