May 14, 2026 • 49 mins
The President of the United States went on 60 Minutes last month and claimed that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was fake, a hoax perpetrated by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He's referring to allegations made in the recent indictment against the SPLC that one of their paid informants was a member of the planning chat for the rally. But what does the indictment actually say? And what kind of person snitches for money?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I was lingering outside the courthouse for no reason in
particular one morning in April a few years ago. Normally
I had straight home to organize my notes. If the
day had a weird energy, maybe I'll walk a few
blocks in the wrong direction to make sure no one's
followed me to my car. The swastika shaped scars on
(00:29):
the trees outside my living room window, or a reminder
of a lesson learned the hard way. But that morning
I sat on the bench outside for a minute, and
I met one of my weird little guys. I hadn't
planned to. I didn't want to. The type of research
(00:51):
I do does not include asking them for their side
of the story. But there he was. I knew who
he was. I'd written about him before. I was there
that morning for his first appearance in court on a
felony charge, and I had already spent years leading up
to that moment scouring footage of the crime in question,
(01:14):
finding his face in the crowd, and identifying dozens of others.
And he knew who I was. I knew that because
I'd heard his podcast, a short lived production that included
some very graphic descriptions of rape and torture fantasies his
friends had about me. So I hadn't planned on chatting,
(01:38):
and yet there I was extending my hand, offering him
a lighter. I'm not too proud to admit i'd been afraid.
I was afraid when I found out a court date
had been set for a man who laughed along with
his friends as they fantasized about rape me to death,
(02:01):
about firing a gun inside of my vagina, about hanging
me from meat hooks. I'd heard those things, and now
he was more than just a voice on a Nazi podcast.
He was going to be in town. I don't usually
get scared, it's just work. But I didn't want that
(02:22):
man anywhere near me. But seeing him slouching on a
bench in the gallery of my little county courthouse, he
was small. I had my notebook and my pen, and
he wasn't the boogieman. He was just a sad, weird
little guy. We stood there outside the courthouse for about
(02:45):
as long as it took him to smoke a cigarette.
He seemed so harmless, now so defeated, He asked me
if I really thought he'd deserved to go to jail,
if I thought they all deserved to go to jail
for marching with their torches that night in August of
twenty seventeen. I told him it didn't matter when I thought,
(03:06):
and I asked him about Ted. They'd marched together that night,
but he didn't have any kind words for his recently
deceased former friend. He only nodded when I asked if
it was true that Ted had been the one who
revealed his name to a rival in the movement. After
he stubbed out his cigarette butt, he reached toward me,
(03:28):
hand outstretched. I didn't mean to grab it. Ask me, now,
would you shake a Nazi's hand, And my answer is no,
of course, not, not in a million years. But even
as he loomed over me, easily a foot taller than
I am, he seemed so small, his slumped shoulders the
(03:52):
very picture of defeat. And it was just a reflex.
I think. His right hand was there, held out distincius
from me, waiting, and suddenly mine was there too, gripping
his a little too tightly. No hard feelings, he said,
(04:15):
I didn't like. Oh, I didn't say anything. Take care
of yourself, he said, as he dropped my hand and
turned to leave, And all I could do was laugh.
I watched him walk away, and I stood there outside
the courthouse, laughing, no hard feelings.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Was it an.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Apology or an offer of forgiveness, I couldn't tell. I
saw him in court a few more times, but we
never spoke again. He ended up taking a plea deal
for a misdemeanor charge, and I haven't seen any evidence
that he's still in the white nationalist movement. I don't
(05:03):
think his heart has changed, really, but it stopped being fun.
Being a Nazi online was a laugh. Getting together and
doing it in person was an adventure. But it just
wasn't worth it anymore. And his friends weren't there when
he needed them. But back in twenty seventeen, he meant
(05:24):
what he said, and he knew what he was doing.
He wasn't joking, he wasn't duped. He meant it. I
hadn't thought about that man at all, and at least
a year, probably not since his sentencing hearing in late
twenty twenty four. But I saw his face again this week.
(05:46):
Not a new picture, not a recent picture, but in
a picture I know well. His is one of the
ones that pops right out to me in that sea
of faces and those famous photos of the Nazi torch
March from seven and there he was, torch in hand,
mouth wide open, mid chant looking back at me from
(06:08):
the top of an op ed, accusing him and all
of his Nazi friends of being a hoax. The President
himself said it, They Unite the Right Rally was a
total fake. I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys.
(06:47):
The Unite the Right Rally in Charlesville, Virginia in August
of twenty seventeen is something that keeps coming up on
the show, even when the subject of the episode is
a person who's never been here. Were a group that
didn't even still exist in the twenty first century, there's
some connection, some direct personal link, some shared ideological lineage.
(07:12):
The groups that converged here in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen
were the product of decades of white nationalist organizing, and
that rally was the most visible manifestation of that political
project in our lifetimes. So when the connection is there,
I try to draw it for you think about it.
(07:34):
Early on in the show's run, there was a funny
episode about an elderly Confederate War reenactor who got kicked
out of his re enactment group and decided to get
revenge by making bomb threats, and he framed anti fascists
for the threats that he made. That plan only worked
because he was doing it in the weeks after the
Unite the Right rally. The tension he was exploiting was
(07:58):
a result that rally. There was a two parter on
Barry Black, the Pennsylvania klansmen who won his Supreme Court
case over a crossburning conviction. Barry was dead by twenty seventeen,
but his case is why Virginia even has the law
that was used to prosecute the men who marched with
(08:20):
torches in twenty seventeen. The series about the man who
assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell in nineteen sixty seven ends with
the assassin himself posting on Facebook in twenty seventeen that
he was glad to see the rally, that the white
men marching in Charlottesville were just expressing their free speech.
(08:41):
In the episode about those march against Sharia rallies that
were held all over the country in twenty seventeen, those
were organized by men who were already making plans to
travel to Charlottesville. Six weeks later, one of the pro
apartheid groups that believes those weird racist prophecies. I discussed
in one of these South Africa episodes that group traveled
(09:04):
to the United States from South Africa to attend the
Unite the Right rally. So many roads lead to that
day in this place. It is a key moment in
the ongoing history of American right wing extremism that I'm
writing here on this show. You can start on that
(09:26):
day and work backwards or forwards, and you will find violence.
You will find true believers acting out their beliefs. I
struggled a bit to settle on a cold open for
this week's episode. It was an unusual one. I know,
(09:46):
the little picture I paint for you at the top
of each episode doesn't always take place within the narrative
of the episode that follows, but I try to write
something that will put you in the world of the
story in some way. That strange encounter outside of the
courthouse doesn't quite fit in. It's not a tidy narrative device,
(10:08):
and I almost cut it, but it kept coming back
to my mind as I thought about what I'm trying
to tell you here. That man that torch marcher at
the courthouse. He's not the point. He's not in this
story except as a member of that screaming mob. But
he was one of those true believers. He made his
(10:31):
own choice, and he spent his own money, and he
drove here from Ohio to meet with friends he met
on Nazi message boards. The rally was real, the racists
who came here were real. Heather Higher was a real person,
(10:51):
and she really was murdered. We've been over that too, sadly.
I debunked some common cospiracy theories about her murder in
an episode last summer, a two parter in June about
the rise and right wing rhetoric about hitting protesters with
your car. I've spent years going over it in my
(11:13):
published work. In my private research, I sat through hundreds
of hours of court proceedings covering every criminal case that
arose out of that weekend. And actually that's not past tense.
There are ongoing cases. Nine years later. I'm still checking
in on appeals and criminal cases. Or two of the
men convicted for their participation in the torch march the
(11:36):
night before the rally, almost a decade later, If they're
still going to court, so am I I've read every document,
thousands and thousands of pages filed in every civil lawsuit
in any jurisdiction that arose out of that weekend. I've
read the least chats from the organizers. I've listened to
(11:59):
recorded jail and interrogation videos, and hundreds and hundreds of
hours of Nazi podcasts discussing the events from their perspective.
