Solidarity in the Face of Intimidation

What gives us reason to believe in these difficult times for our democracy? In Hope in the Dark, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman lifts up hope and bright spots—drawing attention to forward movement and the tangible signs of progress being made toward a democracy that enables all people to thrive.

When I laid out four tests for our democracy in March to introduce this column, I did not expect Test 3 to come into focus this quickly.

The third test asks whether civil society leaders and organizations will remain free and independent. I wrote that a free and independent civil society—the faith communities, labor unions, community groups, and public charities through which people actually do the work of self-government—is the beating heart of our democracy. I expected the test to unfold gradually, through pressure on the legal defense infrastructure and quiet attrition at the edges of the field. I did not expect it to arrive in a single fortnight, in three high-profile cases, each focused on a different part of civil society.

In a span of about two weeks, the Department of Justice secured an 11-count indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on charges that legal experts across the political spectrum have called defective and likely to be dismissed. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered Disney’s eight ABC-owned television stations to file for years-early renewal of broadcast licenses within days of the president and first lady demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke. And in the same week, the DOJ secured a second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a deleted Instagram photo of seashells on a beach. Former federal prosecutors have called the indictment remarkably weak.

None of these cases is built to win. That is what I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it is the part most easily missed.

The Point of a Flimsy Indictment

A flimsy indictment that is eventually dismissed still does its work. The work is signaling—to every other comedian, former official, and civil rights organization—that the cost of being noticed is high enough that maybe it would be wiser to soften the joke, decline the interview, table the report, or simply stay quiet for a while. Timothy Snyder, historian and author of On Tyranny, calls this anticipatory obedience and identifies it as the first lesson of the 20th century. It remains the cheapest tool in the authoritarian kit because the targets do most of the work themselves. You do not have to actually punish a critic if the example of someone else’s punishment causes a thousand quieter critics to edit themselves preemptively. Self-censorship scales in a way that prosecution does not.

Of the three cases, the SPLC indictment is the one I have been watching most closely, because it is being used as a proof of concept. (Note: SPLC Action is a current grantee of Democracy Fund Voice.) The charges allege that, between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paid informants who had infiltrated white supremacist groups and concealed those payments from donors and banks—and that this constitutes fraud by an organization whose mission is to dismantle hate groups. Former federal prosecutors interviewed by CBS News have called the indictment legally stretched and likely vulnerable to dismissal before trial. The organization that took the Klan to court and bankrupted the United Klans of America is now charged, in effect, with being soft on the Klan. The absurdity is the point. The absurdity is what makes the message legible to everyone else: If they can do this to SPLC, they can do this to you.

A flimsy indictment that is eventually dismissed still does its work. The work is signaling…that the cost of being noticed is high enough that maybe it would be wiser to soften the joke, decline the interview, table the report, or simply stay quiet for a while.

What has surprised me is how quickly the message has traveled through private institutions that most of us thought of as neutral infrastructure.

Within days of the indictment, the charitable arms of three of the largest donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors in the country—Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and the Schwab-affiliated DAFgiving360 —began blocking their account holders from directing grants to SPLC. The reasons given were nearly identical, and entirely procedural: Their policies give them the right to pause donations to organizations under federal indictment.

I want to be plain about what this means, because the procedural framing obscures what is at stake. An indictment is an allegation, not a conviction. SPLC remains a 501c3 organization in good standing. It is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions today. And yet three of the largest pass-through vehicles for individual US philanthropy have decided that a charge from this DOJ—a charge legal experts have called defective on its face—is sufficient grounds to cut a 50-year-old civil rights organization off from its donors during the precise moment it needs them most.

There is a particular irony here. For years SPLC was one of the leading voices urging exactly these institutions to stop facilitating donations to hate groups through their DAFs. The institutions that once relied on SPLC’s expertise to make their own giving programs more responsible are now using a spurious fraud allegation to shut SPLC out.

The danger is not only what this does to SPLC, or to Jimmy Kimmel, or to James Comey. The danger is that it is a playbook. If the only thing required to defund a civil rights organization is for the DOJ to bring a charge, however weak, then the administration has been handed an extraordinarily powerful tool, and the price of using it is essentially zero. Every organization the administration decides it does not like becomes a target.

This is the part where I want to share about what gives me hope—because I do have it, and I want to explain why.

The hope is not abstract. It comes from evidence we now have because other institutions facing similar pressure have already run the experiment for us.

