With the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) now subject to an 11-count indictment over its alleged past use of paid informants, podcaster and Trump impressionist Shawn Farash on Friday revealed to The Tennessee Star how its 2022 designation of his political group as an “antigovernment” extremist organization heralded death threats and harassment that contributed to his relocation from New York to Tennessee.
Long Island Loud Majority, co-founded by Farash in 2021, was listed by SPLC in 2022 and 2023. A spokesman for the Alabama-based organization told Newsday in 2023 that Farash’s group employed “typical antigovernment rhetoric about false conspiracies regarding a supposed tyrannical government and masking it with patriotic language,” and on the SPLC website, it remains listed as among other “antigovernment groups” that purportedly create a nationwide “antidemocratic hard-right movement.”
According to Farash, the SPLC designation quickly became political fodder for New York Democrats to use against Loud Majority. His chief critic was former State Senator Anna Kaplan, who published an entry about the group on her State Senate website, which remains live despite her political defeat in November 2022.
“It gave our political opponents, such as State Senator Anna Kaplan, who wound up losing her seat because of her comments… a lot of ammunition that they could use against us,” said Farash.
“That’s when things got bad, because then we started receiving the death threats. Then we started receiving the harassment,” he said. “Then we started hearing, you know, the grumblings, ‘Do we want to be associated with these people because they’re on the SPLC list?'”
Farash told The Star, “In terms of, you know, why did I leave New York? The politics is the overarching umbrella, but that was definitely a contributing factor.”
The specific SPLC list that includes Farash’s group also names dozens of seemingly unrelated organizations, including Moms for Liberty, the Constitution Party, the libertarian project We Are Change, and Prager University.
According to the SPLC, these groups are tied together through their mutual belief, “the federal government is tyrannical.” They all additionally “traffic in conspiracy theories about an illegitimate government of leftist elites seeking a ‘New World Order.'” The movement largely consists of, “sovereign citizens, militias, overt conspiracy propagandists and constitutional sheriff groups,” the SPLC further claims.
Speaking to The Star on Friday, Farash said the inclusion of Loud Majority always made little sense, as his grassroots political group was working to elect candidates to political offices, making it, at worst, neutral on the existence of the government.
“They called us anti-government extremists, which was interesting because we were actually getting people elected into government, right? Like school board elections, library board elections, county executive seats, county legislative seats,” said Farash. “We were not necessarily pro-government, right? But, like, we were getting people elected. It’s not like we wanted to see the system burn down. We just wanted better leadership, better elected officials.”
With the SPLC now under federal indictment, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI accusing the group of paying millions in donor dollars to informants in order to manufacture hate, Farash has celebrated publicly, calling the SPLC a “sham of an organization,” which is finally being held accountable by the Trump administration.
Speaking to The Star, he said the indictment reinforced suspicions about the SPLC that he formed in response to their 2022 designation of Loud Majority.
Farash explained, “We kinda said, if the SPLC declared victory over extremism, right – they took down the Klan – they had this huge message and this huge goal about extremism and hate and all that stuff. Well, if they admit, mission accomplished, they won’t get any more donations, you know? We always figured they were, maybe not funding the problem, but trying to create a problem where one didn’t exist.”
According to Farash, the SPLC’s treatment of his grassroots political organization was a good example of creating a problem where none existed.
“So, for example, pointing at us with Loud Majority and saying, ‘They’re an antigovernment extremist group,’ and then using that entire list that they put together to say, ‘This is why we need your support, so we can keep an eye on folks like this.'” Farash told The Star, “We figured that they were kind of making mountains out of molehills for the sake of their own existence. If they claim mission accomplished, now there’s no reason for people to donate to them anymore.”
Still, Farash added, “But the fact that we’re seeing that they, according to the indictment, directly sent payments to members of the Klan and organizers of the Charlottesville rally, I mean, that was, that was pretty surprising.”
Now living in the Nashville area, Farash hosts Ungoverned on the Live from America podcast network and has appeared as the guest host for The Dan Bongino Show. After lending his voice to satirical commercials for the Tennessee retailer, DT McCall’s, Farash in 2024 revealed to Michael Patrick Leahy, the editor-in-chief of The Star, that he first learned of his ability to create viral impressions of President Donald Trump while bowling.
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Tom Pappert is a 2025 recipient of the Dao Prize and the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star. He also reports for the Star News Network. Follow Tom on X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Shawn Farash” by Shawn Farash.