I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but
I need you to understand I've spent a lot of
time thinking about the events of that weekend. It's very
(12:19):
present in my life and in my work. For the
most part, it's in the past. For the rest of
the world, it was nine years ago. It's not in
the news. Even the big civil lawsuit has been over
for a while, and that was kind of the last
thing that was dragging those images back into the news
(12:40):
for so long. So why then, was I seeing those
pictures again this week? Why was that sad little Nazi
from my chance meeting outside the courthouse looking back at
me from the top of a Fox News article Because
the President said the rally's fake.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
I see these no kings, which are funded, just like
the Southern Law was funded. You saw all that Southern
Law is financing the KKK and lots of other radical,
terrible groups, and then they go out and they say, oh,
we've got to stop the KKK, and yet they give
him hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They well,
(13:25):
it's a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows
you that like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the
Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal too, and
it was done to make me look bad and it
turned out to be a total fake. It basically was
a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging
of the election.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
That's a little bit of a jumbled mess, But that's
the President of the United States being interviewed on sixty
minutes on April twenty sixth, twenty twenty six. If you
have I've been keeping up with the news, that probably
means absolutely nothing to you, because you basically need to
decrt anything the president says these days. You have to
(14:11):
already have all of the context to figure out which
random bits and pieces of the word Sallid tumbling out
of his mouth connects to some part of reality. He's
talking about the recent indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On April twenty first, the Department of Justice announced that
a grand jury had returned an eleven count indictment alleging
(14:34):
that the nonprofit had engaged in wire fraud and conspiracy
to commit money laundering, and made false statements to banks.
The alleged conduct is related to the way the organization
handled payments made to sources. Obviously, this is just an indictment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is innocent until proven guilty,
(14:56):
and a lot of this is very transparently prosecution of
a political enemy. That said, I have no doubt that
the Southern Poverty Law Center did make payments to informants.
It's not surprising at all to me that they would
pay cash for information from sources inside the movement. That's
(15:19):
not weird. I don't think it was really even a secret.
I mean, I'm sure they didn't advertise it, but I
think any researcher in my field would agree they kind
of knew that was happening. It's a questionable practice in
straight journalism to pay a source, but the SPLC isn't
(15:41):
a newspaper. It's a civil rights organization. They aren't just
reporting on the far right. They engage in active litigation
against extremist groups. Why do you think there is no
more Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. It's because
the SPLC sued their fucking pants off. They went bankrupt
(16:04):
and had to leave. The group still exists, but their
beloved compound was burnt to the ground by local firefighters
in a training exercise. The SPLC did that. The SPLC
bankrupted Tom Metzger in nineteen ninety, Richard Butler in two thousand.
(16:24):
They made Louis Beam stop using Clan militias to burn
the boats of Vietnamese fishermen in Texas. In the nineteen eighties,
they sued the Clan, the World Church of the Creator,
the Daily Stormer, and William Luther Pierce personally. For decades,
they have mapped out the landscape of hate groups in America.
(16:45):
They've exposed, disrupted, sued, bankrupt, embarrassed and enraged racists for decades.
They write articles. Sure, but it's an activist organization and
they've been the boogeyman for the radical right for fifty years.
(17:07):
I use their work pretty often in my research. I
won't say I endorse everything they've ever done. I certainly
take issue with their approach to labor relations in recent years.
My conversation with Michael Edison Hayden last month touched briefly
on his experience with union busting and retaliation from the
SPLC during his time there. But I'm not gonna say
(17:30):
they haven't done good work, and I'm not so naive
as to think they did it without talking to a
few Nazis. That's not my approach. The conversation I had
with that Nazi outside the courthouse a few years ago
was an outlier. It is not my personal preference. I
(17:52):
listen to what they have to say in their own spaces,
but I personally do not enjoy seeking them out to
engage in actual conversation. But that doesn't mean I don't
see value in that. It doesn't mean I don't think
it's ever necessary. I just don't like doing it. I
do think somebody needs to talk to them, and I'm
(18:15):
just glad it isn't me. This won't be the episode
where we really get into the nitty gritty legal details
(18:35):
of the SPLC indictment. I think it's a little premature
for that, and it's honestly not that interesting but that's
the context here. There is a federal criminal case against
the organization, and the charges center around their practice of
paying sources. The indictment lists several of the sources they've
(18:57):
paid over the years, and the charged conduct outline specific payments,
So this indictment isn't necessarily a full accounting of every
source they've ever paid, or every payment that's been made
even to those sources. It's just a snapshot of what's
relevant directly to the charged conduct, And for each of
(19:19):
the field sources included in the indictment, there's just a
little snippet of information about them, and based on the
limited information provided by the DOJ, the sources and the
indictment kind of run the gamut of the far right,
the National Socialist Movement, National Alliance, a couple of different
(19:40):
clan groups, American Front, Statistic Soul's Motorcycle Club, National Socialist
Party of America, Aryan Nations, the gangs all there.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
In.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Some of these paid source relationships were short lived and
involved just a few thousand dollars. Others lasted many years
and ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's
all we really know right now, because the case is ongoing.
The issue isn't that it is illegal to pay for
(20:11):
information exactly, but the indictment alleges they went about that
practice in a way that was fraudulent, trying to obscure
who was being paid, who was doing the paying, and
what the money was for. The indictment alleges that the
SPLC made materially false statements to banking institutions and things
of that nature. That's the legal angle here, but the
(20:36):
propaganda angle is obvious. I mean, the indictment is pretty
straightforward in implying that the SPLC wasn't just paying for information,
that they were funneling money into hate groups to help
those groups, to direct them in their actions, to strengthen them,
(20:56):
to create an imaginary enemy, to justify by their own existence.
Legally speaking, the government is accusing the SBLC of wirefraud.
That's the crime they're saying happened here. But what they
want you to believe happened. What they are trying to
(21:17):
punish the organization for is manufacturing fake racism to make
conservatives look bad and to trick donors into giving the
SBLC more money to fight the racism, which again in
this scenario isn't even real. It's just something the SPLC
(21:37):
is making up to scare you into giving them money.
And so in the indictment, they're really supposed to be
focusing on what the actual crime is, but they do
imply this other allegation, saying things like quote the Southern
(21:58):
Poverty Law Center state admission included the dismantling of white
supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors,
some of their donated money was being used to fund
the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku
Klux Klan, the Area Nation, and the National Alliance. The
sblc's paid informants engaged in the active promotion of racist
(22:21):
groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing
the same groups on its website. And again further down
in the same document, the government alleges quote the SPLC
explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would
be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups. In the
(22:42):
SPLC's solicitations for donations, as outlined herein, donors were not
told that some of the donated funds were to be
used by the SPLC to pay high level leaders of
violent extremist groups and others. Nor were donors ever told
that some of the donated funds were used for the
benefit of the violnce extremist groups, or that some of
(23:02):
the donated funds would be used in the commission of
state and federal crimes. So there's some heavy implication here, right.
