Astroturfing Hate

Local gumshoe reporter for NewsChannel 5 Footman Phil Williams launched his Confronting Hate series nearly two years ago detailing the results of a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) study on racist flyering.

On the heels of yesterday’s grand jury indictment of the SPLC on eleven counts including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and money laundering, it’s worth looking back at how intertwined Williams’ Confront Hate beat and his new Substack, Hate Comes to Main Street, is with the embattled organization.

The SPLC, a nonprofit self-styled “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,” has nearly $1 billion in total assets under its control. The crux of the indictment rests on the SPLC paying out more than $3 million in donor funds to informants embedded in various groups between 2014 and 2023 behind the backs of their donors.

Part of the SPLC’s mission is the cataloguing of various “hate groups” across the country. In their reports, the classification system lumps ideologically disparate groups under "extremism,” throws them all into one interface, and tarnishes the reputation of a wide swath of organizations by association. For example, a group like Moms for Liberty, classified as an “antigovernment extremist group,” sits alongside the Ku Klux Klan.

In a press release on the indictment, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated, “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” Capturing the spirit of the allegations, National Review pithily titled their article on the matter ‘SPLC Indicted for Gain-of-Function Research into Racism.’

Williams’ evolution from a local, policy oriented, investigative reporter to an instrument of narrative creation did not occur in a vacuum. By his own telling on his Substack, Williams fell into it by accident after reporting on the trainwreck candidacy of Gabrielle Hanson in the Franklin mayor’s race.

If you were at all familiar with the SPLC’s work at the time of Williams’ shift, his coverage would’ve stuck out to you as directly reflective of the nonprofit’s efforts. As I said early on in Williams’ foray, “These stories fall neatly into the dominant narrative of ‘increasing white supremacy’ set by media outlets like MSNBC and the New York Times—not to mention NGOs like the Southern Poverty Law Center—in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election.”

The mostly directionless reporting saw the Footman wander as far as two hours outside of Nashville to find figures with podcasts who said offensive things. Most of his reporting consists entirely of excerpts pulled from these podcasts.

An early story in the series that is instructive about how much Williams pulls from the SPLC’s work is headlined ‘A white supremacist warned me to comply with his demands or else. Now, he's in federal custody.’

The story details the identification and arrest of a 20-year-old active duty soldier for making veiled threats against the Footman. A New Yorker article from two days prior on far right activity in the country explicitly credits the SPLC and senior researcher Jeff Tischauser with determining the man’s identity. In Williams’ reporting on the incident, he quotes extensively from Tischauser, the first of many collaborations between the two.

After Williams’ reliance on the SPLC became a consistent and predictable pattern, he began laundering their preferred narrative around pending litigation for them. In a June 2025 story on the SPLC’s suit against the Goyim Defense League, Williams lazily dumps the group’s press release in its entirety.

In December 2025, he covered a second SPLC lawsuit involving a Middle Tennessee resident, quoting the SPLC deputy legal counsel Scott McCoy who congratulates the Footman for effectively deplatforming the target.

“Deplatforming these folks from things like dot-com, dot-org, dot-net — which are the big ones, right? — is actually a really meaningful thing to do because what we're worried about is them having a broad platform in order to traffic in this hate,” McCoy said.

Williams has consistently invoked the authority of the watch group to bolster his case that the people he is reporting on are not just marginal weirdos, but dangerous extremists intent on harming society and indicative of a broader trend.

In response to news of the indictment, Williams dutifully and predictably typed out a defense of the nonprofit and celebrated the “incredibly passionate people” that work there, reminding us what earned him the name Footman in the first place.