SPLC

American Free Press Panel Discussion on the SPLC Indictment

The Department of Justice recently announced that a federal grand jury in Alabama has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with multiple counts of wire and bank fraud. Talk radio host James Edwards assembled a special panel of attorneys and activists and asked them to express their thoughts about the indictment.

To ensure a diversity of perspectives, these expert contributors were asked to share their initial reactions and personal experiences with the SPLC and were otherwise encouraged to focus on aspects of this development they believed readers would find most compelling.

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Glen Allen, Esq., Chief Legal Officer and Director of the Free Expression Foundation (FEF): I was a victim – one of many – of the odious SPLC’s fraudulent and criminal conduct. In 2016, the SPLC, led by the hateful Hedi Beirich, orchestrated a campaign against me with the aim and successful result of having me fired from the Baltimore Law Department, impairing my family and social relationships, and sullying my reputation as an attorney. What was my crime in the reptilian eyes of the SPLC and Beirich? Just this: certain perfectly legal associations decades prior with Dr. William Pierce and the National Alliance, plus – horrors! – my attendance at a Holocaust revisionist conference on National Alliance property. And how did Beirich and the SPLC learn of these aspects of my private life? By bribing or otherwise illegally inveigling a National Alliance employee to turn over confidential information regarding me and others to the SPLC.

I fought back. I sued Beirich and the SPLC in federal court, alleging multiple causes of action. The court, however, dismissed my complaint on the rationale that the facts I alleged – and I alleged in detail the SPLC’s odious and illegal tactics – were not “plausible.” So, at one level, I feel vindicated by the DOJ’s indictment, which confirms numerous incidents of SPLC’s criminal behavior, including its illegal manipulation of the National Alliance employee as set forth in my complaint.

On another level, I remain disappointed and frustrated at how our legal system treated me and other SPLC victims, failing to give us the impartial justice to which we are entitled. The system did not rise to the occasion but sank to a shallow political Wokism that for many of us will always tarnish our view of the judiciary. What’s next in this SPLC saga? You may be assured that I and other legal minds in FEF’s milieu will zealously investigate which old claims can be revived and which new claims can be pursued against the SPLC as a result of the DOJ litigation.

Lydia Brimelow, President of the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation and half of the husband-wife team that ran VDare: My only question about the SPLC indictment is, what does this mean for the Historic American Nation? There are several facets of the answer that particularly interest me.

1. Does it damage the SPLC? Undeniably. Even if a large portion of their donors rally around and they drum up support to defend themselves against “persecution,” a flaw has been revealed. It will have repercussions. Not only will some portion of their donors lose enthusiasm, but the ability for our enemies to use the SPLC as their weapon of choice in Cancel Culture battles has been profoundly handicapped. And who knows, some of them might even go to jail. A girl can dream!

2. Does it benefit the SPLC or any of the Leftist with whom they are in league? They were hiding these transactions for a reason. If they thought the exposure would help their cause it would have been in their public communications. Even in the worst case for us – they beat the charges – great! It’s still an ugly clean-up job. The more resources they waste the better. Best case scenario for us…could be historic.

3. Does it damage the Historic American Nation? Not directly. It is extremely annoying that some influential voices of the mainstream Right are using the SPLC indictments to falsely claim that Unite the Right was a hoax, and it is worth correcting them. On the one hand, it shows how profoundly uninvested in our people they are. On the other hand, the distance (however inappropriate given the facts) that Fake News creates between the massive smear job that Charlottesville turned out to be, may permit some normal Americans to reconsider their fear in associating with right wing activism. Scapegoats have a purpose after all, and they do important psychological work. There is obviously the question of the paid informants and the people who were informed on, but I have to assume that if any juicy tidbit was shared, the SPLC has already cashed in on it. It’s all from years ago. The damage there is most likely already done.

4. Does it benefit the Historic American Nation? Yes. We should take any and all opportunities to celebrate, unconditionally. A federal indictment that will precipitate massive discovery against our enemies is an objective good, even if the SPLC manages to throw it off. In the best-case scenario – and I’m just talking about logical possibilities here, not realistic ones – the SPLC gets shut down.

Hope is a dangerous thing because disappointment is so painful. I have seen months lead to years when there are no victories. In that interminable desert, keeping the faith takes real effort. And, ultimately, God’s time is not our time – we may never see victory. But we’re called to fight, and we’re called to rally, and victory comes one win at a time.

So, pop some champagne and take this win, patriots! We’re joining you in a toast at Berkeley Springs Castle.

Kyle J. Bristow, Esq., Founder of Bristow Law, PLLC: I was pleasantly surprised when I first heard that the Southern Poverty Law Center had been indicted for having committed felonies. The SPLC has, for decades, viciously targeted and harassed law-abiding American citizens who espouse traditional, Christian, politically conservative, and patriotic ideals, and I am optimistic that the SPLC’s campaign of hate is coming to an end.

For far too long, the SPLC has smeared the reputations of people and organizations that are opposed to the SPLC’s degenerate, leftist worldview. Such smearing fosters a culture of self-censorship and ostracism at best, but violent crime at worst, which is antithetical to core American values. After a gunman walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in 2012 with the goal of gunning down Christians, the FRC president, Tony Perkins, said that he believed that the shooter was motivated by the SPLC.

Although I am hopeful that the SPLC will be convicted and severely punished, such as losing its tax-exempt status or even being dissolved as a corporate entity, the legal process itself will be horrifically painful for the SPLC. I enthusiastically anticipate Republican state and federal lawmakers conducting invasive investigations and holding public hearings to deeply delve into the political and financial misconduct of the SPLC. A law firm that litigates class action lawsuits may even file a major racketeering lawsuit against the SPLC to recover the hundreds of millions of dollars the SPLC has unlawfully and fraudulently received over the years, after engaging in systematic mail and wire fraud against its duped donors.

The SPLC is morally rotten to its core, and this is readily becoming apparent to the public. The federal criminal indictment and significant press coverage associated with the same are far more damaging to the SPLC than even the 2019 allegations of rampant sexual harassment, gender discrimination, race discrimination, and toxic work culture, which culminated in SPLC co-founder Morris Dees being terminated.

There is nothing “southern” about the SPLC. There is nothing “poverty” about the SPLC. And now it is clear that the SPLC may be more of a criminal syndicate than a “law firm.”

Sam Bushman, Owner of the Liberty News Radio Network and CEO of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA): For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has cast itself as America’s moral authority on hatred and extremism. That authority is collapsing under the weight of its own record.

Their most dangerous weapon is the “hate map.” In 2012, a gunman entered the Family Research Council headquarters intent on mass murder — after finding them listed on the SPLC’s website. He said so himself. That is not incidental. That is a direct, documented line between reckless labeling and real bloodshed.

I know this personally. I am a radio host, patriot advocate, and CEO of the CSPOA. Sheriff Richard Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association were falsely branded by the SPLC as advocates of violence. It was a lie. They retracted it — quietly. Accusations travel fast. Corrections don’t. Sheriff Mack and I have offered $10,000 to anyone producing credible evidence linking either of us to violence. No one has claimed it. Not one person.

The walls are closing in. State attorneys general have raised formal concerns about the SPLC’s conduct. Federal scrutiny has followed. Then came Atlanta — an SPLC attorney was arrested on domestic terrorism charges after Molotov cocktails were hurled at a police training facility. The organization that has spent decades branding others as dangerous now has answering of its own to do.

This is not a political disagreement. It is a reckoning. The same standard of accountability that the SPLC has weaponized against patriots, sheriffs, and citizens for decades must now be applied to them. Full investigation. Full transparency. Prosecution where the evidence demands it. The rule of law has no exceptions. Not even for those who built a career deciding who deserves to be called dangerous.

Sam Dickson, Esq.: The indictment is greatly overestimated in the minds of our adherents. It is thin soup that charges the SPLC with technical violations of bank regulations. The “crimes” seem improbable. Since when have donors been entitled to a line-by-line breakdown of the activities of the group getting the donation?

Hasn’t it been pretty much common knowledge that the SPLC plants agents in organizations it targets and bribes officers and members of such organizations to steal information so the SPLC can use it to damage the professional careers of members of such organizations?

The indictment conceals the identities of the sleazeballs who took the bribes, which, to me, indicates the government’s desire to pull its punches. I am pessimistic that we will ever learn the identities of the plants and the bribed informants.

The indictment also fuels the misleading narrative currently being pushed by cuckservatives that by bribing members of these organizations to provide the SPLC with information with which to harm the careers of adherents, the SPLC was “financing hate.”

In a sane society (not one like ours), the SPLC would be a laughingstock. The SPLC is a parody of the liberals’ parody of Senator Joseph McCarthy. For three generations, liberals have ridiculed McCarthy for “guilt by association.” The SPLC practices guilt by association (it calls it “links” to avoid triggering memories in the atrophied brains of liberals) on meth.

