he United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are different organizations. The former is government-based and the latter a private, non-profit organization. Their missions, however, are — or at least appear to be—one and the same: the protection of the most vulnerable members of society, including African Americans, from white racial violence. But despite this striking similarity in mission, the DOJ has recently investigated and indicted the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges that rather than pursue its stated aim of dismantling racial hate groups, the SPLC actually supported these groups by paying informants who were group members, and thus defrauded donors and federally insured banks.

The indictment is the first of its kind against an organization that has historically worked closely with the DOJ — the same DOJ that has now indicted it — to dismantle hate groups and prevent racial violence against African Americans. The similarity in origins of the DOJ and the SPLC, despite their respective beginnings separated by more than a century, is as noble as it is remarkable. It says much about the nature of authentic moral values, most significantly that they transcend space and time.

Regrettably, morality, too often, is no match for politics. Right and wrong will quickly take a backseat to right and left, as a “might makes right” approach of expediency to maintain political power replaces the importance of a nobility of mission. Has that happened in the unprecedented indictment against the SPLC? Has right and left replaced right and wrong? If so, does such ideological posturing signal the final expulsion of morality from the American ethos? Can morality return to the public square and restore public confidence in such a vital American institution as the DOJ? The urgency of these questions is undeniable.

In other words, the SPLC understood that despite the letter of the law changing, the spirit of the people, their hearts and minds, lagged far behind federal legislation.

This raises the question of whether morality can be legislated. It cannot. But the law can, as Martin Luther King has argued, prevent us from harming one another. Morality cannot be legislated. But it is a moral imperative that the law protect people, especially the most vulnerable among us, which the SPLC, consistent with the origin of the DOJ, intended to do.

Eight years of the Obama presidency showed us just how badly racism remains entrenched in both American institutions and social and political life. From racist caricatures of President Obama and his family, to the fabrications about the illegitimacy of his citizenship, a resurgence of extremist, racist, right-wing political ideology, formerly relegated to the periphery of American politics, aided by the proliferation of social media and “alternative news” platforms, became mainstream. Aiding this transition from the margins to the mainstream was the political rhetoric of the ultimate anti-Obama in Donald Trump. He led the lie about President Obama’s citizenship, and threw many other ethnic groups under the bus along the way.

Trump’s rhetoric appealed to a segment of the American electorate who have committed themselves to the racist logic of the infamous Dred Scott decision that America was intended for whites only. Regrettably, even some future lawyers believe that today, such as Preston Damsky, a white law student who wrote a research paper arguing that Dred Scott represents the correct view of the Constitution. He was recognized with an award for his overall performance in the class!

The reemergence of extremist right-wing ideology has provoked a series of reactions from the political left that have done little more than foment outrage, leading to an exchange of ideological brickbats without any meaningful changes in public policy. Instead, there is one unfruitful exchange after another, partisan “investigations” into conduct of political opponents, and yes, even a displacement of moral missions of the DOJ and SPLC in the interest of furthering ideological political agendas. Morality, however, demands much more of us.

When one reads the indictment against the SPLC, it is difficult to see the coherence in the government’s legal position, which seems to be that the SPLC, in paying operatives of racist organizations to turn their backs on those organizations to help destabilize them, is committing fraudulent acts. Therefore, argues the government, the SPLC is criminally misleading its donors into thinking that their donations are helping to dismantle these organizations when they are actually helping to keep them afloat through payments to informants who have turned on the organizations.

But does this logic withstand scrutiny? Indeed, if the SPLC solicits donations with the stated aim of dismantling racist, white-supremacist organizations, and then uses that money to divide the loyalty of members of those organizations, are they not contributing to the destabilization and downfall of those organizations? Do police undercover operations in internet chat rooms to catch sexual predators defraud taxpayers because police fabricate stories to catch sex offenders? And what about police undercover drug operations that use informants, often less than wholesome individuals, to catch high level drug traffickers? Are they too committing criminal fraud?

Prosecutors have often recited the old adage, “If you’re prosecuting the devil, you’ve got to go to hell to get the witnesses.” This is true, whether it be going to hell to get witnesses against the devils of pedophilia or those of drug kingpins.

Protecting the most vulnerable is noble and moral. Pursuit of political enemies based on ideology is power-driven politics. The indictment of the SPLC has occurred because we have replaced the morality of the former with the politics and ideology of the latter.

In the post-Watergate era, it has been understood that the DOJ operated independently of the president’s political agenda. Until recently, this policy has stood firm, enabling the government to remain free of vindictive criminal prosecutions and base indictments on the only two criteria that ought to matter: the law and the evidence against the defendant. But with repeated and open directives to DOJ personnel at the behest of President Trump himself, the current administration has markedly departed from this practice. It seems that the DOJ, which originated to protect the most vulnerable members of society, is now charged with vindicating the president’s grievances through the federal legal system. The DOJ has been transformed into the DOV (Department of Vengeance).