They're even implying that the SPLC paid people to commit
federal crimes, which is a wild allegation considering that is
(23:26):
not included in the charged conduct. If they have proof
of that, I think they would have charged it. So
the indictment is full of these sorts of implications, but
they're not quite saying it with their whole chest. In
the press conference announcing the indictment, though, Acting Attorney General
(23:47):
Todd Blanche went all in outright accusing the SPLC of
faking the existence of the thing they fight against.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
The SPLC is a nonprofit and that purports to fight
white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups
and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the
goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the
SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing
(24:18):
the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to
stoke racial hatred.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
So he's saying, violent extremism isn't real. Violent extremism wouldn't
even be a problem if not for this pesky liberal
nonprofit paying people to pretend to be violent extremists. There
are no real Nazis. It's just something the Left made
up to make us look like the bad guys. That's
(24:51):
what he's saying. One of the paid sources described in
the indictment is the real heart of this conversation. Field
source thirty seven F thirty seven for short from the
indictment quote. F thirty seven was a member of the
online Leadership chat group that planned the twenty seventeen Unite
(25:15):
the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event
at the direction of the SPLC. F thirty seven made
racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped
coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between twenty
fifteen and twenty twenty three, the SBLC secretly paid F
(25:36):
thirty seven more than two hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
That's all we know about F thirty seven, but it's
been widely interpreted by the MAGA media sphere up to
and including the Attorney General, the director of the FBI,
and the President himself to mean that the Southern Poverty
(25:58):
Law Center planned, paid for, and organized the Unite the
Right rally that if not for the work of the SBLC,
there would have been no Nazi rally in Charlottesville in
twenty seventeen. This is being interpreted to mean that the
SBLC paid a quarter of a million dollars to someone,
and that person operated entirely under their control and used
(26:23):
that money to make that Nazi rally possible. The President
of the United States went on TV and, based on
this information, called the entire rally fake. Now, his statement
is a little bit addled, but he seems to be
connecting this with his conspiracy theories about the twenty twenty
(26:46):
election being stolen from him. I mean, you really have
to guess what's rattling around in his brain. But this
is in line with other conservative outlets talking about how
Joe Biden said the rally in Charlottesville was part of
why he decided to run against Trump in the twenty
twenty election. So I think he's trying to say the
(27:07):
Southern Poverty Law Center invented a fake Nazi rally to
make him look bad and to give Joe Biden a
reason to run against him. That's kind of what they're
running with here, and it's everywhere.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
I want to be clear, I don't know anything about
this case that isn't in the filings. I have not
spoken to anyone involved about this, and even if I did,
they all surely have the good sense to say nothing
about an ongoing case. So I do not have any
special insight into the way the Southern Poverty Law Center
(27:46):
specifically interacted with their paid sources. I can only guess
based on what I know about the SBLC and what
I know about snitches. But I'm willing to go ahead
and stake my reputation on this one. It's the dumbest
shit I've ever heard. Whoever F thirty seven was, they
(28:10):
are not solely responsible for the orchestration of the Unite
the Right rally. All we know about F thirty seven
is that they received two hundred and seventy thousand dollars
over a period of eight years. We don't know if
that was spread evenly over those eight years. We don't
know how much of that money was reimbursement for costs
(28:32):
or if it was all a salary of some kind.
We don't know what organizations F thirty seven was involved with.
We don't know what sort of information F thirty seven
supplied or what the SPLC did with that information. We
don't know if F thirty seven personally committed any crimes
or directly encouraged others to do so, and if they did,
we don't know whether the SBLC was aware of that.
(28:54):
We don't know, and the government isn't making any specific
allegation about anything like that, and I think if they
had that kind of information they would have alleged it.
All we know is that whoever this person was, they
were involved in quote the online leadership chat group that
(29:18):
organized the Unite the Right. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything.
What chat group the discord. There were hundreds of people
in the discord and that's just the main discord server
where attendees discussed the event and the months leading up
to it. Individual organizations who helped organize the rally all
(29:41):
had their own discord servers too, and there were Facebook
group chats with various organizers. They were all manner of
different online chat groups, So that's not very specific at all.
That could be anyone, hundreds and hundreds of people had
access to an online space you could technically describe using
(30:04):
those words, and they weren't all actually integral to the
planning process. So maybe F thirty seven was a main
event organizer, but maybe they weren't. The only specific organizational
task ascribed to this person in the indictment is that
they quote helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.
(30:33):
And this is the kind of statement you have to
include in an indictment because it is a concrete, provable action.
But is this the only concrete provable action they have
for this person in connection with Unite the Right, because
it's kind of weak because what is helped coordinate? What
(30:54):
is several attendees? Honestly? What is to the event? Does
that mean they paid for someone's plane tickets or does
it mean they carpooled there with a friend? Does this
refer to the rented vans that organizers use to ferry
attendees the distance of one mile from the big parking
(31:16):
lot at McIntyre Park to the park downtown. It could
mean literally anything helped coordinate transportation. Did they call somebody
an uber? If this is the most damning evidence they're
confident enough to put at the top of their indictment,
I'm not sure how central this person was to organizing anything.
(31:53):
Like I said, I have no problem believing that the
SPLC has paid sources, And if they were in the
business of paying sources, it would have been a massive
oversight to not have a source selling them information on
the largest gathering of right wing extremists and living memory.
It would be weirder if they didn't have a field
(32:15):
source in some Unite the Right chat room in the
months leading up to the event. This is being sold
to us as some kind of bombshell, But like I said,
it was kind of an open secret that they've always
had paid sources in the movement. So of course they
had won at Unite the Right. So what did they
do with the information they got from the informants? Would
(32:39):
they use it? Right? They investigate, they write stories, and
they send information to the FBI. There's nothing in the
indictment about communication between the SBLC and the FBI, and
the day the indictment came down, Todd Blanche was on
Fox News talking about it, and he outright claimed the
(33:00):
SPLC does not share information from their informants with law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
There's no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests
they shared that information with law enforcement. They have communicated,
said they did well, they have communicated when they so
chose with law enforcement over the years. There is no
information that we have that suggests that the money that
they were paying to these informants and these members of
these organizations, they then turned around and share what they
(33:27):
learned with law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
In the morning after, Todd Blanche said that attorneys for
the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion quote to
address the government's materially false statements and to enforce rules
prohibiting further prejudicial extra judicial statements. They want the court
to make the Attorney General stop lying on TV, and
among the points made in their motions that day are
(33:54):
that the SPLC absolutely has shared information with the end
FBI many times, specifically in relation to the Unite the
Right rally. The SBLC says they sent a forty five
page report to the FBI's Mobile Alabama field office before
the rally that summer. From a filing in the case,
(34:19):
the sblc's lawyers write quote that document warned the FBI
of the specific individuals likely to attend the rally and
foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific
details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories for some of
the individuals identified in this event alert. The SPLC even
(34:39):
provided details about those individuals weapons of choice based on
intelligence gathered through the Informant program. And in the course
of responding to Todd Blanche's claims that the SPLC never
uses their information to help law enforcement stop white supremacists,
the sblc's attorneys cite some pretty specific examples, including one
(35:04):
you might be familiar with because we've talked about it
on this show. The name is redacted in the filing,
but you might remember the episode of this show from
September of twenty twenty four was about a handful of
white supremacists who have been prosecuted under a federal statute
that makes it a crime to lie on your security
clearance application. So if you listen back to that episode
(35:27):
and you read this court filing, with the redacted name,
you would know that the Vanguard America member who was
convicted of concealing his membership in a Nazi group when
he applied for a security clearance can only be Fred Arena,
one of the members of the planning chat for Unite
the Right Too the sequel held in DC in twenty eighteen,
(35:49):
and Fred Arena is just one of several examples the
SBLC gives of white supremacists that they've informed the government
about based on information they got from their sources. The
Motion to make the Government Stop Lying on TV lists
several statements from administration officials on TV or social media
(36:12):
that misrepresent the case against the SPLC. In response, the
government filed a brief reply that Todd Blanche has already
corrected the record in a second statement he made a
few days later on a different Fox News show. The
other lies are not addressed. One thing I think gets
lost in all of this is what it means to
(36:36):
be an informant who snitches for money? Why do they
do it? What's going on in the mind of a
paid informant? A lot of things, right, Usually when we're
talking about informants, we're talking about people who are giving
information to the government. That's a more common scenario. It's
a slightly different situation, but it's one we know more about.