The “links” used by the SPLC to smear its targets include geographic guilt by association (“John Doe comes from an area of North Carolina once known for “racism”), audience guilt by association (“John Doe spoke at Berkeley University and a known neo-Nazi sat in the audience”) and even quotation guilt by association (“John Doe denies that he is a Nazi but SPLC research proves that something he wrote was quoted in a Nazi publication”).

The SPLC’s mode of thinking mirrors that of schizophrenics. Normal people’s brains do not hatch screwball ideas that a shared geographic location, the presence of someone in an audience listening to a speaker, or the mere fact that someone wrote something and was quoted by someone else establishes any rational connection.

Schizophrenics think and talk that way. So does the SPLC. We should focus on exposing the intrinsic madness of the SPLC and take a more sober view of this indictment, which will likely be a financial bonanza for the SPLC and will be used to raise another several hundred million dollars.

Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE): The indictment of the SPLC is an amazing breakthrough and may help weaken one of the most morally corrupt organizations in the United States with its gargantuan $800 million endowment. That it paid agitators to create the “racism” and “hate” it purports to fight should sit poorly with many donors. It’s like a fire department setting fires to justify their existence and hours of overtime.

Hopefully, it will weaken them, especially among those corporations that send them fat checks. It may also chill the trust the lamestream media has placed in them as the go-to source to tell them who the “haters” and “extremists” are, with the SPLC’s “hate map” having included everyone from conservative Christians and parents protesting perverted curricula in their schools.

In Canada, we have the pernicious Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which got its start-up seed money from the SPLC and, like the SPLC, spies on nationalists and dissenters and briefs the media as to who the “haters” are. Both groups have cost many good people their jobs, making a mockery of the right to freedom of speech. In the U.S., after a trial and, hopefully, convictions, perhaps citizens who have been defamed, deplatformed, debanked, or fired because of the SPLC may find justice.

Dr. Michael Hill, President of the Southern Nationalist League (SNL): Yes, Charlottesville was a set-up involving high-level officials and likely numerous infiltrators. But it was also a legitimate outpouring of White/Southern nationalist sentiment that scared the hell out of the establishment. Now, after nine years, someone is looking to refashion the Charlottesville story for their own benefit. That’s why those of us who were there should be the first and loudest to insist that the truth be finally told.

The recent indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, for, among other things, paying over a quarter-million dollars to someone who was at Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally (UTR) in August 2017, has reopened the important question of just what actually happened at the event and why. Trump says it was organized and paid for by the SPLC (who we all want to see go down for good) for the sole reason of making him look bad. His acolytes/influencers in the various media, especially social media, laid the groundwork from the beginning for Trump’s claims about Charlottesville being paid for, organized, and orchestrated by the left. They said, in effect, that any organic outpouring of pro-White and pro-Southern sentiment was by its very nature fake and a product of the left designed to embarrass the “real conservative” movement in America: Trump and MAGA. No “racists” and “antisemites” need apply to this respectable club.

I was in Charlottesville as Chief of The League of the South (LS), the largest single organization to participate in UTR. Michael Tubbs (LS Chief of Staff) and I were at the head of that column that marched down East Market Street and had to fight our way into Lee Park while the local and state cops stood down and watched the mayhem take place. In other words, I was there and solely responsible for the LS and its UTR logistical planning and funding, its tactical and operational planning, and its overall goal of defending our beleaguered Southern culture and heritage. I sure as hell know better than Trump and MAGA about what went on that day. In short, they are liars. To what larger purpose remains to be seen, but I’d bet whatever it is goes to the benefit of Trump himself.

But as with much of Trump’s bombastic and ego-driven babbling, Charlottesville, too, is a flimsily constructed falsehood. As my friend and compatriot Brad Griffin posted on X: “Hundreds of White Nationalists got together in 2017, plotted with the SPLC how to make Trump look bad, and drove to Charlottesville to carry out their plan. Part of the organizers’ plan was to get sued for millions of dollars while not being able to afford legal representation.”

May the God of our fathers separate the truth from lies and bring His wrath and judgment upon the purveyors of the latter.

Jason Kessler, Unite the Right organizer and author of Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech: Obviously, the SPLC indictment is great news and yet another example of the benefit we get out of Trump that we wouldn’t get from any other president.

It’s a double-edged sword regarding the revelations about an SPLC informant at Unite the Right. On the one hand, sunlight is almost always a good thing. We want to know who this is and pray that the identity of F-37 is revealed. And yet, on the other hand, the revelation has sparked a wave of false conspiracy theories about Charlottesville being “staged.”

I am not an attorney, but I have spent many years in legal combat, including as a successful pro se litigant. On its face, the allegations against the SPLC clearly and logically have merit. It’s about committing wire fraud and money laundering, not hiring an informant. For once, the shoe is on the other foot, and our enemies will face trial in a potentially hostile jurisdiction in Alabama.

Some people say that this part of Alabama is the “Black belt” because of the high Black population, but I could see Black people also being offended about SPLC paying people to make “racist posts online.” Time will tell.

Kirk Lyons, Esq., Founder and Chief Trial Counsel for the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC): Since the indictment, I’ve fielded about 15 calls about the SPLC case, including an FBI inquiry about my 1989 quote on their involvement in the Shelby Bookstore murder case. This suggests a broader investigation.

Most of the former SPLC leadership has left, including Morris Dees and Richard Cohen in 2019, as well as Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich. But they still have an estimated $800 million endowment, and they are rallying with other left-of-center “civil rights” groups to fight the indictment.

We need to push the administration to proceed vigorously, find ways to share information with the DOJ, and encourage them to expand the investigation through our Congressmen and DOJ contacts (especially in the US Attorney’s office in Montgomery).

The SPLC’s strategy will be to delay, including by filing a motion to quash the indictment, and, if there is a trial, to appeal any verdict they don’t like. I seriously doubt they will settle with the DOJ. I assume they will fight for all they are worth and try to run out the clock on the Trump administration, because when it’s over, this all shuts down.

Dependent on any proven revelations of wrongdoing from the DOJ, any groups looking to jump in on this with a private cause of action need to be united, well-organized, and well-funded.

Experiencing the SPLC discovery process was quite an education for me and was unrelenting and brutal. Whatever we do, we need to take advantage of this situation to learn all we can about SPLC’s skullduggery and inner workings, and keep the press spotlight on the SPLC’s many scandals and abuses. I look forward to seeing what the DOJ can prove.

Rev. Bret McAtee, Pastor of Christ the King Reformed Church (Charlotte, Michigan): I popped a cork from the finest champagne and celebrated when I heard of the SPLC being hoisted on their own petard. I only pray now that the ADL, B’nai Brith, and the ACLU will also soon get a similar comeuppance. Finally, the loathsome SPLC has been indicted. “Whatsoever a man soweth he shall also reap.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that this organization will be convicted in a court of law, but for now, the spotlight has been turned on them to expose the hate-filled nature of their hate-filled lies.

My objection to the SPLC was their contention that there was something errant or unworthy about hate. Scripture clearly teaches that God hates all workers of iniquity (Ps. 5:5). Scripture tells us that there are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to Him (Prov. 6:16 and Zech. 8:17). The Holy Spirit instructs His people to “Hate that which is evil, cling to that which is good.”

Next, Christians have to get past thinking that there is something intrinsically wrong with “hate.” How can we not hate that which the Lord Christ loves? How can we not hate that which seeks to destroy the good, the true, and the beautiful, as Christianity defines the good, the true, and the beautiful? Instead of defending ourselves from charges of hate, we should step up to the mic and say, “Of course I hate that which is vile, false, and ugly. Who wouldn’t?” Christians who don’t hate the SPLC and the parallel organizations are not right in the head. Tolerance of evil folks is not a virtue.

Finally, and this will probably fly right by people, Christians need to realize that Biblical hatred is built on the foundation of love. It is because we love people that we stand in opposition to them when they attack those things God counts as lovely. We should communicate to the Christ-hating cosmopolitans that we understand their attack on that which is virtuous is part of their pursuit of the establishment of the perverse.

Because of these instructions, I gladly admit that I hate the SPLC with a holy hatred since it has consistently revealed itself as an organization that hates that which God loves (Ps. 139:21). Indeed, the SPLC has always used its hate list as a proxy war to seek to destroy Biblical Christians and Biblical Christianity. It’s clear that any organization that claimed to be an authority on identifying hate while refusing to name “antifa” as a hate group was working with an ax to grind.

Sheriff Richard Mack, Founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA): I have been lied about by the SPLC for over 25 years. I have called them out on it numerous times. As I analyzed their modus operandi, I discovered what they were just indicted for: lying to their donors about me and who I was to scare them into donating more money. This is what the SPLC has always done, and they have made a tremendous amount of money doing it.

For example, the SPLC has said numerous times that my national organization and I have promoted and advocated violence and that the CSPOA is a paramilitary organization. I challenged them to show one example in which I ever promoted violence or committed an act of violence in my life. I even challenged them to an open debate about any of their baseless accusations. Of course, they refused.

