PATRICK CLEBURNE: Why Is Southern Poverty Law Center Late Filing Its Financials?

(And is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche throwing $PLC fraud case? )

Ryan P. Haygood, SPLC’s new President and CEO

The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] has not yet posted its Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for the year ending October 31 2025, delaying at least three months later than usual. This is an abrupt departure from the meticulous housekeeping under the regime of founder Morris Dees and President & CEO J. Richard Cohen (who resigned alongside Dees in 2019).

And the SPLC has also switched auditors: it is now using the Atlanta-based firm of CRI (Carr, Riggs & Ingram, L.L.C.), whereas for many years it used Jackson Thornton & Co., P.C. based in its hometown of Montgomery AL.

At commercial bank credit school many years ago, I was trained to regard any change of auditors as raising a red flag.

Is something going on?

The SPLC, long America’s leading anti-white vigilante outfit, has certainly been generating some interesting news this year. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against it, initially in April, amended in June. The core of the original indictment:

• 6 counts of wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343)

• 4 counts of false statements to a federally insured bank (18 U.S.C. § 1014)

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956(h))

(Not primarily for paying monies to questionable groups, as often misrepresented, including, alarmingly, by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the DOJ Press Conference.)

These financial fraud charges will be extremely difficult to defeat, as chillingly laid out in the middle part of Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud (Bits about Money, May 1^st, 2026.)

Financial fraud laws are exceptionally savage, a hangover from the War on Drugs and the War On Terror. Under them, the only thing that matters is that a bank was misled. Why and to whom the money was paid does not matter.

The SPLC’s best chance is probably nullification by a Leftist judge or jury—admittedly all too possible in such a high-profile political case as this.

Consequently it is a puzzle to me why the DOJ is laying so much emphasis on the marginally relevant but headline-grabbing issue of the curious payments to supposed right-wingers for information or perhaps influence. DOJ is asserting this defrauded the SPLC’s donors. This may be be more of a stretch legally.

And a July 7, 2026, Washington Examiner story SPLC arraigned on superseding charges of donor fraud by Mia Cathell added the disturbing fact:

For the charged offenses, the SPLC faces up to 30 years in federal prison, a $1 million fine, and any applicable order of restitution. U.S. attorney Kevin Davidson, however, noted during the arraignment hearing that the SPLC is “a corporate defendant” and would not be subject to imprisonment as the federal statute stipulates in most fraud cases.

This very much puzzles old VDARE.com hands like myself. New York Attorney General Letitia James in her effort to destroy VDARE has filed against both the VDARE Foundation and Lydia and Peter Brimelow personally. (She is not alleging bank fraud. It’s a civil case).

The Federal financial fraud laws are intentionally designed to victimize individuals as well as institutions. In fact, their basic operational method is to terrify individuals into betraying their associates.

That the individuals pseudonymously named in the complaint are not being sued personally raises alarming questions about the seriousness of the DOJ. Merely fining the $829 million-asset SPLC a trivial $1 million is a bad joke.

Of course, these periphery charges have unquestionably hurt the SPLC’s public image. One of the startling stories arising from the DOJ’s legal offensive was summarized in the New York Post (SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account, By Chadwick Moore and Isabel Vincent, June 16, 2026):

Based on the details in the June 2 superseding indictment, “Employee-2” is believed to be Heidi Beirich, a 58-year-old fascism expert who was the director of intelligence at the Alabama-based anti-extremism nonprofit between 2012 and 2019.

“[Beirich] was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, [Beirich] and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts,” the indictment alleges.

“Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account … and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and [Beirich].”

Heidi Beirich, now Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of Global Project Against Hate And Extremism.

Some may find this amusing. But Heidi Beirich was for years one of the $PLC’s main thugs. See Hideous Heidi Beirich’s Bullying Laid Bare.

Perhaps some lawyer out there can explain why an apparent perpetrator—Beirich personally opened some of the fake accounts—who is also the beneficiary of bank fraud would not be charged.

On May 22 2026, I posted Why VDARE called Southern Poverty Law Center the “$PLC”

This recapitulated the $PLC’s astonishing financial success story and reported on its subsequent fall from grace, including founder Morris Dees’s abrupt firing in March 2019 for reasons never fully made public.

I also noted that, over the last few years, a Black takeover of the SPLC has seemingly taken place.

Judging from a screenshot from March 29 2024, posted below, now only four of the 13 Board Members are White (at least three apparently Jewish) and Blacks are in a majority.

In contrast, as recently as 2018, there only three Black members out of 13 and at least eight members appeared to be Jewish.