(37:00):
We've talked a few times on the show about FBI informants,
sometimes speculatively, but often in very concrete terms, because we
have some of the documents now about how the FBI
has used informants in the past, and we know beyond
a shadow of a doubt that the FBI has paid murderers.
(37:25):
The FBI has paid members of violent organizations to engage
in conduct that was beneficial to the government's goals, even
when that conduct was illegal, immoral, and counter to the
FBI's stated goals of investigating and arresting criminals. We know
they've done that. In the episode in January about Biola Luso,
(37:47):
we talked about an FBI informant who very likely fired
one of the shots that killed the USO, a mother
from Detroit who volunteered to drive civil rights marchers back
to Selma after the March on Montgomery in one of
the very weird episodes about Frank Smith last fall. Remember,
he was a New England mafia associate who wanted to
get into business with George Lincoln Rockwell, so he joined
(38:09):
the American Nazi Party in the sixties. I told you
about the proven, documented instances of FBI agents not only
covering up murders by their paid informant, but actively framing
other people for those murders and putting innocent men in
prison for decades so they could keep a hit man
on their payroll out on the streets. We know they've
(38:33):
done this, we know that they have done this in
the past, and you can make your own educated assumptions
about how ethically the FBI handles the extremists they pay
for information today. So it's pretty offensive to hear the
government pretend to be outraged that someone would pay an
extremist for information, because it would be pretty hard for
anyone to do it in a less ethical way than
the government already does. Put that aside, I think a
(39:01):
lot of people have the wrong starting assumption about a
paid informant. There are all kinds of arrangements, sure, but
it's pretty uncommon for an informant to have the same
kind of role an undercover agent might. An undercover agent,
you know, an actual employee of the government infiltrates an organization, right,
(39:26):
he's lying about who he is. He's joining under false pretenses.
He's doing things he wouldn't normally do and saying things
he doesn't mean. He's only there because it's his job
to pretend to be a member of the organization. But
that's what an undercover agent does. Is it possible for
(39:47):
an amateur paid infiltrator to exist, Yes, there are examples
of this, but it's not practical if you're someone like
the SPO, why would you pay someone to pretend to
be a clansman when it's much easier to find an
(40:08):
unscrupulous clansman who'll do anything for money. A paid informant
is very often a true believer. They may be someone
willing to compromise their values for money, but they were
already a member of that organization. I mean they are
a true believer in the organization that they are selling out,
(40:30):
not in the cause of the person paying him. This
might sound crazy to you, because maybe you would never
betray your deeply held beliefs and closest friends for a
few grand but a lot of people would, and a
lot of white supremacists aren't very ethical people or very
good friends. So there is this incorrect starting assumption that
(40:57):
if the SPLC is paying someone that the racism that
person is then espousing in the world is part of
what they're being paid to do. But they were going
to be doing that anyway, right, The SPLC isn't making
them say those racist things. They were already doing that.
They're just paying them to sell out their friends on
(41:19):
the sly Again, think about what we do know and
extrapolate from there. George Lincoln Rockwell wrote letters to j
Edgar Hoover listing off the names of other far right
extremists he thought the government should look into. I mean,
he wasn't being paid for that. He just thought it
might be useful to have the government take out his rivals.
(41:40):
He even gave the names of former members of his
own organization that he just didn't want a round anymore.
Or take a more modern example, you might be familiar
with Chris Cantwell, the man best known as the Crying
Nazi because of a viral video he made of himself
crying when he found out he'd been charged with a
felony for attacking people the Torch March in twenty seventeen.
(42:04):
I doubt he's ever been a paid informant, but he's
tried very hard to audition for the role. He's gone
to the FBI repeatedly trying to get other Nazis in trouble.
Back to that example at the top of the show,
my encounter with that Nazi outside the courthouse. The only
reason I know his name is because Chris can't well
(42:25):
dosed him because they had a falling out. Now in
the end, all can'twell manage to do is end up
in federal prison for a few years. But the point
holds he tried repeatedly to get his own former friends
in trouble with the FBI. A lot of these guys
(42:46):
think they can get one over on their rivals by
wielding their enemy's sword, and I think the SPLC functions
the same way. These guys know that the SPLC is
a power enemy of their movement, So if they need
cash and the SPLC is paying, why not sell them
(43:08):
some information on a guy you just don't like anymore?
You win twice. Just because someone took money from the
SPLC does not mean they or their organization share the
values and goals of the SPLC. The SPLC wants to
dismantle those white supremacist organizations. The informant needs money, and
(43:35):
he probably just wants to embarrass inconvenience or incarcerate arrival,
or maybe the informant thinks they're smart enough to get
paid for information they don't think will hurt anyone. The
fact that they paid informants does not mean the SPLC
is sending in undercover infiltrators or directing the activities of
(43:58):
the men who are desperate enough to say sell out
their own organizations. And I think, regardless of the motivations
of F thirty seven, one man did not trick everyone
else into having a Nazi rally. The government is leaning
into this allegation that this paid source made racist posts
(44:20):
in the rally planning chat at the SPLC's direction. And again,
we don't know how closely the SPLC worked with their source.
We don't know if there was back and forth conversation
where the SPLC had direct input on the sources behavior
or the content of their posts. Maybe we'll find out.
(44:40):
But even if SPLC founder Morris D's himself ghost wrote
those posts, which again didn't happen. But if that were
the case, if the SPLC themselves wrote some racist posts
in the planning chat, I don't care the government's allegations
make it sound like one back faith paid actor turned
(45:02):
the tide of the conversation and tricked everyone else into
pretending to be white supremacist. But here's the thing. I've
read those chats. You can read a lot of them too.
Unicorn Riot published they leaked discord chats. It's not one
guy egging everyone on and convincing them and cajoling them
and goading them into doing this. It's not one guy
(45:25):
being racist and convincing everyone else to get on board
with racist violence. It's everyone. It's all of them, hundreds
of people, thousands and thousands of posts all summer long.
They all knew why they were going, They all knew
what they were doing, and when they got there. It
(45:47):
wasn't one paid agent provocateur creating a situation where violence occurred.
It wasn't one man tricking them into doing this. Those
same men from that planning chat they showed up with
the weapons they bragged about packing. They did all of
that on their own. No one paid them to do that,
(46:07):
no one tricked them into it. Aside from the fact
that the government is making things up and the president
has a bowl of room temperature rice putting where his
brain ought to be. There are a couple of interesting
threads to this story that I want to pull. I
definitely want to spend a little time talking in greater
(46:28):
detail about money, how little money this rally actually cost,
who likely bore those costs, and some of the actual
known sources of that money that didn't just come out
of the attendee's own pockets. Because there are answers to
some of these questions. Obviously, we'll revisit this criminal case
(46:52):
as it develops, but all this necessary context got in
the way of the things I spent all week researching
so I could tell you about them, same as it
always is. I guess we'll have to spend another week
on this, but maybe that's for the best. We so
rarely have a good time around here, so I really
(47:13):
want to let this one breathe, so I'll save it
for next week. I have a collection of responses from
the real Nazis, Confederate secessionists, white nationalists, and assorted bigots
who really did attend to that Nazi rally. Some of
them are very anxiously proclaiming their innocence and pointing fingers
at former friends desperately searching for clues about the identity
(47:35):
of the paid informant. But even worse than the possibility
that someone close to them was the mole. They're hurt.