Why? Because they cannot afford to be exposed to the public or to their supporters regarding their “sales tactics.” Now, finally, they have been exposed, and I would be happy to testify against them.

Padraig Martin, former government contractor and author of A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story: I may be the last individual outside of the criminal justice system to have seen James Fields in person. In fact, in many ways, I became an inadvertent eyewitness to the depths at which the system fought against those of us who simply wanted to preserve a monument and a people’s heritage. Why? Because I was arrested in Charlottesville after the Unite the Right rally was deemed “unlawful,” I was charged with a criminal offense entirely unrelated to the event. That which I witnessed was a study in government tyranny.

After UTR, I had the misfortune of losing the keys to my car. While attempting to break into my own vehicle, the Virginia State Police stopped me. I explained it was my car and told them that I had a gun in my pocket and where to find it. I also explained that I had a legal concealed carry permit in my home country, Florida. Given that Virginia and Florida had a reciprocity agreement, the matter should have ended with a misdemeanor citation (failure to carry said permit, which I left at home). I was not engaged in criminal activity, and I had a legal right to carry. Instead, the State Police chose to process me in a makeshift, underground station beneath the Charlottesville courthouse, where I sat, watched, and listened.

At the time, because I was in their custody, I had no idea about the James Fields incident. I listened to the State Police complain more about Terry Maculiffe’s decision to fly to Charlottesville and the resultant helicopter crash. I heard them speak about a car crash (the Fields incident) and that a woman hospitalized as a result would be fine. I watched as they took calls from various city officials, discussed matters with federal law enforcement wearing White Nationalist regalia (including several whom I recognized at the park earlier in the day), and joked amongst themselves quite frequently. After finally allowing me to wash off a strange irritant that the antifa had thrown at us, they took me to the Albemarle County jail to get processed in front of a Magistrate.

While sitting with handcuffs behind my back on a wooden bench, a disheveled young man in a polo was brought into the room by officers and sat on a bench somewhat caddy-cornered from me. I thought to myself that this was a poor kid who got a DUI on the wrong day. He looked flushed and almost stoned. I genuinely thought he was drunk. I told him, “Don’t worry. It will be alright.” That solicited a bark from one of two officers behind the glass not to talk to one another.

An officer came into and out of the Magistrate’s processing room several times, asking Fields questions or making declaratory statements on his behalf. Fields answered willingly or agreed to the statements without the privilege of an attorney. “Is that when you sped up?” “Did you say you did this?” “Do you admit you did that?” His answers were mumbled, further reinforcing my belief that he was a drunk college kid – not the monster he was later made out to be. He was then led into the Magistrate’s room, and I assumed I would see him inside. Instead, I was let out simply because I owned a home in Virginia, which I had to put up as some kind of collateral. It was not until Monday that I found out who Fields was, when we were both arraigned in Charlottesville court. I sat in the courtroom surrounded by antifa having their charges dropped one by one; his arraignment was via video. At that moment, I knew I was a witness to a crime – one committed by the State of Virginia against Mr. Fields.

Lew Moore, former Congressional Chief-of-Staff, Ron Paul’s Presidential Campaign Manager, and host of the Hour of Decision podcast: I believe the indictment of SPLC had been in the “hip pocket” of the Trump DOJ for some time, to be brought out if/when needed for maximum political impact. After all, the liberal Montgomery Advertiser newspaper exposed a mountain of perfidy on the part of Morris Dees and this strange “poverty” law center as far back as the 1990s. We’re told even the Biden administration was considering a crackdown. There is much evidence that the Trump political operation is currently trying to pivot to fire up the base for the upcoming election, and away from bad war and economic realities. This move at the SPLC is one element of the “pivot.”

The SPLC had overreached, extending its “Hate Map” toward Trump allies Dennis Praeger, Franklin Graham, and TPUSA. The hideous greed of this organization eventually made it a liability to the Left as well, not to mention increasing allegations of internal discrimination against Blacks, etc. This left them with no political cover, allowing the hammer to fall. But whether actual individual actors will be perp-walked and the organization completely bankrupted, not merely fined, remains to be seen.

That the DOJ’s point of attack has been the infiltration of provocateurs within right-wing groups offers Zionist-influenced elements around Trump an opportunity. This malign foreign influence has openly sought to purge influencers within the old Trump base who have exposed them. Unfortunately, through ignorance or design, some of these same influencers have decided to defame, without evidence, the organizers of the Charlottesville rally and other patriots as SPLC plants. Watch this entire turn of events carefully, and all lies must be called out.

Dr. Tomislav Sunic, former Croatian diplomat: I have long had the dubious distinction of being featured on the SPLC website as “a white nationalist author, radio host, and fixture on the white nationalist speaker circuit.” I have also had the privilege—albeit not noted by the SPLC—of growing up in communist Yugoslavia, becoming familiar at an early age with the nature of the communist totalitarian mindset, its lawfare, and its ceaseless manufacturing of “fascism” and “white supremacism” threats. Even if there were no longer any fascists around, the communist judiciary would fabricate them in order to provide itself with international legitimacy.

Having been subjected to such communist demonology, and having seen my late father—a Catholic lawyer—spend considerable time in a Yugoslav communist prison for his anti-communist writings, I had no problem detecting the same language and legal patterns in the SPLC. This did not surprise me, especially given that in the early 1980s, I encountered more communist-minded professors and grad students on U.S. college campuses than in the entire Eastern European communist educational system.

Most Americans still do not realize that the SPLC is not the only player in this demon-hunting game; there are dozens of similar antifascist, communist-inspired, well-funded virtue-signaling leagues all over the US and the EU: the Jewish-Zionist-inspired ADL, the UK-based Hope Not Hate, the powerful and government-funded Amadeu Antonio Stiftung in Germany, the DÖW in Austria, and the CRIF and LICRA in France. All of them function on the same principle: resurrecting dead fascist foes in order to cover up their live academic and media smearing campaigns against dissident voices. With the massive racial changes due to decades of uncontrolled migration, coupled with a still-resilient and strong DEI-influenced judiciary, in the years to come the US will likely face a Soviet-like scenario of mutual hatred of all against all.

The fundamental mistake of self-proclaimed US and EU white nationalists is their often childish sporting of fascist and martial insignia, which provides additional fodder for bans or deplatforming by local authorities. Often, it is their total ignorance of the genealogy of cultural fascisms and their offshoots in prewar Europe that makes them look grotesque and dangerous in the eyes of the wider population. Whoever marches along with “Hollywood Nazis” or their look-alikes must know that there are powerful interests behind them who profit from such silly—if not outright retarded—behavior.

An edited version of this article was originally published by American Free Press – America’s last real newspaper! Click here to subscribe today or call 1-888-699-NEWS.

When not interviewing newsmakers, James Edwards has often found himself in the spotlight as a commentator, including many national television appearances. Over the past 20 years, his radio work has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Media Matters has referred to Edwards as a “right-wing media fixture” and Hillary Clinton personally named him as an “extremist” who would shape our country.

Alabama Opens Its Own Investigation Into the Southern Poverty Law Center

The law center, based in Montgomery, has drawn the ire of conservatives in recent years. Last month, the Justice Department charged the group with financial crimes.

Listen · 2:58 min
A light-colored building that is the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center

The Alabama attorney general’s office announced on Monday that it was opening its own investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, less than a month after the Justice Department charged the organization with several financial crimes.

The law center, which is based in Montgomery, Ala., has drawn the ire of conservatives in recent years for targeting groups that many of them consider mainstream. That conflict came to a head in April, when the Justice Department charged the organization with crimes that included wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

In a statement, the Alabama attorney general’s office applauded the Justice Department’s actions and said that it was separately investigating the law center to determine whether “the S.P.L.C.’s activity within the state also ran afoul of the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act or state laws related to charitable organizations.”

“Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department’s action to deal with the S.P.L.C., the state’s efforts have now received a shot in the arm,” the attorney general, Steve Marshall, said in the statement. “We look forward to learning more about the inner workings of an organization that we have long believed was rotten, but until recently, has been impervious.”

Continues…

Statement on the SPLC indictment

My personal opinion is that the indictment is greatly overestimated in the minds of our adherents.

The indictment is thin soup.  It charges the SPLC with technical (and shaky, weak) violations of bank regulations.  The “crimes” seem highly improbable.  Since when have donors been entitled to a line-by-line breakdown of the activities of the group getting the donation?

Hasn’t it been pretty much common knowledge that the SPLC plants agents in organizations it targets and bribes officers and members of such organizations to steal information so the SPLC can use it to damage the professional careers of members of such organizations?

The SPLC will probably raise several hundred million dollars to defend itself against flimsy charges that will likely be dismissed by the judge.

The indictment will be a financial bonanza for the SPLC.

The indictment conceals the identity of the sleaze-balls who took the bribes which indicates IMO the desire of the government to pull its punches.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever learn the identities of the plants and the bribed informants.

The indictment also fuels cuckservatives’ misleading narrative by claiming that by bribing members of these organizations to provide the SPLC with information with which to harm the careers of adherents, the SPLC was “financing hate.”

