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August 13, 2026 14 mins

Buck Sexton breaks down the federal case involving a former senior Southern Poverty Law Center official and the serious allegations surrounding how donor money was used. Buck examines the arrest, the money trail, the SPLC’s enormous fundraising operation, and the broader question at the center of the controversy: Was an organization built to fight extremism actually helping sustain the very threat it claimed to combat? 

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's talk about what's going on with a big arrest
of a former senior Southern Poverty Law Center officer. This
goes to the growing case that the SPLC was manufacturing
hate to pretend to fight against it, paying white supremacists,

(00:24):
paying people in these groups to spread the very messaging
that the SPLC claims that it exists to fight against.
It's like a firefighter who's starting fires. That's what they
were doing. But just yesterday, federal authorities arrested Heidi bay Rich.

(00:45):
For years, she was a top official at the Southern
Poverty Law Center Finance and Intelligence, the person who oversaw
the so called intelligence project that was tracking hate groups.
So this is interesting. They really were branding themselves as
almost a rogue intelligence agency or like a private sector
intelligence operation at the SPLC. But she now faces federal

(01:08):
charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bank fraud, and
money laundering. So, according to prosecutors, bay Rich helped funnel
donor money millions of dollars through shell companies and fictitious
entities to informants inside of white supremacist groups. One informant
alone received more than one point two million dollars. One

(01:32):
point two million dollars. I have to assume that that
money wasn't just to pay this person for information and
to spread the hate that SPLC Southern Property Law Center
is supposed to fight against. I have to assume that
this paid for infrastructure is paid for you know, the
signs at the protests, travel of people to these or marches,
I should say, not really protests, whatever they call them.

(01:54):
Roughly one hundred of and forty thousand dollars of that
one point two million flew into a joint person flowed
into a joint personal bank account she shared with an
informant that she was allegedly in a romantic relationship with.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
So, just to be clear, the allegation here is by
the FEDS is that this woman was paying to manufacture
hate while she was at an organization supposed supposedly fighting hate,
and she was having a sexual relationship with she was

(02:28):
sleeping with one of the hate mongers. Yikes.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
They shared housing, by the way, they shared bank accounts,
and this is all supposed to be about fighting hate.
That's what they tell the donors, right, So this is
part of a broader indictment I should add about against
the SPLC, and that indictment alleges that between twenty and
seven and twenty twenty three, the organization secretly moved at
least four point one million dollars in tax exempt donor

(02:59):
funds to people who were leading or deeply involved in
the very extremist groups that the SPLC claimed to be dismantling.
Prosecutors say some of that money helped recruit members, stage rallies,
and even buy materials for clan robes and cross burnings.
Oh my gosh, the SPLC was buying the crosses and

(03:23):
telling people that it paid off to burn the crosses.
Donors were told that this money was going to combat extremism,
and DOJ says it was actually creating or sustaining extremism.
So let's understand this is not just some right wing
gotcha game. This is an actual federal case brought by

(03:43):
the Department of Justice. The SPLC denies wrongdoing, the woman
who's arrested denies wrongdoing. They're saying that all of this
is politically motivated, and that's what this is all about.
Bay Rich's lawyer says that she's totally innocent. Okay, well,
let's see, let's prove this in court. But the facts

(04:05):
already on the table are damning enough to force every
serious person to ask a very straightforward question, what exactly
has the SPLC been doing all these years? How has
it been raising money? What has it been raising money for?
The money, of course, is the tell. Over last decade,
the Southern Poverty Law Center raised you ready for this,

(04:27):
well over a billion dollars. Form nine nineties show that
annual revenues routinely were in the one hundred to one
hundred and seventy million dollar range. In fiscal year twenty seventeen,
they took in roughly one hundred and thirty six million dollars.
Later year stayed in that neighborhood. Are higher one hundred

(04:49):
and forty million, one hundred and thirty million, peaking nearly
one hundred and seventy million dollars in donations in one year,
contributions and grants with the overwhelming majority of that of
that revenue, and their net assets now sit in the
high seven hundred millions to around eight hundred million dollar range.

(05:09):
Their endowment alone has been reported near or above seven
hundred and eight hundred million dollars. This is not some
scrappy civil rights outfit living hand to mouth. This is
a massive left wing propaganda cash machine. Where they headquarters.
That staffers used to joke was the quote poverty palace
end quote. So where does that kind of money come from? Well,

(05:32):
part of it is, of course, the systematic inflation of
the threat of white supremacy, the deliberate, the clear manufacturing
of hate. Just look at the way that language changed
in this country and how places like the Southern Poverty
Laws Center were such a part of it. After Barack

(05:53):
Obama was elected in two thousand and eight, the use
of the term white supremacy in major media exploded. Studies
the New York Times Washington Posts show that references to
far right extremism rose hundreds of percent between two thousand
and eight and twenty ten. This is well before, by
the way, Donald Trump entered the picture. By the late

(06:15):
twenty tens, the phrase white supremacy was being used almost
twenty times more than it had been in the previous decade.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Think about that.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
By when you're approaching twenty twenty, white supremacy is used
almost twenty times as much as before Barack Obama's elected
in all the major newspapers. And there was a radical
concept creep as well that happened with white supremacy, so
called white supremacy. It was once thought of as actual clansmen,
neo Nazis, bad people with bad ideas doing bad things.

