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

Discovery is going to be delicious.

Lydia Brimelow, former publisher of VDARE.com

On April 21, the DOJ flipped on the light in the SPLC’s kitchen and spotted a scurrying cockroach called “wire fraud and money laundering.”

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 chart pictured above was displayed in the office of Mark Potok, SPLC Editor in Chief of the Intelligence Report, tracking the end of white majorities in the US and Europe. It wasn’t all for money. It was also for hatred of white people. Greed and genocidal ideation are not mutually exclusive. For 25 years, VDARE.com fought against the SPLC and that chart they found so inspirational.

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.

From the indictment:

In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.

[snip]

After the accounts were opened, the SPLC, through Employee-1 [who went on to become Chief Financial Officer of the SPLC], among others, executed Sole Proprietorship Resolution of Authority documents with Bank-1. These documents contained false and misleading information regarding the ownership and control of the fictitious entities for which the bank accounts were opened. Employee-1, and others, signed these documents containing false and misleading statements for the benefit of the SPLC.

I’m going to interrupt for a second here and just marvel that the SPLC was able to do this at all. Why wasn’t it stopped at the bank level?

Among my ugliest battle scars from 20+ years of SPLC attacks is vast amounts of time on the phone or meeting with financial institutions begging them to keep our business. In my swan song for VDARE.com here I listed more than 50 cancelations we endured during this period. Nineteen of them were financial institutions. We never lied to any bank and had never been accused of any financial impropriety. We were denied services because of “reputational risk”—which meant that the SPLC had called us a Hate Group.

You’re telling me that an SPLC employee was able to walk into a bank and open five fraudulent bank accounts in one day with fake documents and fake EIN numbers? There’s got to be more to that story.

Now back to our regularly scheduled indictment:

The funds deposited…were then loaded onto pay cards issued to the [field sources] who were supposedly employees of the fictitious entity…the [field sources] pay cards were designed to still further conceal the true nature, source, ownership and control of the donated funds the SPLC was paying to the [field sources].

There are rumors that there are RICO possibilities here. I don’ t know the law behind RICO but I do know that it has a way of unzipping long lines of related people who are connected by money.

I can’t pretend to be sad that the SPLC might be facing such a pickle but I’m also curious—will it start unzipping these extremist groups too? Will we see Heidi Beirich and the Grand Wizard of the KKK perp-walked together? The memes write themselves.

(Except when they don’t: I asked ChatGPT to make a political cartoon of Heidi Beirich and a Grand Wizard of the KKK, each handcuffed, being walked into a courthouse together and it told me I had made an “inappropriate request.”)

You think this is bullying, Chat?

Allegedly, once Bank-1 finally (after many years) started sniffing around the five fake bank accounts, the SPLC closed them and sent their right wing extremist informants ACH payments instead. From the indictment:

These ACH payments were masked with monikers such as “Rarebooks050”…designed to conceal the true nature, source, ownership and control of the of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the [field sources].

The charges are 6 counts of wire fraud, 4 counts of lying to a bank, 1 count of conspiracy to launder money.

Note that, contrary to widespread reporting, none of these crimes is actually called “defrauding donors.” All the charges are tied to actual bank transactions.

Is It Illegal to Have Paid Informants?

This is not a question I’ve ever had the opportunity to consider before, but as someone who is actively being bludgeoned into personal bankruptcy on trumped-up nonprofit fiduciary violations, I do have a morbid interest when others run into corporate trouble. Especially my enemies.

According to Grok (an AI bot, cheaper than a lawyer), if the SPLC had paid these sources openly rather than laundering the money, but still made the same alleged misrepresentations to donors (e.g. continued issuing fundraising material saying funds would only “fight” or “dismantle” extremism without disclosing the payment), the wire-fraud charges would remain, because wire fraud = lying to get money electronically.

The donor-deception element is the basis of the charges because that’s they lying part. The money laundering (fake accounts) is merely the concealment tactic used to cover the donor-deception fraud.

But the money-laundering charge is especially serious, because it could broaden the DOJ’s reach in terms of asset forfeiture. Here’s a juicy bit from the indictment:

Upon conviction…SPLC shall forfeit to the United States…any property, real or personal, which represents or is traceable to the gross receipts obtained, directly or indirectly, from the offenses…

The SPLC boasted an annual revenue of over $129 million in 2024, the most recent year reported, plus assets of $822 million including that offshore account. Can we earmark those assets for the border wall?

Or, better yet, reparations for the many victims of SPLC’s witch hunts—such as, to take a random example, the VDARE Foundation and my family?

I’m afraid the SPLC headquarters are just too ugly to host VDARE conferences, but I’m sure we could use it for something. The Castle always was short of storage.

Baby, Meet Bathwater: The SPLC May Be A Fraud But Right Wing Activism Isn’t

News of the indictment triggered a deluge of Hot Takes on X, and while many of them are entirely natural (if perhaps not charitable) there is one loud strain that is just plain Fake News:

Peter and I were not involved in Charlottesville. Peter was not invited to speak. We did not attend. We didn’t promote it and VDARE.com didn’t even cover it until it was all anyone in the U.S. would talk about and it became clear that a huge injustice was being done to the patriots who did attend.

In fact, I pled with friends to stay home. They didn’t, and their lives were ruined.

And VDARE was kicked off PayPal for our trouble.

Maybe you’ve forgotten what a dox once meant, because it doesn’t carry the weight now that it once did. But when I say it ruined their lives I’m not talking about people who took a hit and came back stronger. I’m talking about people who were physically injured by “counter-protestor” violence and have been permanently stripped of their livelihoods, their most precious relationships, their homes and futures.