In a sane society (not one like ours) the SPLC would be a laughing stock.  The SPLC is a parody of the liberals’ parody of Senator Joseph McCarthy.  For 3 generations liberals have ridiculed McCarthy for “guilt by association.”

The SPLC practices guilt by association on meth (it calls it “links” so as to avoid triggering memories in the atrophied brains of liberals).

The “links” used by the SPLC to smear its targets include geographic guilt by association (“Eric Rudolph comes from an area of North Carolina once known for “racism”), audience guilt by association (“Mr. Smith spoke at Berkeley University and a known neo-Nazi sat in the audience”) and even quotation guilt by association (“Jones denies that he is a Nazi but SPLC research proves that something he wrote was quoted in a Nazi publication”).

The SPLC’s mode of thinking mirrors that of schizophrenics.  Normal people’s brains do not hatch screwball ideas that a shared geographic location, the presence of someone in an audience listening to a speaker or something someone wrote being quoted by someone else as establishing any rational connection.

Schizophrenics think and talk that way.  So does the SPLC.

We should focus on exposing the intrinsic silliness of the SPLC and take a more sober view of this indictment.

LYDIA BRIMELOW ON THOSE SPLC INDICTMENTS: There’s Never Just One Cockroach

Discovery is going to be delicious.

PeterBrimelow.com is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It is hard to say how I learned this news—I think my husband Peter was the first person to tell me—because I got a large number of texts and email messages from my friends and supporters almost immediately. This also happens any time the New York State Attorney General Letitia James is in hot water. It’s nice to be remembered.

It’s not what I hoped to be remembered for, but I’ll be reading every word

Quoting from the DOJ Press Release:

“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” said Acting United States Attorney Kevin Davidson. “As alleged, the SPLC instead diverted a portion of those funds to benefit individuals and groups they claimed to oppose. That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”

I would argue the SPLC’s very existence undermines public trust and social cohesion. I posted to social media:

 

A twitter user with the deeply charming name CatsWithoutBorders was right to correct me:

The fashionable reaction among online patriots has been to post their battle scars from the SPLC. VDARE.com has too many to count—but it’s an interesting phenomenon because it highlights just how greedy the SPLC became. Being named as an agent of hate by the SPLC was so common, it practically became a credential on the right—if you weren’t named you weren’t serious.

Every new pin on the SPLC’s Hate Map ginned up fears and opened wallets among the paranoid leftists. And yet it wasn’t enough! The SPLC ginned up hysteria about racism as a fundraising tool. It was extremely effective—so effective in fact, that the demand for racism outstripped the supply. Like an undertaker drumming up business, the SPLC ludicrously labeled Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Majiid Nawaz and other clearly mainstream people as extremists.

According to the DOJ, the SPLC was not content lining their pockets merely with the suffering of the innocent. They also allegedly paid cold hard cash to the scariest “extremists” on their lists.

The SPLC claims the money was not in fact subsidizing their boogey men but a program to pay informants (“field sources”). But even if that were the case, it’s likely not good enough to get them out of charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

Continues…

 

Upstaging the SPLC: Communist Shapeshifters

Otto Dix, “Portrait of the (“new woman”, “anti-Nazi”) journalist Sylvia von Harden”, 1926

The recent U.S. government indictment of the SPLC may prompt a sigh of relief among White nationalist activists. Its defamatory activities have already caused significant harm to conservative and nationalist scholars, often labeled in SPLC vernacular as “white supremacists” or “antisemites.” Why it has taken the U.S. government so long to investigate the SPLC’s financial dealings remains unclear, especially given that some other agencies have used similar tactics—manufacturing threats to justify their own existence.

The SPLC’s smearing methods were heavily borrowed from standard practices in former communist Eastern Europe, where governments had to keep fabricating “fascists”, “nazis”, or “terrorists” in order to sustain their totalitarian regimes. One may also speculate, given the multiracial profile of the SPLC staff and its associates, that internal rifts may have prompted disgruntled individuals from one racial group to rat out their colleagues of a different color over the misallocated funds. When a money squeeze sets in, race always matters—just as money always talks.

This is nothing new in the left-leaning proto-communist and Antifa scenes. Those who were born and lived in communist states, or those who have studied the psychology of the communist mindset, know deadly well that the greatest enemies of communism, as recent history has amply demonstrated, were often disgruntled communist insiders. This brings to mind the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—caused not by proverbial right-wing insiders or foreign outsiders, but by systemic abuse of state funds coupled with internal ethnic squabbles among communist party members. The breakup of communist Yugoslavia and the infighting in the multiethnic Communist League comes to mind.

The True Non-Believers

The SPLC’s demonization of right-wing and nationalist circles in the U.S. and EU feels like a reenactment of quasi-judicial proceedings in former communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Whether other anti-hate think tanks or agencies will now come under the Trump administration’s scrutiny remains to be seen. One may gloat over the SPLC’s sudden fall from grace, but questions remain as to whether there will be similar legal efforts and comparable media outcry if other domestic, self-proclaimed anti-hate, anti-fascist organizations come onto the DOJ’s radar screen. The powerful Jewish ADL uses a far more refined name-calling when it comes to vilifying right-wing and nationalist dissenters. Why not examine its sources of funding as well as the methods of its demonology courses it presents at schools and police department? It is, however, very significant that over the past year the ADL and AIPAC have toned down their demonological rhetoric against so-called White supremacists while fully backing Trump’s rhetoric about bombing Iran to oblivion. A raw deal? A quid pro quo? Everybody can take a wild guess.

Nor are right-wing Christians in the U.S. and nationalist figureheads in Europe lagging behind in their sycophancy, as recently shown by the ‘discreet visit’ of French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen to the Israeli Embassy in Paris. The age of mutual Euro-right-wing and Israeli brownnosing is dawning.

The buck doesn’t stop with the SPLC though. Hundreds of other NGOs, especially in the EU—as noted in my previous pieces—are non-governmental in name only, yet depend on substantial state funding, draping themselves in the romantic attire of love, peace, and multiracial tolerance. Their public posturing, much like that of the SPLC, is a carbon copy of earlier Bolshevik agencies in the early Soviet Union. One must repeat, time and again, that some of the most zealous communist henchmen in the Soviet Union and Europe—such as Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Béla Kun, along with thousands of their leftist sidekicks—were put to death by their former trusted comrades-in-arms. In Czechoslovakia in 1952, a dozen communist Jews, the early masters of the post-WWII Czech totalitarian system, were executed on charges of treason by their former comrades in arms.  The same upstaging scenario may have been brewing among jealous rank-and-file SPLC members, where everyone thought they could run the money side best on their own..

Historically, the more exotic titles these virtue-signaling agencies carry—such as the lavishly funded SPLC or the UK-based NGO Hope Not Hate—the more prone they are not just to violent proscriptions of right-wing wrong-thinkers but also to constant purges of their own kind. In passing, one should mention the case of Hans-Georg Maaßen, who headed Germany’s powerful domestic intelligence service—euphemistically known as the “Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution “ (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz)—and who was removed from his post in 2018 by Chancellor Angela Merkel following disagreements over the agency’s inquisitorial practices against the manufactured right-wing menace.

I have already written and provided references to the rise of the totalitarian spirit, also suggesting that it is part and parcel of absolute democracy—not its opposite, as many scholars claim. As a brainchild of post-communist multiracial pathology, the SPLC operates in a manner similar to the former intel agency Securitate in communist Romania, the Stasi in ex-East Germany, or the UDBA in communist ex-Yugoslavia. All of those secret service outlets kept hunting down anticommunist wrong-thinkers even if there were none in sight. Ultimately, the paranoid mindset of communist cutthroats  made them terminate each other. The SPLC would have finished the same way, one way or another, regardless of the recent Trump clamp-down.

Here are some personal remarks. When my father, Mirko Sunic,  a former Catholic lawyer, was arrested in communist Yugoslavia in 1984 on charges of having ties with Croat émigrés in the UK, the first to testify against him were our family members! This is a classic mode of the totalitarian mindset—of war of all against all—where self-denial and avoidance of guilt by association by family members becomes the rule, so well-illustrated in Shakespeare’s prose.

There is no such thing as true believers in politics. The SPLC members could have, under different circumstances and with different winds blowing, acted as a loudspeaker of the Right-wing or, for that matter, embraced belief in fearsome extraterrestrials. Furthermore, contrary to widespread belief, Croatia did not turn in 1991 into a right-wing country based on its own decision. Its new diplomatic and intelligence apparatus was staffed entirely by former communist officials. It was, willy-nilly, the ethnic infighting amidst the famed intel agency UDBA that sped up the independence of Croatia. As a high diplomat in newly born Croatia, I was literally surrounded by former Yugoslav diplomats who, in a matter of weeks and months, had converted from ardent Yugo-communist apparatchiks into church-going ardent Croat nationalists. The dread of getting terminated by their former Serbian communist comrades made them welcome extreme right-wing nationalists and expats who were best skilled to protect their rears. The true Croat nationalists did their work out on the front lines—similar to the Ukrainian Azov—still daydreaming their unfulfilled dreams.

No need to reinvent the wheel when discussing the SPLC . Political shapeshifting into the Other is nothing new, as was well described by the Latin poet Ovid two millennia ago. Family disunion or party betrayal will continue whoever comes to rule the US or EU ten years from now or ten centuries down the road. One must be prepared that the communism-minded SPLC or other left-wing NGOs in the US will, under different circumstantial sunsets, become devoted right-wingers or hide when needed—where the sun don’t shine.

The modern Left has always followed the mode of an all-you-can-eat buffet, i.e., dancing to the tune of the dominant ideology. Neither are right-wingers much better, as we learn from Shakespeare’s Richard III. Our own tribe, our ingroups, many of our own people—if our longed-for “White miracle” happens—will quickly resort to mindless vindictiveness and show their egomaniacal racial traits. With permission granted, let us cite again the French-Romanian pagan philosopher Emil Cioran, who warned us to beware of any attachment: “To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward; it is to expect nothing—neither from men nor from gods.”

 

Tucker Interviews VDARE’s Lydia Brimelow

In what I hope is a breakthrough for our side, Tucker Carlson interviewed VDARE’s Lydia Brimelow on the very expensive lawfare (~$500,000) initiated by left-activist Letitia James, New York Attorney General. James is attempting to destroy VDARE not only with the lawsuit, but also with such tactics as demanding the real names of their writers, many of whom use pen names to shield themselves from the the fallout they would endure—fallout that all too often has resulted in loss of job (some work in government) and other penalties. Another important topic here is the disgusting harassment that she and her family have gotten from the SPLC since buying their castle-meeting venue in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

The reason I think this may well be a breakthrough is that Tucker Carlson has huge reach. A ~nine-minute clip of the video of the interview has been watched 19.8M times on X as I write this; it was re-Xed 32K times, and got 78K likes. Further Elon Musk then commented it was “alarming” in a post that was viewed by 16M times, received 119K likes and was re-Xed 32K times.


And:

This is reach that immigration patriots and the dissident right in general have been denied as long as I can remember. In fact, the entire media, including social media, has been set up to exclude voices like VDARE. We have been de-platformed, banned from from social media or had our reach and followers restricted, and we have been refused service from financial companies. Indeed, as Lydia notes, it’s at the point where it’s quite difficult for VDARE to obtain legal representation. And we all know how corrupt the courts are. Just ask Donald Trump, another of James’s victims.

Here’s one terrifying example:

[Lydia]: When you have the media so focused on turning you into a monster, on conveying to people that you are a subhuman who has evil, evil, you know, [with] patriotic ideas, there are a lot of people on the left, a lot of people generally probably, who are just there on the edge. And when they hear somebody being described as this person, they will believe them and they are unhinged. So one of the other challenges that we have faced is, there’s actually a group of trannies who have decided to stalk my family, and by that I mean follow us around, town, at the farmers market that we attend [and] again at my church, showing up at my church, wearing lots of guns on the outside of their clothes, in an attempt to intimidate us. … It’s terrifying. And the main leader is male to female, but one of his sidekicks is male to goblin identifying. Do goblins even have a gender? I mean, these people actually are telling you that they are demons. You have to believe them.

Imagine being stalked like that. Absolute evil. And of course, I have been a victim of their evil too in a campaign led by the disgusting Heidi Beirich (joined by the ADL) at my university starting in 2006 and resulting in a very difficult eight years, until I finally retired. Happiness is seeing Long Beach in the rear view mirror.

Beirich has apparently been replaced by the equally disgusting Michael Hayden. Like Hayden, Beirich tried to stir up the faculty against me, but with a much more receptive target at the university. (At least, Beirich’s actions did not result in stalking me or my family.) She was quite successful in stirring up the university. Pretty much the entire faculty turned against me, with public statements from various departments (e.g., see here, under the heading “My Replies to the “My replies to the History Department statement of April 4, 2008). One of my VDARE articles described what happened: “Heidi Does Long Beach: The SPLC vs. Academic Freedom,” dated November 14, 2006.

. And I was inundated with hostile emails for quite a long time after, many proudly posted on the faculty listserv.

One of the good things about the Brimelows’ situation is that they reside in a small town in a red state that, apart from a few nutcases, is apparently on their side. It’s a town where character and behavior count more than the mendacious propaganda used against them—unlike your typical American university.

Tucker asks if Lydia has any information on who funds the SPLC. It will come as no surprise to readers of TOO that the money comes from Jews, noted by Jerry Kammer (“The SPLC Depends on Jewish Donors“):

Because the Jewish donor base is so critical, the SPLC appeals to “hate” rather than trying to make life better for poor people:

Ripping the SPLC as “puffed up crusaders,” [JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in The Nation]: “Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s. Why the organization continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.”

Jews fund the left in America, and that certainly includes the SPLC. Jews who contribute to leftist causes do so for typically Jewish motives — fear and loathing of the White majority, not compassion for poor people. The rhetoric of  helping poor people may be used if it aids in the larger anti-White agenda but is completely ignored when, as in the case of immigration policy, it does not. What’s good for the Jews and all that.

I am personally very proud to be associated with VDARE, with 29 articles posted there, dating from 2003. Their list of writers includes many who have written for TOO, and topics include race realism, Jewish influence, and of course our disastrous immigration policy.

The video is at TuckerCarlson.com behind a paywall. This is the machine-produced transcript, lightly edited for readability.


TIMESTAMP HEADLINE
00:04:58
Targeted by Letitia James
00:19:49
Stalked by the SPLC

Tucker [00:00:00] Illegal immigration into the United States is at its highest levels ever. Tens of millions of people have come here illegally over the past 15 years, and none of them will ever leave. Mostly they come from the poorest countries on the planet. We don’t know anything about them, really. We don’t know if they’re pro America. We don’t know if they’re hostile to the people who already live here. We don’t know, in the case of the recent arrivals, what they’re going to do for a living as robotics eliminate low skilled jobs. So what’s happening right now at the border that what’s often mentioned on TV is really undersold as a story. This is changing America forever, and almost certainly for the worse as we’re watching it. And no one is doing anything about it. The governor of Texas occasionally makes noises about it – it’s over his border that this human wave is flowing, and yet he’s taken no real steps to stop it. There are some media outlets that let you know that it’s happening in general terms, but they don’t seem particularly outraged by it. We’re sitting here as our country is destroyed and no one’s responding, and at some point you have to ask why? Are the majority of Americans in favor of this? Of course not. In fact, no one’s in favor of this. No one will defend this in public. No one will explain why we need it. Why it’s a good idea. How it’s going to help this country. How your grandchildren will live in a better place because of it. People are just silent, like it’s not even happening. And again, you have to ask why. And the answer, of course, is really simple because they’re afraid they know they’ll be punished if they say anything about it.

The story of Peter and Lydia Brimelow explains why they’re afraid. Peter Brimelow has been a journalist for 50 years. Worked at a whole bunch of what are now called mainstream publications. Was an editor – Barron’s, Forbes, National Review, Dow Jones, a legitimate old school journalist. And in the late 90s, he began to ask questions about our immigration scheme. Is this really good idea, is it helping America? And of course, no one could answer those questions because the answer is obvious. No, it’s destroying America as it destroyed California, so it will destroy your state. That’s certain. But for asking that question, he was fired from his jobs and shunted off into what we call the fringes. But he didn’t stop. He started a website called VDARE. He runs it now with his wife, Lydia. And for the crime in the supposedly free country of opposing the immigration system currently in place — not the official system, but the actual system — where anyone from the poorest parts of America [I think he meant ‘the world’] with no skills whatsoever can come here and immediately go on welfare. That’s our current system. For saying that that’s a bad idea, powerful forces have just tried, to destroy their lives, not just their lives, the lives of their family using the justice system to do it. And needless to say, you probably guessed, using something called the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is nothing to the South or poverty. It has to do with shutting down free speech in this country. They have descended on the Brimelows and have really kind of tried to destroy them. That’s not an overstatement, but you judge for yourself because Lydia Brimelow, who helps run VDARE, joins us now to explain what’s happened to her. Lydia, thanks so much for coming on.

Lydia Brimelow [00:03:13] Thank you so much, Tucker. It’ll be very nice to have our story told.

Tucker [00:03:18] So I have known your husband, sort of, since he was not a controversial figure at all. And he became a controversial figure when he began to say things like, hey, why are we doing this? And he was immediately called a White nationalist, a White supremacist. And I remember very well his response, which is, no, I’m not. And if I was, I’d say so. But that kept up and he wound up publishing with you, VDARE online. That would seem not a particularly controversial thing to do in a free country. But for your family, it’s been, a very risky thing to do. So I hope that you would explain to us what the government, we’ll start with the government, is trying to do to you for daring to oppose the immigration system.

Lydia Brimelow [00:04:03] Yeah, absolutely. So it’s it’s hard to believe everybody who hears the story says it’s completely incredible. Peter founded VDARE Foundation, which has its main project of VDARE.com back in the late 90s. As you said, we’re in our 25th year now, and I joined about ten years ago. I do the fundraising and the back office work, and he handles everything that goes up on the website VDARE.com. We’re a nonprofit journalism enterprise. So everything that we do, all of our people are paid through generous donations from individuals. I can tell you we don’t get any government grants or big foundation grants either. It’s all just grassroots. And we’re veterans of cancel culture at this point. So we’ve been kicked off a lot of mainstream services that most people use to distribute the media that they produce. And that is nothing compared to what we’re facing right now, which started about two years ago, originating out of the hate crimes division in the state of New York. A series of subpoenas were issued by Letitia James first, to Facebook, which I can explain a little bit in a minute. And then to us and our board members, at VDARE Foundation, with no clear trigger, they have refused to tell us what they’re investigating. It’s been two years of us just being crushed under this burden of investigation. The subpoenas were, like, 47 points each. They want us to turn over essentially every document that we have interacted with, since 2016. And for a small organization, you know, at our peak, we had four full time employees. Right now, we have two. That’s Peter and myself. This has just been an absolutely crushing burden. And I will say the Facebook subpoena was interesting because we had actually been kicked off of Facebook, years previous. So we had not even been on Facebook to interact with Facebook in many years, and they were asking for all of the data that VDARE had ever accumulated, created, while we were on Facebook, which we had incidentally, also requested. VDARE was kicked off of Facebook the same day that every one of the people involved in our organization was kicked off, including myself. I had never posted anything political online, at all, but they took all my baby pictures. The video of my daughter’s first steps, which was not saved anywhere else. Facebook still has that. They have, in fact, told my lawyers that we are too dangerous to get our data back, including my daughter taking her first steps. So that was the first subpoena that, Letitia James’s hate crimes division issues.

Tucker [00:06:43] May I ask you to pause for one moment and just clarify something. So Facebook is calling you too dangerous to possess your own baby pictures? Has VDARE ever committed violence? Is there something we’re missing? Terrorism? Insurrection. Killing people?

Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] Never.

Tucker [00:07:00] Okay, okay. Sorry. I just want to clarify that.

Lydia Brimelow [00:09:18] That’s what my lawyers have been asking. That’s what my lawyers have been asking. So there have have been no accusations. We have been desperately requesting that they tell us what it is they’re wondering about so that we can provide them with tailored, you know, rather than dumping them with this huge amount of data. Can we just provide you what it is that you’re worried about in terms of regulation? And they refused to do it. At first, they insinuated that it has to do with what we call the Castle transaction. So the backstory on that is that, around the time Trump was campaigning and electing, we were attempting as the VDARE Foundation to host conferences around the country. We tried it in Tucson, in California, multiple places in California, New York, Boston, all over the country. We would get bookings and hotels and, you know, set up normal conference activities. And as soon as we would announce that we were going to have a conference and that people could buy tickets, the contracts would be canceled by the venues. So we had, depending on how you count it, between 8 and 12 contracts canceled out from under us. We were unable to successfully host an event at all over the course of those several years, and the hotels were so adamant that they cancel us because they were afraid of protesters, not because they were afraid of my group. I was told this over and over again. We know that your group is just going to be a bunch of people, you know, wearing ties, standing in line to ask questions on a microphone. But we can’t protect our venue from the protesters that might come, or from the bad press that we might get for hosting you. They were so anxious to cancel us that they would pay out significant liquidated damages. I mean, we had one hotel in New York. They preferred to write us a check for $80,000 rather than host our conference of 50 people. And at a certain point, we have to have in-person meetings.

The whole thrust of isolating people and calling them names is to prevent them from getting to know each other, to develop communities, to come up with good ideas and to be able to organize them. Yes. And so we decided to take matters into our own hands. And we went shopping for a venue somewhere in America. And I landed in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, which is in the Eastern Panhandle. It’s an absolutely beautiful place in the mountains of Appalachia. It is. And there’s this hysterical, charismatic property. It’s a stone, historic stone mountain built in the 18th. It’s historic stone castle on a mountain built in the 1880s that happened to be for sale when we were looking for a venue. And it has a what they call a great hall. It has a ballroom, it has a conference space. And so we bought it and we moved our offices there. And we have been hosting events there ever since. They’ve all been sold out. They’re all a lot of fun. Most of our speakers, all of our speakers who are not off the record, you can find their videos of their presentations publicly posted on our website, VDARE.com. And it has really irritated the people that want to shut us down. It has really irritated them. The fact that we were able to acquire our own venue, and it’s not just some fluorescent lit, you know, rundown VFW hall where, you know, everybody goes in and it feels like some kind of depressing AA meeting. No, like it represents the beauty and history of America and the truth that we speak for in the future that our children deserve. And so it’s really fun to come to events at the castle, and that is killing them.

And so at first, the attorney general insinuated that there might be something wrong with the way we had gone about buying the castle so they, you know, they threw around concepts like abuse of donor funds, when in fact we had two significant donors step forward in 2019, who conveyed to me very clearly that they wanted to donate enough, that it would make a material difference to the work that we do, and there was no more material difference to be made than allowing us to meet in peace and safety, to develop what you might call a safe space for patriots to meet. And, once we heard that through the grapevine, that that was something that had alarmed the New York Attorney General, we immediately turned over all the paperwork that had to do with it. You know, I mean, it was it was very heavily lawyered. We know that we’re vulnerable to lawfare. And so we watch our papers very carefully and have everything look over. We turned out all over, at which point the attorney general’s office continued to lie and say that they had not received it, that we were still under suspicion of not going through the right, you know, regulatory process protocols to buy this building with donor funds. So, we then pressed them, you know, what is it that you’re still looking for? What is it that that you’re still looking for? And they have now sort of moved into the zone of we think perhaps you have engaged in related party transactions. So for people who don’t know what that means, it’s like if we were giving money, we were paying money to people who were on the inside. You know, if I had family or board members that got special deals, because, you know, of their relationship, to me, this is laughable on its face because nobody is getting rich being an immigration patriot, I can tell you that.

Tucker [00:14:47] Well, it’s a little confusing.

Lydia Brimelow [00:14:48] Also, we have already turned over all that information. Who do they think we are, Black Lives Matter?

Lydia Brimelow [00:15:20] Right. So VDARE is actually incorporated in New York. This is an interesting thing. 25 years ago, our pro-bono lawyer who worked for Covington and Burling and was later banned from being able to do pro bono work for VDARE, even though he was allowed to do pro bono work for the defendants in Guantanamo Bay, set up our nonprofit in the state of New York, and our papers were signed by no other than Lois Lerner. Who you may know, went on to target the Tea Party. But, back then it was a different era politically. We were not under the kind of harsh polarization and, pressure and persecution that we are now. That was a whole different era in immigration, patriotism, where we couldn’t even get the message out. You know, there were no, peter and I would watch political campaign speeches or debates. We would watch the news and just pray just hope that somebody would mention immigration, that they would just mention it. And they didn’t. Well, people mention it now it’s on everybody’s lips now. But we also, that came at a cost. And the cost is this persecution. We’ve never operated in the state of New York. That was a convenience that our lawyer, you know, leaned on at the time. But helpful people at this point usually say, why don’t you just exit New York and you can’t. It’s like Hotel California. You cannot, if you’re a charity that’s incorporated in the state of New York, and everyone should take this as a warning, you cannot reincorporate into another state without the permission of the Attorney General’s office. You cannot sell or transfer all or significantly all of your assets without permission from the Attorney General’s office, and you cannot close up shop without permission from the Attorney General’s office. So once you are under the, jurisdiction of Letitia James, there is no getting out until she decides you’re dead enough.

Tucker [00:17:14] So at some point, and again, this is all so North Korean it’s hard to believe that it’s happening here, but that, a state prosecutor can threaten you without telling you over a period of years what crime you may have committed, and then try and bankrupt you just through threats. Like, where does this go from here? And I assume no one’s defending you, right? Of course.

Lydia Brimelow [00:17:42] Very few. You know, we have a few friends, in alternative media that have spoken up. This is the first time anybody who has any kind of significant platform has allowed us to, to share our story. So I thank you for that, Tucker. Really from the bottom of my heart, as you said, Peter was in mainstream journalism for his entire career. And, you know, that was a long career and none of his friends have been able to help him. So, or I say been able to, some of them are willing to and they’re too scared to. Others have tried and been been, you know, thwarted. The same is true with donors. We know a lot of people that can step forward and make a big difference. And the thing is, what Letitia James and cancel culture in general has done, it works. It scares people and makes them think that they they have too much to lose. They really don’t want, patriotic immigration reform to lose. They really don’t want the Brimelow’s children to be stalked by the SPLC, but they also don’t want that to happen to them. And so, despite the fact that there are many ways that people can donate anonymously, I’ve become an expert on that. And you can still even get your tax deduction in some cases. And despite the fact that if we don’t speak up, then, nobody will know that this is happening and it will continue happening to other people. We have just had a very hard time being defended, but it doesn’t stop there. It is actually very difficult for us to find lawyers who will defend us. Lawyers are too afraid to take up, our cause. And so the first thing that we have to do is to find legal representation. You know, gone are the days with the Boston Massacre, where you have an honorable lawyer who thinks everybody needs defending. Now you have to rely on whoever will help you. And sometimes those people are honest and patriotic and also really good at their trade, and sometimes they’re not. When you don’t have, the whole market available to you because they’re afraid of political persecution. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Tucker [00:19:43] It’s beyond belief. But it doesn’t end there. You’ve also been hounded and slandered by the media, and you have furthermore, and you just alluded to this, been stalked and your children have been harassed by the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is, a hate group posing as an anti-hate group. Tell us what your interactions with them have been like.