(06:52):
But then they started to stretch the term white supremacy
to cover university admissions, policies, bank lending practices, nutritional advice
for the poor, and eventually almost any disagreement with progressive
orthodoxy could and was be called out as white supremacy.
Now might add the same thing holds for the word racism.
Academic and media analyzes show a sharp sustained increase in

(07:14):
the prevalence of prejudice what they call prejudice denoting language
starting in the early twenty tens. Mentions of racism, racist
and related terms in major newspapers rose by factors of
five to seven, even ten times over the decade. This
was not driven solely by Trump. The trend was already
accelerating before twenty fifteen. It was a cultural and institutional project,

(07:37):
and the Southern Poverty Law Center played a huge role,
was central in that project of making people in America
believe that there was this huge rise in right wing extremists,
hate groups and all this stuff, and it was just
simply lies. But they built a business model on expansive

(07:59):
hate grips. Group labeling, mainstream conservative organizations, parental rights groups,
religious conservatives, immigration restrictionists, anyone restrictionists, people just believe in immigration.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Rule of law.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Anyone who refused to tow the progressive line could find
themselves targeted as a white supremacist. The more groups they designated,
the more urgent, of course, the crisis appeared. So it's
a self perpetuating cycle. Call more and more people, white supremacists,
raise more and more money to fight white supremacy, and
so on. The Czechs were rolling in. They were manufacturing
fake hate, you could say, manufacturing a delusion, great book

(08:35):
that all of you should get if you have not
already written by yours, truly manufacturing a delusion to create
this notion of the country in the midst of a
hate a hate extravaganza. So this was all part of
an attempt to suppress real dissent. And think about what

(08:56):
this means in practice. If you can convince large numbers
of Americans, especially institutionetional gatekeepers in tech, finance, media, and government,
that ordinary political disagreement is the gateway to white supremacy.
Then you can justify deplatforming, canceling, and financially starving your opponents.
You can treat legitimate debate about immigration, crime, education, or
biological reality as a moral emergency. You can raise hundreds

(09:20):
of millions of dollars while painting half the country as
a latent threat. And now we learn that while they
were doing that, significant sums of the money they raised
were allegedly being routed through shell companies. Again, these are
the allegations from the federal government, with false statements, to banks,
to people inside the very groups they claimed to be fighting,
and at least one case, the money was going to

(09:40):
summon the SPLC official overseeing the payments was romantically involved
with again.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Allegation.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
This is not intelligence work, my friends, this is a
racket and therefore there was racketeering involved here. Conservatives have
been saying for years the SPLC's hate map was a
political weapon, trust up as civil rights work. It was
designed initially to fight the Klan, but that had already
largely been destroyed by earlier lawsuits and action, and this

(10:11):
really just turned the SPLC into a weapon to police
acceptable opinion on the right. So the bay Rich arrest
and the broader case against the organization of the first
major institutional confirmation of that critique from the federal government itself. Now,
does that mean that every claim the Southern Poverty Law
Center made was false? Of course not. Are there white supremacists? Absolutely?

(10:31):
Are they terrible people, Yes they are. But those are
people who believe horrible things about their fellow human beings
based upon skin color and want action taken upon it.
They have unjust and absurd ideas, and they are on
the absolute fringe of society and a tiny tiny portion

(10:53):
of the overall American populace. And they are true out
as they should be with disdain. But being a Republican
is not a white premacist. That certainly is the case
for the millions of people who are black, brown Asian
who are Republican. They're not white supremacists, are they? The
whole thing is falling apart around the Southern Poverty Law Center,

(11:13):
The whole Khan is being exposed. Yes, white supremacist violence
should be prosecuted to the Phullsic Center law and white
supremacists should be shouted down where they actually appear. Having
secure borders is not white supremacy, it's sanity. Enforcing laws
about everything from traffic to murder is not white supremacy.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
It is rule of law.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
It is sanity. But the media got away with treating
the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority for decades
on this issue. And of course their credibility has never
been at a lower moment than it is right now either.
So both of these and the Democrat aligned press and

(12:02):
the Southern Poverty Law Center are in free fall, at
least in terms of anybody with any sense believing them.
But the SBLC was treated as a neutral arbiter of
hate in America when it was actually amplifying hate and
building a huge, a massive endowment off the very threat
narrative that they were creating. Explosion of white supremacist and

(12:26):
racist language after two thousand and eight was not a
reflection of reality in this country. It was part of
a feedback loop that was created. Activist groups inflated the threat,
media repeated that inflated threat, and then donors responded to
the fake urgency and the cycle continued. That cycle is
now under federal scrutiny. Cash Betel of the FBI and

(12:47):
others are on it. If a former senior officer of
the Southern Poverty Law Center under arrest SPLCS, under indictment
as an entity, and now the rest of us are
looking at an organization that amassed nearly a billion dollars
selling fear of hate, while according to prosecutors, some of
that money was quietly circulating back to the hate itself.

(13:08):
If this case holds up, it will not just be
an embarrassment for one nonprofit. It will be a case
study in how manufactured moral panic can become a multi
hundred million dollar industry and how that industry can be
used to silence descent under the banner of fighting extremism.
So that's the bigger story here, not just this arrest.
The business model at the SPLC represented and the language

(13:33):
that made that business model possible. So we're gonna keep
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Speaker 2 (14:33):
That is the show She'll tie

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