SPLC – Southern Poverty Law Center

One of America’s most influential “experts” on combating hate just got arrested on charges of fraudulently funneling cash to white supremacist groups and financing her romantic relationship with a leader of a neo-Nazi group.

In a 2021 testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Heidi Beirich declared, “There is no question that the major terrorism threat to the U.S. is coming from the far right.” That testimony forms part of her influence on federal policy, military policy, artificial intelligence companies, social media content moderation, and international advisory bodies.

Yet Beirich now stands accused of conspiring to create fake bank accounts to prop up the very extremism she has built a name for herself supposedly combatting.

The justice department on Wednesday arrested a leading expert on far-right extremism, charging her with financial crimes as part of the government’s ongoing case against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Federal prosecutors charged Heidi Beirich, who formerly served as the group’s chief financial officer, with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

“White supremacy is one of the worst things ever created by man” — Heidi Beirich, CFO SPLC

She just got arrested for funding the KKK pic.twitter.com/8wBuwt6csI

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 12, 2026

More …

(more…)

As if the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t already looking like a menace instead of a respected civil-rights outfit, now comes evidence that one of its top execs was sending donor cash to the white supremacist she was shacked up with.

To be fair, it’s long been obvious that the SPLC is a racket exploiting liberals (especially in the media) desperate for right-wing threats to condemn; the nonprofit raked in billions over the decades to support its (shoddy) research, including a “hate map” and database on supposed hate groups.

The SPLC’s new head honcho is big big big on “reparations”.

It turns out that the most generous funder of white supremacist groups in the United States was likely the Southern Poverty Law Center.

At least that’s what the Department of Justice’s superseding indictment against the SPLC alleges. The organization secretly paid informants to engage in the active promotion and funding of racist groups while denouncing and “fighting” the very same groups in public. The SPLC purportedly created fictitious entities to hide funding from their donors.

A top Southern Poverty Law Center official is accused of helping funnel $1.2 million in donor money to an informant in the National Alliance white supremacist group — who was also allegedly her lover.

The Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment against the SPLC accusing it of funneling donor cash to hate groups they were then telling donors they were fighting.

One figure, referred to as “Employee-2” in the indictment, is described as a “person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.”

h/t Patti Jo

We at VDARE always followed the lead of our old friend Paul Craig Roberts in believing that the bank fraud legislation that Congress cooked up in 1989–90, supposedly because of the War on Drugs and subsequently enhanced during the War on Terror, is a major infringement of liberty and a big step toward an American police state.

In April, shortly after the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Federalist explained here that the indictment was probably just a start and should be regarded as the tip of the iceberg. An active investigation continued, we wrote, and more legal developments should be expected. That was correct: A grand jury just returned a more detailed superseding indictment alleging that the SPLC has been pouring money into the groups it purports to oppose.

Since that educated guess turned out to be correct, here’s the next one: This new version of the indictment is also probably the tip of the iceberg, and there are still more developments to come. You’re probably going to wait a long time to find out what happens to the SPLC, and there are reasons to expect delay from both sides of the pending criminal case.

I was still learning how to be a father when the Southern Poverty Law Center came after me.

On a winter night during my corporate paternity leave in 2023, my Twitter started blowing up. A couple inconsequential kids were gloating. I had a sense of what it was. Someone from the SPLC had been snooping around my LinkedIn that week. Eventually, I surveyed the damage: The SPLC had published a hit piece targeting me and two better-known conservative figures for our professional relationships with the Danube Institute, a geopolitical think tank in Budapest. The piece suggested we had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). With the subtlety of a baboon, a D.C. lawyer clearly friendly to the SPLC asserted our contracts “seem to raise significant FARA concerns” and that my contract was the “most likely to require FARA registration.” His law firm even boasted about the analysis on its website.

The Liberals use the same tactics in Canada.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice and FBI were aware that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying “informants” in the KKK — and according to former Obama official Norm Eisen, that apparently means donors have nothing to be upset about.

“If these allegations are true, there will be consequences,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier promised Monday, announcing he has launched a probe into the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) “alleged deceptive and unfair practices related to charitable solicitations and fundraising.”

“The SPLC raises millions in charitable donations every year, while allegedly paying members and leaders within the very groups it purports to fight,” Uthmeier wrote on X.com, linking to a press release. “SPLC appears to be running a deceptive organization that pays informants to manufacture racism on its behalf.”

In recent weeks, I keep coming across new items that need constant double-checking, because they are so absurd that at first glance they appear made up. Last week, this story in particular caught my attention: On April 21, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The real Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) scandal isn’t just the indictment. The deeper scandal is that the FBI used a highly partisan activist group as an unelected, unvetted intelligence wing of the federal bureaucracy. For years, the bureau didn’t just consult the SPLC. It folded the group’s ideology into its threat assessments and other work products, then used those products to brand Americans as hateful or flag them as potential domestic violent extremists.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is in the news because the Trump administration has been investigating, and is now prosecuting, it for various kinds of malfeasance.

In 2025, shortly after Charlie Kirk was murdered, Kash Patel’s FBI “cut all ties” to the notorious left-wing espionage organization, which has spent years persecuting conservative groups like Kirk’s TPUSA, my former employer VDARE.com, and all immigration patriot groups, no matter how mainstream they are.