On Tuesday the Justice Department announced an 11 count indictment against the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of using shell accounts to funnel money to individuals with ties to the KKK, and other extremist groups that they claim to oppose. They also allegedly paid more than $270,000 to an informant who was a member of the leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, VA, which became the focus of Wednesday's opening segment on Fox News's The Five.
Co-Host Dana Perino began the segment by reviewing the the indictment and playing a clip of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and a response from the SPLC's Interim President Bruyan Fair, who naturally defended the use of what he called, "informants." She also played Joe Biden citing Charlottesville as the reason he decided to run in 2020.
Greg Gutfeld was the first to step up to the plate, and he hit it out of the park.
GUTFELD: This makes the Jussie Smollett hoax look like amateurs. Did the media fall for it or did they go along with it? They went along with it. They knew. None of this white supremacy movement made sense to anybody because nobody knew about this march and then it just happened. They kept it under wraps to prevent anybody from digging into the origins of it. Nobody ever heard of these people and then we never saw them again.... It wasn't just a hoax or a fraud. It was a plot that resulted in people dying.
Gutfeld continued making several brilliant points, in rapid succession..
GUTFELD: If a right wing group actually paid leftists like Antifa, BLM, Venezuelan drug gangs to terrorize citizens, to kind of underscore their value, it would be a huge story, but we never had to do that because all of that was real.... It's a testament to conservatives that you had to create the hate that wasn't there because we didn't supply it. The United States, least racist country in the history of the world, we knew it, but in the last ten years, the left made it sound like somehow we were the very worst thing on the planet.
When left-wing panelist Jessica Tarlov had her turn, she was either pretending, or truly could not grasp what the SPLC did wrong, or how it rips apart the legend of the Charlottesville march, and Gutfeld wasn't going to take it quietly.
TARLOV: I don't see how we get from, we flipped people within these organizations and paid them for it to, white supremacy is made up, and that it's a complete fallacy, and it's not just the Biden administration that said it was the greatest threat, the Trump administration, too, Chris Wray said this.
GUTFELD: That's B.S. Don't play that with us. No one believed it.
She then bizarrely tried to conflate the SPLC's alleged crimes, with what the FBI does.
TARLOV: This is a procedure that law enforcement does on every level, where they flip people within organizations.... and we know the FBI does this, so that's the problem?
Gutfeld wasn't the only one angered by Tarlov's analogy, as Kennedy went after Tarlov and the media.
KENNEDY: That is one of the tools that the mainstream left media is trying to use to defend Southern Poverty Law Center, saying well, they were doing what the FBI does. The FBI uses criminal informants in order to prosecute criminals. The Southern Poverty Law Center was paying their enemies in order to raise money off of the existence of our enemies.
TARLOV: To give information to the FBI so they could do something.
GUTFELD:: Do you actually believe what you are saying?
TARLOV: Yes.
And Jesse Watters addressed the lunacy of Tarlov's claims.
WATTERS: The FBI does not pay crime bosses, okay? The FBI doesn't do this. The FBI doesn't pay people to commit crimes, that blows the case up, okay, it is called entrapment. It's illegal. This is a charity, it's not the FBI.