Moreover, in June 16 the SPLC website posted SPLC Announces Ryan P. Haygood as New President and CEO

Haygood, by an amazing coincidence, is black. Previously for ten years he was President of the New Jersey Institute For Social Justice, an outfit so obscure that it has not earned (or bothered to create) a Wikipedia page (neither has Haygood). The only news stories he has generated appear to be honorific.

The website of Haygood’s New Jersey Institute For Social Justice is as secretive as the SPLC’s. But it does disclose it was

established in 1999 by Alan V. and Amy Lowenstein and a group of visionaries steeped in the Civil Rights Movement.

and that it has appointed an Indian woman, Henal Patel, Interim President & CEO of the Institute.

(Senior Counsel, Nuzhat Chowdhury, and Senior Counsel “Democracy and Justice Reform” Rupal Motwani, are also obviously Indian—three out of the nine officers.)

So basically the Institute For Social Justice is an anti-white advocacy operation which is being forced to utilize “Blacks with Brains” to keep the shop operating.

Symbolically, the longstanding $PLC logo was changed in 2023. The new one dispensed with the Scales of Justice and is straightforwardly Black and White.

These changes at the SPLC have been accompanied by a radical reduction of transparency on the its website, which was historically quite informative. In particular, information about its Directors and Officers has been suppressed.

Yet the changes at the SPLC are significant. I noted in my May 2026 that, starting in 2020, invasions of the SPLC’s fabled “Endowment Fund”—not actually an Endowment Fund as usually understood in charity law but just a pile of money that Morris Dees seemed to like sitting on—had begun.

From Footnote 13 of the 2024 Consolidated Financial Statements (which reported the Endowment Fund at $787 Mm):

During the year ended October 31, 2020, the Board of Directors approved $30 million from the Endowment Fund for the Vote Your Voice initiative…the Board of Directors approved a $100 million investment from the Endowment Fund over the next decade to support voter outreach…The commitment…marks a more-than-threefold increase…pledged in 2020.

The total Vote Your Voice expense for the year ended October 31, 2024, was $14,068,100 (total $41,964,614 for four years).

Footnote 13 does not directly state when the “investment,” which of course is just a subsidy to black political activists, was voted. But I do not believe that any distributions from the “Endowment Fund” were ever allowed when Morris Dees was in control (ended 2019).

It is axiomatic, and has been underlined by the recent Somali and BLM funding scandals (see here and here and here), that showering money on Black-controlled outfits just enables fraud.

If anyone is dubious of the political importance of the $SPLC case, or of the organization’s tremendous power of the $PLC, I commend the section Data products and mechanistic decisioning in Bits about Money’s definitive essay Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud mentioned above.

This nauseatingly explains that from 2017

The SPLC formed a coalition to gain account- and transaction-level decisionmaking capability at tech companies, financial infrastructure firms, and banks through a coordinated pressure campaign… Industry participants describe the coalition participants as threatening their employers, openly and by implication.

In effect, the SPLC effectively gained veto power of access to financial services over an amazingly wide range of institutions. Political opponents were systematically targeted. This may well explain the tremendous loss of services that VDARE.com suffered in those years.

The Biden totalitarian coup was communist in content, because it was egalitarian and anti-identitarian, but fascist in form, because like Mussolini it co-opted corporate insititutions.

Bits about Money points out that the SPLC’s ludicrous reputation for holiness amongst the sheeple was key to this:

Industry participants… when the cameras are not rolling, when there is nothing to gain, repeatedly described the SPLC to me as being on the side of the angels.

Destroying this totally fallacious reputation is of course definitely in the interest of Americans. And there has already been some evidence this process has started.

But will the process be completed? The redoubtable Sam E. Antar, without whom the Letitia James mortgage fraud case would never have been assembled, suspects Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of having sabotaged that litigation.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche

Is Blanche, a former Democrat, reluctant to charge home against Democratic icons?

For my own part, having closely observed VDARE’s litigation experiences (and for that matter President Trump’s) has eliminated any confidence in the integrity of the American judicial system. Especially when any whiff of politics is involved.

However I do have confidence in Black behavior in financial matters.

Consequently, I have been eagerly awaiting the posting of the SPLC’s Audited Financial Statement and IRS Form 990 for their FY ended 10-30-2025.

Hurry up, $PLC!

p.s. For the record, my major, exhaustive but still-relevant, VDARE.com analyses of the SPLC phenomenon were

· The Good News: SPLC loses $50 Million. Bad news: $PLC can afford it 04/08/2009

· Will The Southern Poverty Law (And Investing) Center Return Its Madoff Money? 05/20/2010

· Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble? 06/01/2011

Significantly, the SPLC has now disabled its website’s links to the financial reports that I cited here. What is the new regime trying to hide?

Sign up for Patrick Cleburne’s free substack here.