Lydia Brimelow [00:20:11] Well, I would start by saying they’ve been extensive and unpleasant. They, the Southern Poverty Law Center was tracking VDARE for years. Well, before we got the castle, the Southern Poverty Law Center I say, between them and, you know, some other smaller groups are mostly responsible for pushing cancel culture. And were really the cause, I would say, of our cancellations of all those events that I was talking about before that encouraged us to buy our own venue. And when we did buy the venue, then suddenly the fact that we had done this was so enraging to them. So we live now in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Like I said, it’s a very small town. It’s a beautiful historic town. There are natural mineral springs that bubble up out of the side of the mountain, all year round it’s 73 degrees. It was originally surveyed by George Washington. And the people there are just incredible. But there are very few of them. Only 700 people, populate the main town. Morgan County is much bigger. Berkeley Springs is much bigger. But the reason I say that is because once you live there for a little while and I think you’ve lived in some small towns, you know everybody. It doesn’t take that long. And at first when VDARE bought the castle, which is this icon of the county, you know, when you live in a rural area and you have something as much of a folly, as a stone castle looming over a tiny little resort town. Everybody wants to know what’s happening to it. So when we first bought it, people were nervous. Because of that the media said, oh my gosh, are these going to be, you know, is this the Klu Klux Klan which has now descended on our precious, you know, landmark? And, over time it became evident that no, we our main goal in Berkeley Springs is to be good, quiet neighbors. I’m raising my children there. My daughter went to the public school. We belong to the church. And so the overwhelming number of people in the town are actually good friends of ours. But there are a few bad apples, and the SPLC has really fixated on them. And starting from the first few months that we were in operations there, the SPLC would fly out journalists to embed themselves in Berkeley, little old Berkeley Springs to try to talk the locals into being quoted in the paper about how awful we are, and host secret meetings and, you know, after hours back rooms of local leftists—there’s like one leftist organization and one leftist company in our town. It’s really easy to see because they’ve got lots of colorful flags [presumably LGBT+ flags] and Black Lives Matter signs. They self-identify. It’s very like tropical fish, you know, the more colorful they are, the more poisonous they are. Destroyers. Yes. And so they their whole goal, Michael Hayden and the others who came in there to talk was to turn them against us. I mean, I think I’m certain that they would not have been happier than to organize a literal torch [parade], you know, [a] mob to come up to the castle and pull my family out of it. I mean, when I hear some patriots attend these meetings, some locals are really not having it. And I’ve heard recordings from it. I heard Tanya Gersh, [a Jewish activist] who was flown in from Whitefish, Montana, who thinks that she has endured persecution. But it is nothing like what my family has endured. And she sat here and told these West Virginia people that my family are maggots who should never see the light of day. And, you know, here I am sending my daughter to to first grade in the public school and I’m thinking, wow, this is what you’re sowing in my community. And then on top of that, when that didn’t scare us off, Michael Hayden has now decided to write a book about our family, and in support of this supposed book that he’s supposedly writing, he is spending a lot of time in town. He hangs around my church and pesters my priest about what my faith habits are. He inquires with the town council who are my neighbors. You know what are you actually friends with, Lydia? What’s your relationship with her? Have you seen their children in town? He actually bought tickets to a local Christmas, fundraiser. So there’s a nonprofit in my town. It’s all volunteer operated people who decorate the whole town for Christmas just for the benefit of the town. Our municipality is too impoverished to decorate the town for Christmas, you know, sponsored by any kind of town thing. And so some of the local townspeople decided they wanted some Christmas cheer. And they all get together and they decorate the town every year. And what we do is we, offer the castle space to nonpolitical groups, non-VDARE groups who want to have events there. And they had rented the castle for the night. We had actually donated the space to them, and they sold tickets to have a little champagne reception with our, 13 foot live Christmas tree. And they get to, you know, the guests get to wander around and see the Christmas decorations. And Michael Hayden and Hannah Geist drove from New York City to the mountains of Appalachia, bought a ticket under a fake name, and then came in there so that they could spy on VDARE’s headquarters and approach my eight year old daughter to ask her questions about the off-limits areas of the building, and then wrote about it, and the piece was run in The Daily Beast. Now, he didn’t mention my daughter, but he has lots of pictures of himself, you know, prowling around the public spaces of the Berkeley Springs Castle. And, is surprised when the security guy at the party tells him on the way out that he’s not welcome there. When you have the media so focused on turning you into a monster, on conveying to people that you are a subhuman who has evil, evil, you know, [with] patriotic ideas, there are a lot of people on the left, a lot of people generally probably, who are just there on the edge. And when they hear somebody being described as this person, they will believe them and they are unhinged. So one of the other challenges that we have faced is, there’s actually a group of trannies who have decided to stalk my family, and by that I mean follow us around, town, at the farmers market that we attend [and] again at my church, showing up at my church, wearing lots of guns on the outside of their clothes, in an attempt to intimidate us.

Tucker [00:26:54] Wait, wearing guns?

Lydia Brimelow [00:26:58] Yeah. So you know they have their their regular clothes on and then maybe a trench coat or something. And then they just have all their open-carry guns, just like, you know, multiple guns on the outside of their bodies.

Tucker [00:27:09] Well, they’re, I mean.

Lydia Brimelow [00:27:11] In my church who don’t even … .

Tucker [00:27:13] I mean, they’re violent. There’s, I mean, there been a lot of shootings by people like that recently. I mean.

Lydia Brimelow [00:27:19] Absolutely.

Tucker [00:27:20] Really threatening. Absolutely. I interrupted you. I’m sorry.

Lydia Brimelow [00:27:23] It’s very threatening.

Tucker [00:27:25] People in your church. How do they respond?

Lydia Brimelow [00:27:27] [They] don’t even know why they’re there. You know, they don’t think, who this person is trying to intimidate Lydia from attending mass. They think, who is this horrific, violent person who’s in our church? It’s terrifying. And the main leader is male to female, but one of his sidekicks is male to goblin identifying. Do goblins even have a gender? I mean, these people actually are telling you that they are demons. You have to believe them.

Tucker [00:27:52] Yes.

Lydia Brimelow [00:27:52] And I’m very blessed to have moved from a more liberal area to Berkeley Springs, because I can actually trust the law enforcement, and I can trust my friends, and I can trust my neighbors. But, you know, I don’t want it to get to the point where I need to be calling law enforcement. One of the beautiful things about living in a coherent community where people care about each other and value things like neighborliness, is that as soon as one of these hostile people comes in, I’m getting text messages. I’m getting phone calls. Hey, you don’t want to stop by Sheetz today? There’s somebody weird up there. Hey, I took a picture of this guy because he’s been snooping around. Do you know who he is? You know, that’s actually the first line of defense. And it actually reinforces what Peter and I and VDARE have been saying from the beginning, which is that your community matters. And when you flood it with huge numbers of people who are alien to you in their in their manners, in their culture, and you don’t know them, they don’t know you, you don’t know their history, you don’t know their family. They they have different values and they have different skills and abilities. You actually don’t know what’s going to happen. And it’s to everyone’s detriment. When you no longer have relationships and an understanding of your neighbors and of your community and of your town, of your state, of your country. You have lost it. There’s nothing.

Tucker [00:29:15] That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Lydia Brimelow [00:29:17] And that’s the goal. You know, of course [what] they’re trying to [do]. I mean, our issues have won every argument that we’ve made. Their immigration exacerbates all issues. It’s the queen of all issues. When you have mass immigration, unvetted even vetted when you’re talking about legal immigration, you’re bringing in huge numbers of doctors or CEOs or whatever. I mean, it still has the same effects on the social fabric of a community. And when you have a situation with ours where it’s like we have won on every issue, but we have certainly not rewarded from it. In fact, our lives are being used as an example to others. How dare you say what you can see with your own eyes? Or you know you must lie or we will hurt you and we will hurt your children. That tells you how dedicated they are to make sure that the damage to the social fabric continues. That is what they are dedicated to.

Tucker [00:30:16] It’s been received.

