Washington, D.C. — Trump’s Justice Department is doubling down on its prosecution of one of America’s most storied civil rights organizations, the White House is moving to turn the federal grants process into a political loyalty test, and a right-wing think tank that helped gut DEI has a new target: the right to peacefully protest.
Trump’s DOJ Escalates Its Prosecution of the SPLC
The Trump Justice Department is not backing down from its specious prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that spent decades as one of the FBI’s most valuable partners against domestic terrorism. The DOJ obtained a superseding indictment that contained no new charges and named no new defendants from the original, which a grand jury returned in April. The SPLC has asked the court to dismiss the case as an unlawful vindictive prosecution. Its attorney, Abbe Lowell, noted that the DOJ appeared to share the superseding indictment with the press before it was unsealed by the court, calling it “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case.”
The SPLC spent decades bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan and sharing intelligence directly with the FBI. The Trump administration now wants to put the organization on trial for exactly that work, and is calling the counterterrorism program it once relied on a crime.
The White House Wants to Turn Federal Grants Into a Trump Political Loyalty Test
The Office of Management and Budget has published a 400-page proposal requiring senior political appointees to conduct “pre-issuance reviews” of every discretionary grant to determine whether it “demonstrably advances the President’s policy priorities.” Those appointees would be required to personally sign off on awards and explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers.
Before the proposal emerged, a White House memo instructed agencies to inventory grants to roughly four dozen targeted nonprofits, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Urban League. OMB has said that “grantees out of alignment may now be suspended or terminated.” This is OMB Director Russ Vought seeking to exert political control over billions of dollars in annual federal grants, telling every civil society organization in America that their funding now depends on their loyalty to the president.
The Manhattan Institute Is Coming for Peaceful Protesters
Having spent years drafting the blueprints for the Trump administration’s assault on DEI, the Manhattan Institute has a new target. The right-wing think tank is running a yearlong campaign to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor protest-related offenses as felonies carrying 18-month prison sentences, under the label of “civil terrorism.” They want to embed the word “terrorism” next to “peaceful protest” in statute, permanently tainting the most fundamental form of democratic participation.
Manhattan Institute Fellow Tal Fortgang began pushing the framing in a 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, and the campaign comes amid a broader administration effort to crack down on leftist organizations while recasting nonviolent civil disobedience as criminal conduct.
It’s the same pattern used by the Capital Research Center: build the theory in a think tank, shop it to friendly legislators, watch the administration adopt it. The right to peaceful protest has survived for 250 years in this country. The Manhattan Institute is trying to end it.
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