I know, I know. Once we all had it in our heads that the Southern Poverty Law Center was started to fight evil doers. It was a noble enough beginning, long, long ago.
But somehow, as those easily identified villains were vanquished and the dwindling remnants of an obviously racist cohort of a bygone era became less available for public demolition, they shifted targets. Built new categories. Renamed what used to be old irritants with scary, reworked labels.
The lucrative business of hate-grift would get away from them if there were no more racists to hunt down and pillory into oblivion. If they couldn't expose the newly identified and villainous 'right-wing extremism' - purposefully engineered to be a broad category - to the cleansing power of sunlight, how could they solicit funds? So the SPLC demonized more individuals and groups ever more creatively, indulging their natural inclination to use fascist, brutalist tactics to target and crush the unsuspecting and often completely innocent.
What they did rapidly became pretty unpalatable to freedom-loving Americans. Visiting financial and reputational ruin on someone who simply might have expressed a contrary opinion to that of the foaming-at-the-mouth ideologues running the SPLC.
All with the sheen of operating as a quasi-government agency. If you were fingered by the SPLC as a right-wing radical for guns, racism, religious phobias - pick your poison, hello. The very real possibility that your name was appearing on a watchlist in the bowels of the Hoover Building was essentially a given.
And very few souls had the wherewithal to fight the machine.
This held true until the machine started tearing itself apart, as so many of these rabid progressive institutions seem inevitably to do.
All that money and power is too tempting, and the wheels started coming off about eight years ago.
SPLC stokes fear of Trump because it is an extremely effective fundraising gimmick. In fiscal year 2017 they neared half a billion dollars in endowment, growing 35% from the year before. Credulous media continue to cite them as some authoritative source. https://t.co/wddCHlb3dI
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) March 23, 2019
But it got even worse than smack-talking around the girls in the office. As I wrote this past June, bona fide 'hate' for all the fake noose stories was getting tough to find.
...The SPLC raises money on hate. Sadly for them and lucky for the country, it really is true that actual hate is in short supply.
So much so that the venerable institution took to manufacturing and maintaining its own staff of bogeymen on call to keep the hate map bucks rolling in.
...The center’s more cunning strategy involves branding mainstream conservatives and Christians as “hate groups” and “anti-government extremists,” putting them on the map for the sin of disagreeing with the SPLC’s agenda.
That has the added bonus of delegitimizing the SPLC’s opponents—but it seems the center is running out of new groups to add. First, it was conservative Christians like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom. Then, it was opponents of illegal immigration, like the Federation on American Immigration Reform. Now, it’s Moms for Liberty, PragerU, Focus on the Family, and Turning Point USA. They’re on the cusp of adding the entire conservative movement to the map.
Then Trump got elected, Kash Patel hand-in-hand with the Justice Department, started rooting through rooms and burn bags, and holy smokes.
The country found out who and what these snarling charlatans were really spending all that donated KKK-ash on, right down to the crisp white hooded robes for the cross-burnings. Worse, when the two rubes they'd been paying wanted to leave, they upped the ante, appealing to the fellows' natural greed, and got them to stay as paid infiltrators.
The Southern Poverty Law Center paid reluctant white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members thousands of dollars in donor money to remain in the notorious hate groups — even making them whole for money spent on cross-burnings, the Justice Department alleged in a shocking superseding indictment filed Tuesday.
The feds initially charged the once-venerable civil rights organization in April with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and money laundering conspiracy. Tuesday’s superseding indictment, filed in Montgomery, Ala., federal court, lays out some of the stories of informants who were paid in money the SPLC raised from donors on the pretext of “exposing hate and injustice” and “fighting discrimination.”
Two Klan members, identified only as F-31 and F-32, came to the SPLC in 2010 in fear for their safety and wanting to leave the hate group, the indictment alleges.
Another shoe in that investigation has dropped today.
Former SPLC Intel Project Director Heidi Beirich arrested on fraud chargeshttps://t.co/x4K7i3ZlGo
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) August 12, 2026
What really makes this gross is that not only was this less-than-appealing woman the instrument of so much angst and suffering from the targeting her organization did to keep their Judas dollars flowing, but she was living with one of the 'right-wing extremists,' 'hate group members' her organization was bankrolling to frame innocent Americans.
In fact, she was reportedly the one writing the checks.
A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of White supremacist groups, one of whom she was allegedly living with and had a romantic relationship with at the time.
The woman, Heidi Beirich, previously ran the SPLC’s project tracking hate groups in the US and allegedly “oversaw payments of donors’ money” to people inside of these hate groups, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say she shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC’s payments.
“I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies’ names and make payments to individuals for reasons that that were not accurate as described,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference Wednesday. “This is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the US attorneys and the agents working the case will can keep on working it even after the initial indictment.”
What a nice girl.
...Despite her role in overseeing the payments — some of which were directed to an Imperial Wizard in the KKK — Beirich allegedly had a romantic relationship with one source who infiltrated a White Supremacy group and stole documents from for the SPLC, according to the indictment.
That person, prosecutors say, was paid over $1 million by the SPLC since 2007 and shared a bank account with Beirich which contained $140,000 from those payments.
Ms. Beirich's lawyer claims this is a 'witch hunt.'
I would say they caught one. Now, that would normally be catty and unkind, were it not for the sort of hunting the SPLC has been doing for decades.
Kash Patel says they got their woman.
Following an FBI investigation with our DOJ partners: today we are announcing a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Director of Intelligence, Heidi Beirich.
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 12, 2026
As alleged, Heidi Beirich was at the center of our ongoing investigation into SPLC and their…
As alleged, Heidi Beirich was at the center of our ongoing investigation into SPLC and their previously alleged criminal activity - where SPLC knowingly misled donors, who believed their money was being used to dismantle violent extremist organizations - when in fact, part of those donations were instead being used to pay senior leadership within those extremist groups.
According to the indictment and our investigation, Beirich played a primary role in this scheme. From at least 2007-2023, Beirich allegedly helped orchestrate this fraudulent activity worth approximately $4.2 million, conspiring with SPLC to defraud donors, obtaining money through these materially false and fraudulent pretenses and omissions to pay leadership of the very violent organizations SPLC claimed to oppose.
Beirich was arrested today - charged with crimes including wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
This is an ongoing investigation. This FBI will find anyone who exploits the trust of the American people and our financial system.
Ironically, on the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism page dedicated to her biography (as co-founder), Beirich is touted for all the things she is accused of writing checks to foment.
Isn't that neat how that works? She and her SPLC buddies have developed their own cottage anti-hate industry...
Heidi Beirich, Ph.D., is an expert on the American and European far right, including white supremacist, anti-immigrant, antigovernment, and other extremist movements. In 2020, Beirich co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) to monitor and counter increasingly transnational hate movements, particularly in areas of the world where capacity is limited to combat far-right movements that threaten human rights and democracy.
Beirich has testified in Congress on issues related to extremism in the military and among veterans and on the dangers of accelerationist and neo-Nazi movements. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol sought her testimony on the threat posed by the extremist Proud Boys and on the history of the rise of white supremacy in the U.S. Government agencies and tech companies have sought her advice on policies to combat hate speech, hate crimes, and domestic terrorism.
...Her expertise has been sought out by government agencies both domestically and abroad, and cited in major investigations of the far right produced by governments, organizations and coalitions working to combat the rising tide of hate and extremism globally. Beirich has also served as an expert witness in civil cases lodged against extremist organizations including the white supremacist Proud Boys.
...and she apparently got herself a right-wing extremist, hood-wearin' man and some cha-ching on the side to boot.
Who says hate doesn't pay?
When you've got the right connections, everything falls into place.
Until it falls apart.