The Cause for Hope

Resistance, organized and legally defended, has been working.

Last year, the Trump administration issued executive orders against major law firms whose lawyers had represented disfavored clients. Nine of the most prestigious firms in the country made deals, agreeing collectively to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for causes the administration favored, in exchange for an unenforceable promise to be left alone. Four firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—sued instead. By March, the DOJ signaled an interest in dropping its appeals after losing in district court four times in a row. The firms that fought won. The firms that capitulated lost partners and clients, are bound by deals they cannot fully escape, and have watched their reputations within the legal profession suffer in ways that could take a generation to repair.

The same pattern played out at universities. Columbia, Brown, and others negotiated quickly when federal funding was frozen, paying hundreds of millions of dollars and accepting sweeping concessions. Harvard fought back in court and, in September, won a decisive ruling that the administration’s funding freeze was illegal. The case is on appeal and the larger battle is not over. But the contrast is unmistakable. The institution that resisted has so far won where it has been heard. The institutions that settled are now living with the terms of agreements that limit their independence in ways that will outlast any one administration.

I sit with these examples because they tell me something about what is actually happening beneath the noise. Giving in to the administration does not buy safety. It buys a price tag for the next demand. Resistance, organized and legally defended, has been working.

That is the lesson I think our sector now has to absorb, and quickly, because the same choice the law firms and the universities faced is now in front of philanthropy.

I have been telling colleagues these past few weeks that what is being asked of us is not complicated, even if it is not easy. We need to make our expectations of DAF sponsors explicit, public, and accompanied by the willingness to move money. A policy that automatically blocks giving on the basis of a federal indictment, regardless of merit and context, is not neutral compliance. In an environment where the DOJ is being used to pursue political opponents, such a policy is an active subsidy for that pursuit. The charitable arms of Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab are large institutions, and large institutions move when their largest customers tell them to. A growing group of philanthropic leaders is signing a public statement of solidarity with SPLC calling for exactly that, and I would invite you to add your name. The San Francisco Foundation has already publicly invited DAF holders to transfer their assets there. Other community foundations and mission-aligned sponsors will follow if donors lead.

We also need to fund the defense infrastructure that makes resistance possible in the first place. SPLC has hired strong counsel and filed a discovery motion, and it will need sustained support through what is likely to be a long fight. But the deeper need is support for the broader infrastructure—like the Democracy Protection Network, the Democracy Security Project, the legal organizations doing rapid response work for civil society groups under attack. I wrote in March that this infrastructure was facing a funding gap as it tried to grow to meet the scale of the threats. That gap has not yet closed. These organizations are the load-bearing walls of an independent civil society, and the people they protect are precisely the people whose own funding is being squeezed. They cannot fund their defenders. We have to.

I want to say a brief word about the FCC’s threats against ABC, even though it is not the central case here, because I think it belongs in the same frame and I expect it to be back in this column soon. A federal regulator does not get to use license review as punishment for jokes the first lady does not like, and the timing of an “accelerated” review the day after the president called for a comedian’s firing strains any innocent reading. With the 2026 midterms approaching, the willingness of broadcasters to cover this administration honestly is part of the election integrity question, not separate from it. Test 3 and Test 4—assessing whether we have free and fair elections—are bleeding into each other, which is part of why this moment feels different from earlier ones. I will have more to say about that as the year unfolds.

The Choice to Make Right Now

The hope I keep returning to is grounded. It is grounded in the fact that the law firms that stood up won. It is grounded in the fact that Harvard has won where it has been heard. It is grounded in the fact that SPLC has not flinched, has hired counsel, and has been met with a wave of solidarity from civil society leaders and from several major community foundation publicly inviting donors to vote with their assets. None of this guarantees the outcome. All of it suggests something simple and important: The strategy of intimidation works only when its targets, and the institutions adjacent to its targets, agree to be intimidated.

If our sector decides—visibly, collectively, with money attached—that we will not allow our giving infrastructure to be weaponized against the civil society organizations we exist to support, then the playbook breaks. The administration cannot prosecute every nonprofit it dislikes. It cannot indict its way through a coalition. What it is counting on is that each of us, individually, will calculate that the smart move is to keep our heads down.

Anticipatory obedience is a choice. So is standing up for one another.

I will keep watching the four tests as the year unfolds, and I will keep writing about what I see. As ever, I welcome your responses, your critiques, and your own hopes in the dark.