Many of them paid a high price for attending that
Nazi rally. They lost their jobs, they got docks, they
got sued, they were ostracized and ridiculed. They feel like
martyrs now that the political tide has turned and the
(47:59):
slow as they shouted that day or things you're allowed
to say on Fox News. They feel like they should
be rewarded for paving the way, not cast aside as
embarrassments or political liabilities. Their ideas are mainstream now, but
they've been left behind. The men who ruined their own
(48:20):
reputations attending that Nazi rally are furious that the mega
media ecosystem has decided the whole thing was a hoax
all along. Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool
(48:48):
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by
me Molly Hunger. Part executive producers are Sophe Electremen and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Bradteck. You
can email me that Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy
(49:08):
theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird
Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I was lingering outside the courthouse for no reason in
particular one morning in April a few years ago. Normally
I had straight home to organize my notes. If the
day had a weird energy, maybe I'll walk a few
blocks in the wrong direction to make sure no one's
followed me to my car. The swastika shaped scars on
(00:29):
the trees outside my living room window, or a reminder
of a lesson learned the hard way. But that morning
I sat on the bench outside for a minute, and
I met one of my weird little guys. I hadn't
planned to. I didn't want to. The type of research
(00:51):
I do does not include asking them for their side
of the story. But there he was. I knew who
he was. I'd written about him before. I was there
that morning for his first appearance in court on a
felony charge, and I had already spent years leading up
to that moment scouring footage of the crime in question,
(01:14):
finding his face in the crowd, and identifying dozens of others.
And he knew who I was. I knew that because
I'd heard his podcast, a short lived production that included
some very graphic descriptions of rape and torture fantasies his
friends had about me. So I hadn't planned on chatting,
(01:38):
and yet there I was extending my hand, offering him
a lighter. I'm not too proud to admit i'd been afraid.
I was afraid when I found out a court date
had been set for a man who laughed along with
his friends as they fantasized about rape me to death,
(02:01):
about firing a gun inside of my vagina, about hanging
me from meat hooks. I'd heard those things, and now
he was more than just a voice on a Nazi podcast.
He was going to be in town. I don't usually
get scared, it's just work. But I didn't want that
(02:22):
man anywhere near me. But seeing him slouching on a
bench in the gallery of my little county courthouse, he
was small. I had my notebook and my pen, and
he wasn't the boogieman. He was just a sad, weird
little guy. We stood there outside the courthouse for about
(02:45):
as long as it took him to smoke a cigarette.
He seemed so harmless, now so defeated, He asked me
if I really thought he'd deserved to go to jail,
if I thought they all deserved to go to jail
for marching with their torches that night in August of
twenty seventeen. I told him it didn't matter when I thought,
(03:06):
and I asked him about Ted. They'd marched together that night,
but he didn't have any kind words for his recently
deceased former friend. He only nodded when I asked if
it was true that Ted had been the one who
revealed his name to a rival in the movement. After
he stubbed out his cigarette butt, he reached toward me,
(03:28):
hand outstretched. I didn't mean to grab it. Ask me, now,
would you shake a Nazi's hand, And my answer is no,
of course, not, not in a million years. But even
as he loomed over me, easily a foot taller than
I am, he seemed so small, his slumped shoulders the
(03:52):
very picture of defeat. And it was just a reflex.
I think. His right hand was there, held out distincius
from me, waiting, and suddenly mine was there too, gripping
his a little too tightly. No hard feelings, he said,
(04:15):
I didn't like. Oh, I didn't say anything. Take care
of yourself, he said, as he dropped my hand and
turned to leave, And all I could do was laugh.
I watched him walk away, and I stood there outside
the courthouse, laughing, no hard feelings.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Was it an.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Apology or an offer of forgiveness, I couldn't tell. I
saw him in court a few more times, but we
never spoke again. He ended up taking a plea deal
for a misdemeanor charge, and I haven't seen any evidence
that he's still in the white nationalist movement. I don't
(05:03):
think his heart has changed, really, but it stopped being fun.
Being a Nazi online was a laugh. Getting together and
doing it in person was an adventure. But it just
wasn't worth it anymore. And his friends weren't there when
he needed them. But back in twenty seventeen, he meant
(05:24):
what he said, and he knew what he was doing.
He wasn't joking, he wasn't duped. He meant it. I
hadn't thought about that man at all, and at least
a year, probably not since his sentencing hearing in late
twenty twenty four. But I saw his face again this week.
(05:46):
Not a new picture, not a recent picture, but in
a picture I know well. His is one of the
ones that pops right out to me in that sea
of faces and those famous photos of the Nazi torch
March from seven and there he was, torch in hand,
mouth wide open, mid chant looking back at me from
(06:08):
the top of an op ed, accusing him and all
of his Nazi friends of being a hoax. The President
himself said it, They Unite the Right Rally was a
total fake. I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys.
(06:47):
The Unite the Right Rally in Charlesville, Virginia in August
of twenty seventeen is something that keeps coming up on
the show, even when the subject of the episode is
a person who's never been here. Were a group that
didn't even still exist in the twenty first century, there's
some connection, some direct personal link, some shared ideological lineage.
(07:12):
The groups that converged here in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen
were the product of decades of white nationalist organizing, and
that rally was the most visible manifestation of that political
project in our lifetimes. So when the connection is there,
I try to draw it for you think about it.
(07:34):
Early on in the show's run, there was a funny
episode about an elderly Confederate War reenactor who got kicked
out of his re enactment group and decided to get
revenge by making bomb threats, and he framed anti fascists
for the threats that he made. That plan only worked
because he was doing it in the weeks after the
Unite the Right rally. The tension he was exploiting was
(07:58):
a result that rally. There was a two parter on
Barry Black, the Pennsylvania klansmen who won his Supreme Court
case over a crossburning conviction. Barry was dead by twenty seventeen,
but his case is why Virginia even has the law
that was used to prosecute the men who marched with
(08:20):
torches in twenty seventeen. The series about the man who
assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell in nineteen sixty seven ends with
the assassin himself posting on Facebook in twenty seventeen that
he was glad to see the rally, that the white
men marching in Charlottesville were just expressing their free speech.
(08:41):
In the episode about those march against Sharia rallies that
were held all over the country in twenty seventeen, those
were organized by men who were already making plans to
travel to Charlottesville. Six weeks later, one of the pro
apartheid groups that believes those weird racist prophecies. I discussed
in one of these South Africa episodes that group traveled
(09:04):
to the United States from South Africa to attend the
Unite the Right rally. So many roads lead to that
day in this place. It is a key moment in
the ongoing history of American right wing extremism that I'm
writing here on this show. You can start on that
(09:26):
day and work backwards or forwards, and you will find violence.
You will find true believers acting out their beliefs. I
struggled a bit to settle on a cold open for
this week's episode. It was an unusual one. I know,
(09:46):
the little picture I paint for you at the top
of each episode doesn't always take place within the narrative
of the episode that follows, but I try to write
something that will put you in the world of the
story in some way. That strange encounter outside of the
courthouse doesn't quite fit in. It's not a tidy narrative device,
(10:08):
and I almost cut it, but it kept coming back
to my mind as I thought about what I'm trying
to tell you here. That man that torch marcher at
the courthouse. He's not the point. He's not in this
story except as a member of that screaming mob. But
he was one of those true believers. He made his
(10:31):
own choice, and he spent his own money, and he
drove here from Ohio to meet with friends he met
on Nazi message boards. The rally was real, the racists
who came here were real. Heather Higher was a real person,
(10:51):
and she really was murdered. We've been over that too, sadly.
I debunked some common cospiracy theories about her murder in
an episode last summer, a two parter in June about
the rise and right wing rhetoric about hitting protesters with
your car. I've spent years going over it in my
(11:13):
published work. In my private research, I sat through hundreds
of hours of court proceedings covering every criminal case that
arose out of that weekend. And actually that's not past tense.
There are ongoing cases. Nine years later. I'm still checking
in on appeals and criminal cases. Or two of the
men convicted for their participation in the torch march the
(11:36):
night before the rally, almost a decade later, If they're
still going to court, so am I I've read every document,
thousands and thousands of pages filed in every civil lawsuit
in any jurisdiction that arose out of that weekend. I've
read the least chats from the organizers. I've listened to
(11:59):
recorded jail and interrogation videos, and hundreds and hundreds of
hours of Nazi podcasts discussing the events from their perspective.
I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but
I need you to understand I've spent a lot of
time thinking about the events of that weekend. It's very
(12:19):
present in my life and in my work. For the
most part, it's in the past. For the rest of
the world, it was nine years ago. It's not in
the news. Even the big civil lawsuit has been over
for a while, and that was kind of the last
thing that was dragging those images back into the news
(12:40):
for so long. So why then, was I seeing those
pictures again this week? Why was that sad little Nazi
from my chance meeting outside the courthouse looking back at
me from the top of a Fox News article Because
the President said the rally's fake.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
I see these no kings, which are funded, just like
the Southern Law was funded. You saw all that Southern
Law is financing the KKK and lots of other radical,
terrible groups, and then they go out and they say, oh,
we've got to stop the KKK, and yet they give
him hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They well,
(13:25):
it's a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows
you that like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the
Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal too, and
it was done to make me look bad and it
turned out to be a total fake. It basically was
a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging
of the election.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
That's a little bit of a jumbled mess, But that's
the President of the United States being interviewed on sixty
minutes on April twenty sixth, twenty twenty six. If you
have I've been keeping up with the news, that probably
means absolutely nothing to you, because you basically need to
decrt anything the president says these days. You have to
(14:11):
already have all of the context to figure out which
random bits and pieces of the word Sallid tumbling out
of his mouth connects to some part of reality. He's
talking about the recent indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On April twenty first, the Department of Justice announced that
a grand jury had returned an eleven count indictment alleging
(14:34):
that the nonprofit had engaged in wire fraud and conspiracy
to commit money laundering, and made false statements to banks.
The alleged conduct is related to the way the organization
handled payments made to sources. Obviously, this is just an indictment.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is innocent until proven guilty,
(14:56):
and a lot of this is very transparently prosecution of
a political enemy. That said, I have no doubt that
the Southern Poverty Law Center did make payments to informants.
It's not surprising at all to me that they would
pay cash for information from sources inside the movement. That's
(15:19):
not weird. I don't think it was really even a secret.
I mean, I'm sure they didn't advertise it, but I
think any researcher in my field would agree they kind
of knew that was happening. It's a questionable practice in
straight journalism to pay a source, but the SPLC isn't
(15:41):
a newspaper. It's a civil rights organization. They aren't just
reporting on the far right. They engage in active litigation
against extremist groups. Why do you think there is no
more Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. It's because
the SPLC sued their fucking pants off. They went bankrupt
(16:04):
and had to leave. The group still exists, but their
beloved compound was burnt to the ground by local firefighters
in a training exercise. The SPLC did that. The SPLC
bankrupted Tom Metzger in nineteen ninety, Richard Butler in two thousand.
(16:24):
They made Louis Beam stop using Clan militias to burn
the boats of Vietnamese fishermen in Texas. In the nineteen eighties,
they sued the Clan, the World Church of the Creator,
the Daily Stormer, and William Luther Pierce personally. For decades,
they have mapped out the landscape of hate groups in America.
(16:45):
They've exposed, disrupted, sued, bankrupt, embarrassed and enraged racists for decades.
They write articles. Sure, but it's an activist organization and
they've been the boogeyman for the radical right for fifty years.
(17:07):
I use their work pretty often in my research. I
won't say I endorse everything they've ever done. I certainly
take issue with their approach to labor relations in recent years.
My conversation with Michael Edison Hayden last month touched briefly
on his experience with union busting and retaliation from the
SPLC during his time there. But I'm not gonna say
(17:30):
they haven't done good work, and I'm not so naive
as to think they did it without talking to a
few Nazis. That's not my approach. The conversation I had
with that Nazi outside the courthouse a few years ago
was an outlier. It is not my personal preference. I
(17:52):
listen to what they have to say in their own spaces,
but I personally do not enjoy seeking them out to
engage in actual conversation. But that doesn't mean I don't
see value in that. It doesn't mean I don't think
it's ever necessary. I just don't like doing it. I
do think somebody needs to talk to them, and I'm
(18:15):
just glad it isn't me. This won't be the episode
where we really get into the nitty gritty legal details
(18:35):
of the SPLC indictment. I think it's a little premature
for that, and it's honestly not that interesting but that's
the context here. There is a federal criminal case against
the organization, and the charges center around their practice of
paying sources. The indictment lists several of the sources they've
(18:57):
paid over the years, and the charged conduct outline specific payments,
So this indictment isn't necessarily a full accounting of every
source they've ever paid, or every payment that's been made
even to those sources. It's just a snapshot of what's
relevant directly to the charged conduct, And for each of
(19:19):
the field sources included in the indictment, there's just a
little snippet of information about them, and based on the
limited information provided by the DOJ, the sources and the
indictment kind of run the gamut of the far right,
the National Socialist Movement, National Alliance, a couple of different
(19:40):
clan groups, American Front, Statistic Soul's Motorcycle Club, National Socialist
Party of America, Aryan Nations, the gangs all there.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
In.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Some of these paid source relationships were short lived and
involved just a few thousand dollars. Others lasted many years
and ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's
all we really know right now, because the case is ongoing.
The issue isn't that it is illegal to pay for
(20:11):
information exactly, but the indictment alleges they went about that
practice in a way that was fraudulent, trying to obscure
who was being paid, who was doing the paying, and
what the money was for. The indictment alleges that the
SPLC made materially false statements to banking institutions and things
of that nature. That's the legal angle here, but the
(20:36):
propaganda angle is obvious. I mean, the indictment is pretty
straightforward in implying that the SPLC wasn't just paying for information,
that they were funneling money into hate groups to help
those groups, to direct them in their actions, to strengthen them,
(20:56):
to create an imaginary enemy, to justify by their own existence.
Legally speaking, the government is accusing the SBLC of wirefraud.
That's the crime they're saying happened here. But what they
want you to believe happened. What they are trying to
(21:17):
punish the organization for is manufacturing fake racism to make
conservatives look bad and to trick donors into giving the
SBLC more money to fight the racism, which again in
this scenario isn't even real. It's just something the SPLC
(21:37):
is making up to scare you into giving them money.
And so in the indictment, they're really supposed to be
focusing on what the actual crime is, but they do
imply this other allegation, saying things like quote the Southern
(21:58):
Poverty Law Center state admission included the dismantling of white
supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors,
some of their donated money was being used to fund
the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku
Klux Klan, the Area Nation, and the National Alliance. The
sblc's paid informants engaged in the active promotion of racist
(22:21):
groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing
the same groups on its website. And again further down
in the same document, the government alleges quote the SPLC
explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would
be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups. In the
(22:42):
SPLC's solicitations for donations, as outlined herein, donors were not
told that some of the donated funds were to be
used by the SPLC to pay high level leaders of
violent extremist groups and others. Nor were donors ever told
that some of the donated funds were used for the
benefit of the violnce extremist groups, or that some of
(23:02):
the donated funds would be used in the commission of
state and federal crimes. So there's some heavy implication here, right.
They're even implying that the SPLC paid people to commit
federal crimes, which is a wild allegation considering that is
(23:26):
not included in the charged conduct. If they have proof
of that, I think they would have charged it. So
the indictment is full of these sorts of implications, but
they're not quite saying it with their whole chest. In
the press conference announcing the indictment, though, Acting Attorney General
(23:47):
Todd Blanche went all in outright accusing the SPLC of
faking the existence of the thing they fight against.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
The SPLC is a nonprofit and that purports to fight
white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups
and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the
goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the
SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing
(24:18):
the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to
stoke racial hatred.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
So he's saying, violent extremism isn't real. Violent extremism wouldn't
even be a problem if not for this pesky liberal
nonprofit paying people to pretend to be violent extremists. There
are no real Nazis. It's just something the Left made
up to make us look like the bad guys. That's
(24:51):
what he's saying. One of the paid sources described in
the indictment is the real heart of this conversation. Field
source thirty seven F thirty seven for short from the
indictment quote. F thirty seven was a member of the
online Leadership chat group that planned the twenty seventeen Unite
(25:15):
the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event
at the direction of the SPLC. F thirty seven made
racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped
coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between twenty
fifteen and twenty twenty three, the SBLC secretly paid F
(25:36):
thirty seven more than two hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
That's all we know about F thirty seven, but it's
been widely interpreted by the MAGA media sphere up to
and including the Attorney General, the director of the FBI,
and the President himself to mean that the Southern Poverty
(25:58):
Law Center planned, paid for, and organized the Unite the
Right rally that if not for the work of the SBLC,
there would have been no Nazi rally in Charlottesville in
twenty seventeen. This is being interpreted to mean that the
SBLC paid a quarter of a million dollars to someone,
and that person operated entirely under their control and used
(26:23):
that money to make that Nazi rally possible. The President
of the United States went on TV and, based on
this information, called the entire rally fake. Now, his statement
is a little bit addled, but he seems to be
connecting this with his conspiracy theories about the twenty twenty
(26:46):
election being stolen from him. I mean, you really have
to guess what's rattling around in his brain. But this
is in line with other conservative outlets talking about how
Joe Biden said the rally in Charlottesville was part of
why he decided to run against Trump in the twenty
twenty election. So I think he's trying to say the
(27:07):
Southern Poverty Law Center invented a fake Nazi rally to
make him look bad and to give Joe Biden a
reason to run against him. That's kind of what they're
running with here, and it's everywhere.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
I want to be clear, I don't know anything about
this case that isn't in the filings. I have not
spoken to anyone involved about this, and even if I did,
they all surely have the good sense to say nothing
about an ongoing case. So I do not have any
special insight into the way the Southern Poverty Law Center
(27:46):
specifically interacted with their paid sources. I can only guess
based on what I know about the SBLC and what
I know about snitches. But I'm willing to go ahead
and stake my reputation on this one. It's the dumbest
shit I've ever heard. Whoever F thirty seven was, they
(28:10):
are not solely responsible for the orchestration of the Unite
the Right rally. All we know about F thirty seven
is that they received two hundred and seventy thousand dollars
over a period of eight years. We don't know if
that was spread evenly over those eight years. We don't
know how much of that money was reimbursement for costs
(28:32):
or if it was all a salary of some kind.
We don't know what organizations F thirty seven was involved with.
We don't know what sort of information F thirty seven
supplied or what the SPLC did with that information. We
don't know if F thirty seven personally committed any crimes
or directly encouraged others to do so, and if they did,
we don't know whether the SBLC was aware of that.
(28:54):
We don't know, and the government isn't making any specific
allegation about anything like that, and I think if they
had that kind of information they would have alleged it.
All we know is that whoever this person was, they
were involved in quote the online leadership chat group that
(29:18):
organized the Unite the Right. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything.
What chat group the discord. There were hundreds of people
in the discord and that's just the main discord server
where attendees discussed the event and the months leading up
to it. Individual organizations who helped organize the rally all
(29:41):
had their own discord servers too, and there were Facebook
group chats with various organizers. They were all manner of
different online chat groups, So that's not very specific at all.
That could be anyone, hundreds and hundreds of people had
access to an online space you could technically describe using
(30:04):
those words, and they weren't all actually integral to the
planning process. So maybe F thirty seven was a main
event organizer, but maybe they weren't. The only specific organizational
task ascribed to this person in the indictment is that
they quote helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.
(30:33):
And this is the kind of statement you have to
include in an indictment because it is a concrete, provable action.
But is this the only concrete provable action they have
for this person in connection with Unite the Right, because
it's kind of weak because what is helped coordinate? What
(30:54):
is several attendees? Honestly? What is to the event? Does
that mean they paid for someone's plane tickets or does
it mean they carpooled there with a friend? Does this
refer to the rented vans that organizers use to ferry
attendees the distance of one mile from the big parking
(31:16):
lot at McIntyre Park to the park downtown. It could
mean literally anything helped coordinate transportation. Did they call somebody
an uber? If this is the most damning evidence they're
confident enough to put at the top of their indictment,
I'm not sure how central this person was to organizing anything.
(31:53):
Like I said, I have no problem believing that the
SPLC has paid sources, And if they were in the
business of paying sources, it would have been a massive
oversight to not have a source selling them information on
the largest gathering of right wing extremists and living memory.
It would be weirder if they didn't have a field
(32:15):
source in some Unite the Right chat room in the
months leading up to the event. This is being sold
to us as some kind of bombshell, But like I said,
it was kind of an open secret that they've always
had paid sources in the movement. So of course they
had won at Unite the Right. So what did they
do with the information they got from the informants? Would
(32:39):
they use it? Right? They investigate, they write stories, and
they send information to the FBI. There's nothing in the
indictment about communication between the SBLC and the FBI, and
the day the indictment came down, Todd Blanche was on
Fox News talking about it, and he outright claimed the
(33:00):
SPLC does not share information from their informants with law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
There's no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests
they shared that information with law enforcement. They have communicated,
said they did well, they have communicated when they so
chose with law enforcement over the years. There is no
information that we have that suggests that the money that
they were paying to these informants and these members of
these organizations, they then turned around and share what they
(33:27):
learned with law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
In the morning after, Todd Blanche said that attorneys for
the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion quote to
address the government's materially false statements and to enforce rules
prohibiting further prejudicial extra judicial statements. They want the court
to make the Attorney General stop lying on TV, and
among the points made in their motions that day are
(33:54):
that the SPLC absolutely has shared information with the end
FBI many times, specifically in relation to the Unite the
Right rally. The SBLC says they sent a forty five
page report to the FBI's Mobile Alabama field office before
the rally that summer. From a filing in the case,
(34:19):
the sblc's lawyers write quote that document warned the FBI
of the specific individuals likely to attend the rally and
foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific
details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories for some of
the individuals identified in this event alert. The SPLC even
(34:39):
provided details about those individuals weapons of choice based on
intelligence gathered through the Informant program. And in the course
of responding to Todd Blanche's claims that the SPLC never
uses their information to help law enforcement stop white supremacists,
the sblc's attorneys cite some pretty specific examples, including one
(35:04):
you might be familiar with because we've talked about it
on this show. The name is redacted in the filing,
but you might remember the episode of this show from
September of twenty twenty four was about a handful of
white supremacists who have been prosecuted under a federal statute
that makes it a crime to lie on your security
clearance application. So if you listen back to that episode
(35:27):
and you read this court filing, with the redacted name,
you would know that the Vanguard America member who was
convicted of concealing his membership in a Nazi group when
he applied for a security clearance can only be Fred Arena,
one of the members of the planning chat for Unite
the Right Too the sequel held in DC in twenty eighteen,
(35:49):
and Fred Arena is just one of several examples the
SBLC gives of white supremacists that they've informed the government
about based on information they got from their sources. The
Motion to make the Government Stop Lying on TV lists
several statements from administration officials on TV or social media
(36:12):
that misrepresent the case against the SPLC. In response, the
government filed a brief reply that Todd Blanche has already
corrected the record in a second statement he made a
few days later on a different Fox News show. The
other lies are not addressed. One thing I think gets
lost in all of this is what it means to
(36:36):
be an informant who snitches for money? Why do they
do it? What's going on in the mind of a
paid informant? A lot of things, right, Usually when we're
talking about informants, we're talking about people who are giving
information to the government. That's a more common scenario. It's
a slightly different situation, but it's one we know more about.
(37:00):
We've talked a few times on the show about FBI informants,
sometimes speculatively, but often in very concrete terms, because we
have some of the documents now about how the FBI
has used informants in the past, and we know beyond
a shadow of a doubt that the FBI has paid murderers.
(37:25):
The FBI has paid members of violent organizations to engage
in conduct that was beneficial to the government's goals, even
when that conduct was illegal, immoral, and counter to the
FBI's stated goals of investigating and arresting criminals. We know
they've done that. In the episode in January about Biola Luso,
(37:47):
we talked about an FBI informant who very likely fired
one of the shots that killed the USO, a mother
from Detroit who volunteered to drive civil rights marchers back
to Selma after the March on Montgomery in one of
the very weird episodes about Frank Smith last fall. Remember,
he was a New England mafia associate who wanted to
get into business with George Lincoln Rockwell, so he joined
(38:09):
the American Nazi Party in the sixties. I told you
about the proven, documented instances of FBI agents not only
covering up murders by their paid informant, but actively framing
other people for those murders and putting innocent men in
prison for decades so they could keep a hit man
on their payroll out on the streets. We know they've
(38:33):
done this, we know that they have done this in
the past, and you can make your own educated assumptions
about how ethically the FBI handles the extremists they pay
for information today. So it's pretty offensive to hear the
government pretend to be outraged that someone would pay an
extremist for information, because it would be pretty hard for
anyone to do it in a less ethical way than
the government already does. Put that aside, I think a
(39:01):
lot of people have the wrong starting assumption about a
paid informant. There are all kinds of arrangements, sure, but
it's pretty uncommon for an informant to have the same
kind of role an undercover agent might. An undercover agent,
you know, an actual employee of the government infiltrates an organization, right,
(39:26):
he's lying about who he is. He's joining under false pretenses.
He's doing things he wouldn't normally do and saying things
he doesn't mean. He's only there because it's his job
to pretend to be a member of the organization. But
that's what an undercover agent does. Is it possible for
(39:47):
an amateur paid infiltrator to exist, Yes, there are examples
of this, but it's not practical if you're someone like
the SPO, why would you pay someone to pretend to
be a clansman when it's much easier to find an
(40:08):
unscrupulous clansman who'll do anything for money. A paid informant
is very often a true believer. They may be someone
willing to compromise their values for money, but they were
already a member of that organization. I mean they are
a true believer in the organization that they are selling out,
(40:30):
not in the cause of the person paying him. This
might sound crazy to you, because maybe you would never
betray your deeply held beliefs and closest friends for a
few grand but a lot of people would, and a
lot of white supremacists aren't very ethical people or very
good friends. So there is this incorrect starting assumption that
(40:57):
if the SPLC is paying someone that the racism that
person is then espousing in the world is part of
what they're being paid to do. But they were going
to be doing that anyway, right, The SPLC isn't making
them say those racist things. They were already doing that.
They're just paying them to sell out their friends on
(41:19):
the sly Again, think about what we do know and
extrapolate from there. George Lincoln Rockwell wrote letters to j
Edgar Hoover listing off the names of other far right
extremists he thought the government should look into. I mean,
he wasn't being paid for that. He just thought it
might be useful to have the government take out his rivals.
(41:40):
He even gave the names of former members of his
own organization that he just didn't want a round anymore.
Or take a more modern example, you might be familiar
with Chris Cantwell, the man best known as the Crying
Nazi because of a viral video he made of himself
crying when he found out he'd been charged with a
felony for attacking people the Torch March in twenty seventeen.
(42:04):
I doubt he's ever been a paid informant, but he's
tried very hard to audition for the role. He's gone
to the FBI repeatedly trying to get other Nazis in trouble.
Back to that example at the top of the show,
my encounter with that Nazi outside the courthouse. The only
reason I know his name is because Chris can't well
(42:25):
dosed him because they had a falling out. Now in
the end, all can'twell manage to do is end up
in federal prison for a few years. But the point
holds he tried repeatedly to get his own former friends
in trouble with the FBI. A lot of these guys
(42:46):
think they can get one over on their rivals by
wielding their enemy's sword, and I think the SPLC functions
the same way. These guys know that the SPLC is
a power enemy of their movement, So if they need
cash and the SPLC is paying, why not sell them
(43:08):
some information on a guy you just don't like anymore?
You win twice. Just because someone took money from the
SPLC does not mean they or their organization share the
values and goals of the SPLC. The SPLC wants to
dismantle those white supremacist organizations. The informant needs money, and
(43:35):
he probably just wants to embarrass inconvenience or incarcerate arrival,
or maybe the informant thinks they're smart enough to get
paid for information they don't think will hurt anyone. The
fact that they paid informants does not mean the SPLC
is sending in undercover infiltrators or directing the activities of
(43:58):
the men who are desperate enough to say sell out
their own organizations. And I think, regardless of the motivations
of F thirty seven, one man did not trick everyone
else into having a Nazi rally. The government is leaning
into this allegation that this paid source made racist posts
(44:20):
in the rally planning chat at the SPLC's direction. And again,
we don't know how closely the SPLC worked with their source.
We don't know if there was back and forth conversation
where the SPLC had direct input on the sources behavior
or the content of their posts. Maybe we'll find out.
(44:40):
But even if SPLC founder Morris D's himself ghost wrote
those posts, which again didn't happen. But if that were
the case, if the SPLC themselves wrote some racist posts
in the planning chat, I don't care the government's allegations
make it sound like one back faith paid actor turned
(45:02):
the tide of the conversation and tricked everyone else into
pretending to be white supremacist. But here's the thing. I've
read those chats. You can read a lot of them too.
Unicorn Riot published they leaked discord chats. It's not one
guy egging everyone on and convincing them and cajoling them
and goading them into doing this. It's not one guy
(45:25):
being racist and convincing everyone else to get on board
with racist violence. It's everyone. It's all of them, hundreds
of people, thousands and thousands of posts all summer long.
They all knew why they were going, They all knew
what they were doing, and when they got there. It
(45:47):
wasn't one paid agent provocateur creating a situation where violence occurred.
It wasn't one man tricking them into doing this. Those
same men from that planning chat they showed up with
the weapons they bragged about packing. They did all of
that on their own. No one paid them to do that,
(46:07):
no one tricked them into it. Aside from the fact
that the government is making things up and the president
has a bowl of room temperature rice putting where his
brain ought to be. There are a couple of interesting
threads to this story that I want to pull. I
definitely want to spend a little time talking in greater
(46:28):
detail about money, how little money this rally actually cost,
who likely bore those costs, and some of the actual
known sources of that money that didn't just come out
of the attendee's own pockets. Because there are answers to
some of these questions. Obviously, we'll revisit this criminal case
(46:52):
as it develops, but all this necessary context got in
the way of the things I spent all week researching
so I could tell you about them, same as it
always is. I guess we'll have to spend another week
on this, but maybe that's for the best. We so
rarely have a good time around here, so I really
(47:13):
want to let this one breathe, so I'll save it
for next week. I have a collection of responses from
the real Nazis, Confederate secessionists, white nationalists, and assorted bigots
who really did attend to that Nazi rally. Some of
them are very anxiously proclaiming their innocence and pointing fingers
at former friends desperately searching for clues about the identity
(47:35):
of the paid informant. But even worse than the possibility
that someone close to them was the mole. They're hurt.
Many of them paid a high price for attending that
Nazi rally. They lost their jobs, they got docks, they
got sued, they were ostracized and ridiculed. They feel like
martyrs now that the political tide has turned and the
(47:59):
slow as they shouted that day or things you're allowed
to say on Fox News. They feel like they should
be rewarded for paving the way, not cast aside as
embarrassments or political liabilities. Their ideas are mainstream now, but
they've been left behind. The men who ruined their own
(48:20):
reputations attending that Nazi rally are furious that the mega
media ecosystem has decided the whole thing was a hoax
all along. Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool
(48:48):
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by
me Molly Hunger. Part executive producers are Sophe Electremen and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Bradteck. You
can email me that Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy
(49:08):
theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird
Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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