After baseless attacks on the SPLC, Pastor Joel Webbon says America needs “more racism”
His comments, tied to the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment, expose a white Christian movement eager to rewrite history
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Christian Nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon insists “America does not have a racist problem” and that, “if anything, we could probably use a little bit more racism in America.” If that strikes you as a wildly ignorant rant from someone who slept through every single grade school history class, you’d be absolutely right.
But he’s not alone in saying things like this. Conservatives like him are whitewashing history even more than usual on the back of an indictment against a group that’s been fighting hate groups for decades now.
For the past week, conservatives have been downright giddy over the Trump-controlled Justice Department indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center. After years of watching many of their organizations accurately labeled “hate groups” by the SPLC—not because they’re merely anti-LGBTQ but because they spread untrue and harmful lies about the groups they rail against—they’re eager to see the SPLC destroyed by the Trump administration.
The problem is that the indictment means very little and the actual case against the group is extremely thin.
The entire case against the SPLC, according to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, revolves around a couple of major allegations: that the SPLC was financially propping up the very groups they claimed to fight against, and that it lied to banks about who they were in order to make those payments. That’s why the 11-count indictment includes charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The more nuanced understanding is that the SPLC knew that they could learn more about a variety of hate groups if they had someone on the inside who could feed them information about upcoming plans or attacks. They paid several of those informants to give them this information, which was also shared with the FBI. And to protect everyone’s cover, and to make sure the money wasn’t traced back to the SPLC, they created fake companies to make the payments. (It’s unclear if the FBI was aware of this.)
The government argues that this method deceived the banking system as well as donors. They need to fight the SPLC on behalf of liberals who love them!
At a press conference earlier this week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche focused largely on the wire fraud charges, saying that between 2014 through 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center paid at least $3 million to eight different informants who were affiliated with groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nation.
To prove wire fraud, the government must show at trial that the Southern Poverty Law Center intentionally tried to fleece its donors and that those misstatements or omissions of facts were material.
If the SPLC told donors it wanted to “dismantle white supremacy,” but paid hate group insiders to help take them down, is that deception? Not if I’m a donor. Seems like a perfectly smart way to do that kind of work. That’s why experts say this case isn’t strong and may even be dismissed before any kind of trial.
But conservatives have spent the past week arguing that the indictments prove the SPLC was fueling hate, not stopping it. Blanche said the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Others are going even further, arguing that these supposed hate groups never existed at all. Some conspiracy theorists claimed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was a false flag:
Those attempts to pretend violent hate groups never existed aren’t getting very far, though, in part because there’s video proof of the violence and some of the people involved are openly confessing to what they did. Even white nationalist Jared Taylor said the indictment “seems hokeyed up to me.”
Joel Webbon doesn’t care about any of those pesky details. Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas (not far from Austin), is the sort of guy who believes false rape allegations would end if we just “publicly execute a few women,” that white parents should teach their children to avoid Black people, and that in his ideal world Jewish people wouldn’t “be able to serve in public office.”
In response to the SPLC indictment, Webbon says it’s proof that racism simply doesn’t exist. As if the organization made it up from scratch in the 1970s.
Right Wing Watch has the clip and transcript:
"It's so clear that America does not have a racist problem, at least in terms of like pure, baseless, mindless hatred towards minority people," Webbon said on his program last Friday.
…
"There's a lot of money to be made in slaying dragons or pretending to slay dragons that have already been slain," he continued. "Either the dragon doesn't exist at all, and that's why it's lucrative, or—I'm just going to throw this out there—the dragon's actually good and it's actually the king who's commissioned the knights and they're actually the bad guys. This whole witch hunt for white supremacists who hate brown people simply because they're brown, the reason why that's so lucrative and there are NGOs with millions and millions of dollars for that is because the white people in America are predominantly, on the whole, not racist. White people in America are, if anything, I think, too trusting, too gullible, toxic empathy. White people in America are like, 'You know what? I know that this will kill my grandchildren, but can we just import half of the country of Haiti, just to be nice?' So not only is racism non-existent, if anything, we could probably use a little bit more racism in America."
As Right Wing Watch points out, Webbon himself is living proof that racism is alive and well, especially in conservative Christianity.
He’s said he doesn’t trust Black doctors, that it’s Black people’s “fault” they’ve ever been oppressed, that he would tell his daughter not to marry anyone who’s Black, and it’s fair to generalize that all Black people are lazy.
In response to RWW’s clip, Webbon issued one correction: Racism was indeed real, he said. But white people were the victims of it:
There’s a reason he and his Christian allies are making these kinds of comments. If they can convince conservatives that racism is somehow over (if it ever existed at all), then any policies that harm marginalized groups can be reframed as neutral or justified. When Webbon says “a little bit more racism” would be beneficial, he’s trying to normalize his own bigotry.
If this were one fringe guy with no audience, maybe it would be forgettable, but he’s not. He’s part of a white conservative Christian movement that has spent years minimizing systemic racism, rewriting American history, and reframing civil rights advocacy as the real threat. They’ve already been successful getting their bigotry enacted in red states and it’s widespread in pockets of social media. That’s why it must be countered at every turn.
America needs less Webbon. It sure as hell needs less religion.
Further Thought:
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑢𝑠! 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑢𝑠! 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑢𝑠! 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑢𝑠!
This is what I hear from Webbon and his ilk, really. He's yet one more scared-ass little white boy who cannot deal with diversity and thinks that once the blacks and the Jews take over, that they'll do to him what he and his kind did to them.
He's a pathetic little twit who deserves neither pity nor consideration.