Some have found peace in their circumstances. Some went off the deep end. Some of them are still rotting in jail. Some died alone.

I didn’t tell people to stay home because I thought it was a setup or a false flag. It’s because I knew Richard Spencer was a drunk, wife-beating egomaniac who would let innocent people be destroyed before he would let himself suffer. And I was right.

The SPLC paid one guy. The vast majority of demonstrators at Charlottesville were there to resist the very thing the SPLC stands for: the destruction of the Historic American Nation. They were not Nazis, and they weren’t violent. They were, in fact, fine people.

And, it’s clear now that Charlottesville was a dress rehearsal for the January 6 trap.

Look, at some point the Respectable Right will have to face the fact that reasonable white Americans don’t like watching their own destruction. That’s what Charlottesville was, a genuine response to the attack on themselves and their heritage. The allegations that the SPLC took it seriously enough to pay someone on the inside – and perhaps even encourage him to misbehave, we don’t know – while the Respectable Right ran for cover, just goes to show how shockingly uninvested in the Historic American Nation these media figures actually are.

The SPLC took Charlottesville more seriously than the Respectable Right does, even today.

SPLC Investigation vs. VDARE Investigation

It is worth pausing to compare how prosecutors have treated VDARE with how they have treated the SPLC.

VDARE

· Public investigation

· Burdensome subpoenas

· Years of discovery

· Legal bills drained the organization before any complaints filed,

SPLC:

· Silent investigation

· No subpoenas (as far as we know)

· Straight to criminal charges

· SPLC still has hundreds of millions of dollars and many lawyers on staff

One was a slow, public, financially ruinous process designed to bleed the us dry before any complaint was filed, let alone a verdict reached. The other was a quiet, efficient investigation leading directly to criminal accountability.

Why the difference?

I can think of a few possibilities. Maybe the New York Attorney General Letitia James knew we were innocent—and knew that a fair process would prove it, so she opted for “process as punishment” instead. Drag it out. Make it expensive. Bankrupt us so the truth never comes out and we can never be exonerated.

Maybe the U.S Department of Justice, by contrast, knew the SPLC was guilty. So it moved quietly, gathered evidence, and struck when it was ready—without warning, without giving the SPLC years to bulk up their resources crying persecution.

Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe the powerful get investigated with care and discretion and the powerless get investigated by a bullhorn and a lawyer’s bill.

I personally still find it difficult to think of us as powerless (despite our clear demise) because we were supposed to be protected by the First Amendment. Turns out, the first amendment isn’t a shield, it’s a lawsuit, and lawsuits cost money VDARE ultimately didn’t have.

The Constitution doesn’t bill by the hour, but lawyers do.

Secrecy of A Different Color

There is another difference, too, that I can’t get it out of my mind.

Both the SPLC investigation and the VDARE investigation hinge on the same thing: the protection of names.

In the SPLC’s case, according to the indictment, a future CFO hid names to defraud donors. Fake businesses. Shell accounts. Payments routed through “Rare Books Warehouse” so no one would know they were siphoning money to the very activists the SPLC claimed to oppose. They protected names because the truth was a scandal, and so they could keep making dat money.

In our case, we protected names because the truth would harm innocent people: our donors and pseudonymous writers. These people would lose their jobs, their reputations, their safety, if the malicious and leak-prone OAG got hold of their names.

One of us committed serious crimes and is now indicted. The other committed no crimes and is now belly-up.

(And the SPLC probably has Officers and Directors insurance, meaning the individuals involved likely won’t have to pay the legal bills to defend themselves, the SPLC donors will be covering it for them. Is that how they intended their charitable dollars to be spent?)

But Discovery Is Going To Be Awesome

Seriously. I cannot wait to see what the DOJ finds when discovery begins in earnest. They have an entire operation of lawyers and a ka-jillion dollars in mysterious offshore accounts, but they are fighting in Alabama and not NY so they likely won’t have any kind of political home field advantage.

What do we have to look forward to, you ask?

Where to even begin??

• What exactly is going on with that offshore money?

• What kind of soap opera struggle sessions unfolded when the younger staff decided the older staff were racists or sexist or when there was union strife, or when Morris Dees was caught peeping at his 16 year old stepdaughter through a bathroom window?

• How consciously do they overstate the threat of extremists? Have they truly drunk the kool-aid, or is it more cynical?

• Why was Michael E. Hayden fired? Is he the only one that’s been committed to a mental hospital? Or all they all like that?

• Who exactly were the paid informants? Did they give any juicy information?

• What other crimes might be revealed as the real investigation proceeds? You know what they say about finding one cockroach.

• What was the nature of their partnership with the FBI? Who at the FBI did they corrupt? Who needs to be purged?

• And of course, what did they say about VDARE and my family? Did they engage in tortious interference to get us canceled? How did they like it when Michael E Hayden was caught cornering my 8 year old daughter at a private party?

What, dear reader, do YOU hope to learn from the DOJ getting to read all of the SPLC’s emails, text messages, mailings, travel records, financial records and recorded calls?

Leave it in the comments!

(And if you can help my family pay the personal lawfare costs inflicted on us by the SPLC and its allies in New York State government, please do so by credit card here or by mail to PO Box 677, Berkeley Springs, WV 25411. Many thanks).

Lydia Brimelow is the former publisher of VDARE.com, now fighting political persecution while homeschooling three daughters and helping run the historic Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia.