Two weeks ago, the United States Department of Justice issued further indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), this time against former top official Heidi Beirich, who is being accused of orchestrating a network of informants through the SPLC’s intelligence project.
Beirich is alleged to have diverted at least $140,000 to a joint bank account used to pay personal living expenses with the informant, according to the indictment. This is not the first in a string of allegations against the once-storied civil rights non-profit, which in April 2026 found itself the subject of an 11-count DOJ indictment that included wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The direct allegation? The SPLC through a network of so-called informants paid the very organizations the SPLC was supposed to be fighting against, then fundraised off of the violence from those organizations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Of particular interest to Virginians was $270,000 alleged to have been paid by the SPLC to an organizer of the 2017 Unite The Right riot in Charlottesville who co-ordinated transportation to and from Charlottesville:
Another “informant” was the fundraiser for the National Alliance, which the SPLC is accused of paying $1,000,000 to between 2014 and 2023. The chairman of the National Alliance was paid some $140,000. One, an officer within the National Socialist Movement, was allegedly paid $300,000 over the same time period. The leader of the National Socialist Movement? Paid $70,000 by the SPLC.
All in all, the SPLC is accused of funneling more than $4.1 million to right-wing hate groups according to the August indictment.
The SPLC’s turn from civil rights advocate to more extreme tactics have included including the Family Research Council in their SPLC Hate Group Map, who was in turn the target of a terrorist attack in 2012, pro-life pregnancy resource centers which have been attacked in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk who was assassinated in September 2025 after being targeted yet again by the SPLC.
In 2024 alone, SPLC raised $208 million with total assets of $822 million. By contrast before funneling cash to hate groups, the SPLC fundraising haul was a more modest $54.4 million in 2014 with $314 million in total assets.
The surge in SPLC fundraising after the 2017 Charlottesville riots has been illustrated by the Wall Street Journal:
Charity Watch — a nationally non-profit watchdog group — has given the SPLC an “F” because its war chest of three quarters of a billion dollars violates the watchdog’s policy of spending resources on the mission.
Paid Protesters and Political Theater: Exception or Template?
Of note to Virginians is why Charlottesville of all cities in the nation became a magnet for this sort of violence and hatred. Why Charlottesville, which endured not just one near riot where local citizens turned out in the thousands to oppose a few hundred neo-Nazis and Klansmen organized from across the nation? Why were the two groups allowed so close? Governor Terry McAuliffe never quite answered the question as to why Virginia State Police officers were told to stand down.
The 2017 Unite The Right riot soon thereafter somehow was known to local activists as a potential activity when hundreds of Citronella Nazis marched to Mr. Jefferson’s Rotunda and pushed towards the Jefferson Monument at its base. While a handful of activists huddled around the statue of Jefferson, so too did the tiki torch wielding rioters. One might even be forgiven for seeing a bit of the theatrical as the images of that night were recorded, pounced upon (to borrow the terminology of the Washington Post), and finally allegedly capitalized upon by the Southern Poverty Law Center — which allegedly paid people to bring people there.
The aftermath of the 2017 riots and the subsequent “Summer of Love” riots in 2020 continue to have their imitators on college campuses and in public forums. Students rallying for Ukraine one month suddenly flip to desiring to Free Palestine the next, only to carry American flags the next month before reverting back to Palestinian keffiyehs as the new N95 masks. Protests against federal law enforcement adopts the posture of direct action bordering violence. Tent cities become the new Occupy movement. Assassinations become the new form of protest. Soros backed Commonwealth Attorneys refuse to enforce the laws or plead felonies down to misdemeanors.
This practice of leveraging protests to effect change outside of legal normative behavior isn’t a new tactic. What were the Solidarity protests in Poland if not backed by the AFL-CIO among others? Americans have used such tactics with great effect, first with the Berlin Wall and next with the Velvet Revolution as the Iron Curtain collapsed.
The Arab Spring was American soft power at work. Tahrir Square saw American influence first in taking down Mubarak and finally — after realizing the mistake made with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood — the restoration of sanity with Al-Sisi as president of Egypt. Who helped the Maidan Uprising in the Ukraine but a steady stream of visitors such as U.S. Senator John McCain and Vitali Klitschko? When the pro-Russian government sent in the riot police, from out of the blue — 14,000 armed militia stood ready to fight back. Hong Kong democracy protests mimicked the same strategies seen in Seattle, then mimicked the same methods used during the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots. Pro-Palestinian protests? Gee, imagine that. How many times have Iranians protested against their government in the name of democracy?
Should anyone be naive enough to believe these protests come for free? When these strategies are weaponized against Americans, should we be surprised?
As Always, Follow The Dark Money
The long lesson here is that protests are rarely non-coordinated events. No Kings? In the words of Bob Dylan, you gotta serve somebody.
Perhaps the defunding of USAID was an adjacent event to the relative calm we are seeing today? One can merely speculate at such things, yet interesting to most of us is the omnipresent link between emotion and the lucrative.
Should the indictment against the SPLC prove demonstrable — and the DOJ either has the aces or they do not — then we are seeing but a tiny crack in the armor plate of the professional protesting class. If the narrative proves true, the mere fact that the SPLC held both ends of the Charlottesville Unite The Right protests should be one of the loudest wake-up calls in American politics, shattering a narrative long decade that Democrats held dearly to as to morally justify riots, violence, and cancel culture.
Even assassinations are on the table, with people such as Luigi Mangione lauded and Charlie Kirk openly mocked. Even the near assassination of President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania revealed the characters of too many of our friends and neighbors.
Yet Virginians in particular should be offended that the SPLC chose Charlottesville as the centerpiece for their double-dealing and stoking of hatred. Not only did their greed cost the life of Heather Heyer, these protests cost the lives of two Virginia State Police officers who died in the line of duty — Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen III and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates — whose names are rarely if ever mentioned by the predictable few more than happy to scrawl ACAB on everything from gas pumps to bathroom stalls. How edgy. How droll.
Of course, these are all allegations in an indictment from a grand jury. Yet let’s hope there are enough people of sound mind and good will where — if the Department of Justice is correct and the SPLC is found guilty — minds on the political left might change just a bit. Maybe — just maybe — the SPLC-fueled riots of 2017 took in a lot of good people. Maybe we should all be a bit angrier about being duped by professional agitators seeking to make a buck? Maybe our politics might change if we quit listening to and rewarding those who manipulate the worst rather than cultivate the best?