Lydia Brimelow [00:30:16] And the situation right now Elon Musk is just tweeting about immigration all the time. Yes and yet, you know, the small mom-and-pop operations that have been doing this work slow and steady for 25 years. I mean, there’s a strong chance that while we win the day with the arguments our organization, it’s hard to see how we’re going to survive. You know, we’re praying for a miracle. Peter and I are both natural optimists. I don’t think you can do this kind of work if you aren’t. But and we love working together, and we actually truly believe in our cause. And so I think that there’s a strong chance that something will change. But something does need to change. Because, if we are never going to get relief in the courts from Letitia James, you know, who is taking the same tactics and using them against Donald Trump. But Donald Trump has way more resources than we do. I feel like I don’t even need to say that out loud. It’s so obvious. He also has a much bigger microphone than we do. You know, I remember when, General Flynn was treated so horrifically, you know, when he was removed from the White House because of these false accusations, I think he had to sell his family home to handle the investigation.

Tucker [00:31:26] He did.

Lydia Brimelow [00:31:27] You know, and this weaponized, the process is the punishment type can you call it, justice system? Injustice system.

Tucker [00:31:41] It’s a political-

Lydia Brimelow [00:31:41] Anarcho-tyranny is what it is. And the courts have become political tribunals. So all we need is one good judge to tell Letitia James that she can’t do this anymore. Or we need, you know, a big media campaign to pressure Letitia James, against forcing us. What she’s trying to do right now is to force us to turn over all of the names of our writers, contributors and vendors, many of whom operate, under a pen name because they’re afraid of being outed. We have whistleblowers. We have whistleblowers in the government. I mean, there’s a reason they don’t want their names to be known to Letitia James, even aside from the fact that the Charities Bureau and the attorney General’s office, which is what Letitia James, operates, has already even leaked Nikki Haley’s donors. Look, if they’re going to leak Nikki Haley’s donors and hope that those people get harassed, how do you think they’re going to treat the names of the whistleblowers who write for VDARE.com? So a judge needs to step forward and say enough is enough. If you’re concerned about, their financial propriety, examine the financial documents that have already been turned over. But you do not need the names of their anonymous writers.

Tucker [00:32:58] Well, because.

Lydia Brimelow [00:32:58] They don’t need, you know, gigabytes of all the emails that they have written since 2016.

Tucker [00:33:06] I think they haven’t even articulated what you’ve done wrong.

Lydia Brimelow [00:33:08] No. The other thing.

Tucker [00:33:10] You haven’t been charged with anything.

Lydia Brimelow [00:33:11] No. No, there have been no charges.

Tucker [00:33:16] So can I take you back just a couple paragraphs to the SPLC. What they’ve done to you is so monstrous and so obviously evil. I mean, it’s not activism. It’s a moral crime. What they’re doing to your family. I think the obvious question is, who’s paying for this? Who are who are the Southern Poverty Law Center’s donors? Who is directing this? Do you know?

Lydia Brimelow [00:33:42] I don’t know. VDARE, a few years ago, I mean, gosh, before Covid. So that seems like 20 years ago was, we had a series [in which] we wrote about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s financial situation. And what’s really interesting is that a huge amount of it is held in funds, you know, like it’s operated like a hedge fund and a lot of it’s offshore. I don’t know who their donors are. I know that to the extent that they have individual, you know, American donors, it is people who have been frightened by the rhetoric who think, you know, White supremacy is coming for my children, which, they’re very good at spreading that lie and, propping up what they think are examples of that which are actually just people being normal. So, you know, they have this, I would say bifurcated approach. One is, to scare vulnerable people into handing over lots of money , and the other is to operate it in a corrupt way. And so what I wonder is, why hasn’t the Attorney General of Alabama [where the SPLC is located] done anything about it? We have the Attorney General of New York giving us an example. And, you know, there are other attorney generals out there. West Virginia, could could step in at this point. Texas, I think has done some, where’s Alabama? Where are the other patriot states out there?

Tucker [00:35:03] Because they’re I mean, the Republican Party is utterly fraudulent, as you know. And that’s the core problem. There’s no one to defend you. Which leads me to my last question, you said, a couple of moments ago that you’re in charge of fundraising for the group. And people can assess it because it’s you still have a website and assess whether they agree with your views or not. And want to support you or not. But there is a way to donate anonymously. That is, you think, secure. Can you explain what that is?

Lydia Brimelow [00:35:33] Oh, well, there is more than one way to donate anonymously. If you have a small donation that you would like to contribute, what people often do is send in a money order and they sign it to VDARE. And that’s, you know, very well established, you’re not going to get a tax deduction for that. But usually when you’re talking about $25, that’s not an issue anyway. For more significant donations you can still go through donor-advised funds. So Fidelity Charitable, which is the world’s biggest giving vehicle for for charitable money these days, will not honor a donor advisor’s direction to donate to VDARE. But there are lots of other donor advised funds that will. So, I’m happy to mention some of those, although I don’t have official relationships with any of them. That’s the main way that people donate anonymously is through donor-advised funds that are still, allowing their donor advisors to direct the money. You can also do it through a lawyer on an individual basis. And, if you’re concerned about, the tax deduction, that’s really the best way to go. If you’re not concerned about the tax deduction, then there are other ways that can help VDARE financially. They get a little bit more esoteric. But, you know, in an environment where we are having to diversify, in order to make sure that our, business is able to survive, there are a lot of opportunities for investment and patriotic type businesses.

Tucker [00:37:07] Man, it’s just it’s unbelievable that we’re having this conversation. Lydia Brimelow, thank you very much. And Godspeed.

A Sad Day in Court for Men’s Group: Activist judge gives rightwingers max sentences, ignores real criminals

July 19 was a grim day for three young men from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) who were told their punishment by a federal district judge in Charlottesville, Va. The defendants had been arrested under the Anti-Riot Act, which a California federal court has found unconstitutional, and charged for their participation in the 2018 “riots” in Charlottesville and California. 

Denied bail, the RAM defendants, after many months in difficult conditions in prison, had entered into plea agreements in May 2019. A few weeks prior to the sentencing hearing and long after the plea agreements were entered into, the government announced its intention to try to increase, by means of the federal Hate Crime Enhancement Statute (part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2800003), the sentences to which the RAM defendants agreed in their plea agreements. The hate crime enhancement statute allows a court to increase a defendant’s prison time if the court determines that the defendant, in committing a federal crime, e.g., rioting, singled out members of a protected group, such as racial minorities, women, or homosexual persons.

At the hearing, the government put forward a massive effort to make its proposed hate crime enhancements stick. It called two FBI agents as witnesses and introduced and discussed over 60 exhibits, mostly photographs and videos, and invoked comparisons to Nazi Germany. 

The hearing, however, had an air of Kafkaesque, bizarre unreality. During the entire hearing the government and its FBI witnesses ignored or mitigated the provocative, aggressive, and often violent actions of the counterprotestors, which included antifa and other hard-left radicals, at the Charlottesville and California confrontations.

For example, one of the government’s photo exhibits showed a RAM defendant holding a bagel and making a hand gesture that the government described as a “white power sign.” Standing next to the RAM defendant was a man who was friends with the RAM defendant. The government presented this photo as evidence that the RAM defendants were anti-Semitic and were targeting Jews at the riots. What the government failed to mention and defense counsel failed to elicit on cross examination was that bagels had been thrown at the RAM defendants by the neo-Bolshevik antifa agitators and their allies, and the man standing next to the RAM defendant was later viciously assaulted with a bike lock, and injured, by a masked antifa member. This masked antifa member was Eric Clanton, then a professor at a college in Berkeley. Clanton was charged with a misdemeanor for his assault, received a suspended sentence of 30 days, was placed on probation, and thus served no jail time.  Read more

American Free Press Interviews Glen Allen On His Lawsuit Against the SPLC

This interview first appeared in American Free Press, April 14,2019.

Glen K. Allen, an attorney in Baltimore, Maryland, is the plaintiff in a lawsuit he filed in December 2018 in federal court in Maryland against Heidi Beirich, Mark Potok, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Recently, Allen sat down with AFP to talk about his case as well as free speech in the current political environment in the United States.

* * * * *

AFP: Mr. Allen, could you give us a summary of your lawsuit?

Allen: Sure. In August 2016, Heidi Beirich and the SPLC improperly orchestrated my termination as an attorney for the City of Baltimore, where I was doing competent and ethical work.

The SPLC, in its remarkable arrogance, not only does not deny it did this but has boasted about it on one of its so-called “hate maps,” together, of course, with the most unflattering photo of me it could find. I have brought suit in federal court alleging three federal and six state law claims.

My claims are based on the SPLC’s actions against me but also on its conduct over decades that I contend is inconsistent with its status as a law firm and a purported 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to an educational mission. So, in essence, I’m seeking to redress the harms done to me but also to vindicate basic principles of free expression and the rule of law.

AFP: You mentioned free expression. Did you have an interest in that subject prior to this case?

Allen: Yes, for half a century I have seen our American traditions of free expression and free assembly as unique and fragile and have advocated constant vigilance to preserve them. I have tried to do my part to protect them. Read more