Molly Conger debunks claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center orchestrated the 2017 Unite the Right rally, refuting federal allegations of wire fraud against "Field Source 37" who received $270,000. Citing leaked Discord chats and court documents, she argues hundreds of true believers independently organized the violence using their own weapons, rejecting the narrative that a single informant tricked attendees. Ultimately, the discussion exposes government fabrications designed to dismiss genuine white supremacist threats while highlighting how participants now face ostracization as their views gain mainstream traction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Kingdom of Fraud Launch00:01:24
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On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
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Those people are starving for banter.
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Life is full of hurdles.
So, how do you keep going?
On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions, about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward.
At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like I can do anything.
I can do anything.
Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
Hey, what's good, y'all?
You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Keir Gaines.
This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor?
Election Rigging Confessions00:15:55
It signals to the world that you're not to be played with.
And just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to.
Listen to Learn the Hard Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multimillion dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last?
Tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the Yahoo Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
I was lingering outside the courthouse for no reason in particular one morning in April a few years ago.
Normally, I head 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 the trees outside my living room window are 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 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'd already spent years leading up to that moment scouring footage of the crime in question, 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.
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'd laughed along with his friends as they fantasized about raping me to death, 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 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 boogeyman.
He was just a sad, weird little guy.
We stood there outside the courthouse for about 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 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 2017.
I told him it didn't matter what I thought.
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, 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 very picture of defeat, and it was just a reflex, I think.
His right hand was there, held out just inches from me, waiting.
And suddenly, mine was there too, gripping his a little too tightly.
No hard feelings, he said.
I didn't let go.
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.
Was it an 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 active in the white nationalist movement.
I don't 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 2017, He meant 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 in at least a year, probably not since his sentencing hearing in late 2024.
But I saw his face again this week.
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 2017.
And there he was.
Torch in hand, mouth wide open mid chant, looking back at me from the top of an op ed, accusing him and all of his Nazi friends of being a hoax.
The president himself said it.
The Unite the Right rally was a total fake.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, is something that keeps coming up on the show.
Even when the subject of the episode is a person who's never been here or a group that didn't even still exist in the 21st century, there's some connection, some direct personal link, some shared ideological lineage.
The groups that converged here in Charlottesville in 2017 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.
Early on in the show's run, there was a funny episode about an elderly Confederate war reenactor who got kicked out of his reenactment 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 a result of that rally.
There was a two parter on Barry Black, the Pennsylvania Klansman who won his Supreme Court case over a cross burning conviction.
Barry was dead by 2017, but his case is why Virginia even has the law that was used to prosecute the men who marched with torches in 2017.
The series about the man who assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967.
Ends with the assassin himself posting on Facebook in 2017 that he was glad to see the rally, that the white men marching in Charlottesville were just expressing their free speech.
In the episode about those March Against Sharia rallies that were held all over the country in 2017, 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 the South Africa episodes.
That group traveled 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 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.
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, 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 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 Heyer was a real person and she really was murdered.
We've been over that too, sadly.
I debunked some common conspiracy theories about her murder in an episode last summer, a two parter in June about the rise in right wing rhetoric about hitting protesters with your car.
I've spent years going over it in my published work and 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 for two of the men convicted for their participation in the torch march the 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 leaked chats from the organizers.
I've listened to recorded jail calls 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 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 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 was fake.
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 them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.
They were.
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.
That's a little bit of a jumbled mess, but that's the President of the United States being interviewed on 60 Minutes on April 26, 2026.
If you haven't been keeping up with the news, that probably means absolutely nothing to you.
Because you basically need to decrypt anything the president says these days.
You have to already have all of the context to figure out which random bits and pieces of the word salad tumbling out of his mouth connect to some part of reality.
He's talking about the recent indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On April 21st, The Department of Justice announced that a grand jury had returned an 11 count indictment, alleging 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.
And a lot of this is very transparently malicious 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.
SPLC Bankruptcy Scandal00:02:27
Surprising at all to me that they would pay cash for information from sources inside the movement.
That's 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 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 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 1990, Richard Butler in 2000.
They made Louis Beam stop using Klan militias to burn the boats of Vietnamese fishermen in Texas in the 1980s.
They sued the Klan, 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.
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 50 years.
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 going to say they haven't done good work.
And I'm not so naive as to think they did it without talking to a few Nazis.
Questioning Labor Tactics00:04:00
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 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 just glad it isn't me.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy.
Not quite.
On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform?
We do some retirement homes.
Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Life throws hurdles big and small.
The question is how do you conquer them?
On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions.
To talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.
From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.
If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't.
Like, I've never understood that.
Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.
It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong.
Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.
And Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki.
The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile means the world to me.
And that's what motivates me to.
Win more gold medals.
At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world.
Like, I can do anything.
I can do anything.
Because resilience isn't just about winning, it's about showing up, even when it's hard.
Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect.
We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.
He felt destined for greatness.
So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.
Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Levon, this went to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?
The largest tax investigation in American history.
You need to tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Jacob told Lovon, You're ruining my life.
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way, with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough.
Because people scoreboard wise, life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross.
Because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on earth?
Or are you a good person because you're afraid?
Funded Hate Groups00:13:47
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gains, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way, and listen now.
This won't be the episode where we really get into the nitty gritty legal details of the SPLC indictment.
And it gets 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 paid over the years, and the charged conduct outlines 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 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 in the indictment.
Kind of run the gamut of the far right.
The National Socialist Movement, National Alliance, a couple of different Klan groups, American Front, Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, National Socialist Party of America, Aryan Nations, the gang's all there.
And 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 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 propaganda angle is obvious.
I mean, the indictment is pretty straightforward in implying that the SPLC wasn't just paying for information, they were funneling money into hate groups to help those groups, to direct them in their actions, to strengthen them, to create an imaginary enemy to justify their own existence.
Legally speaking, the government is accusing the SPLC of wire fraud.
That's the crime they're saying happened here.
But what they want you to believe happened, what they are trying to punish the organization for, is manufacturing fake racism to make conservatives look bad and to trick donors into giving the SPLC more money to fight the racism, which, again, in this scenario, isn't even real.
It's just something the SPLC 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 The Southern Poverty Law Center's stated mission 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 Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.
The SPLC's paid informants engaged in the active promotion of racist 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 The SPLC explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups.
In the 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 violent extremist groups, or that some of 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 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 Todd Blanch went all in, outright accusing the SPLC of faking the existence of the thing they fight against.
The SPLC is a nonprofit entity 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 the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
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 what he's saying.
One of the paid sources described in the indictment is the real heart of this conversation Field Source 37, F 37 for short.
From the indictment, F37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC.
F37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.
Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F37 more than $270,000.
That's all we know about F 37.
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 Law Center planned, paid for, and organized the Unite the Right rally.
That if not for the work of the SPLC, there would have been no Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
This is being interpreted to mean that the SPLC. Paid a quarter of a million dollars to someone, and that person operated entirely under their control and used 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 2020 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 2020 election.
So I think he's trying to say the 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.
Now, 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 specifically interacted with their paid sources.
I can only guess based on what I know about the SPLC 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 37 was, they are not solely responsible for the orchestration of the Unite the Right rally.
All we know about F 37 is that they received $270,000 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 or if it was all a salary of some kind.
We don't know what organizations F 37 was involved with.
We don't know what sort of information F 37 supplied or what the SPLC did with that information.
We don't know if F 37 personally committed any crimes or directly encouraged others to do so.
And if they did, we don't know whether the SPLC was aware of that.
We don't know.
And the government isn't making any specific allegations 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 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 in the months leading up to it.
Individual organizations who helped organize the rally all had their own Discord servers too.
And there were Facebook group chats with various organizers.
There 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 those words.
And they weren't all actually integral to the planning process.
So maybe F 37 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.
And this is the kind of statement you have to include in an indictment because it is a concrete, provable statement.
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 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 used to ferry attendees the distance of one mile from the big parking 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.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy?
Not quite.
Uber Transportation Claims00:03:15
On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform?
We do some retirement homes.
Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Life throws hurdles big and small.
The question is, how do you conquer them?
On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.
From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.
If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't.
Like, I've never understood that.
Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.
It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong.
Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.
And Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki.
The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile means the world to me.
And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals.
At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world, like I can do anything.
I can do anything.
Because resilience isn't just about winning, it's about showing up, even when it's hard.
Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Capital One.
Founding partner of iHeartWomen Sports.
Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect.
We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.
He felt destined for greatness.
So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.
Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Levon, this plant, to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?
The largest tax investigation in American history.
You need to tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Jacob told Wavon, You're ruining my life.
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way, with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough.
Because people scoreboard wise, life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross.
Because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on earth?
Or are you a good person because you're afraid?
Paying for Racism00:14:57
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gains, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way, and listen now.
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 in living memory.
It would be weirder if they didn't have a field 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 one at Unite the Right.
So, what did they do with the information they got from the informants?
Well, 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 Blanch was on Fox News talking about it.
And he outright claimed the SPLC does not share information from their informants with law enforcement.
There's no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests they shared that information with law enforcement.
They have communicated when they so chose with law enforcement over the years.
There's 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 shared what they learned with law enforcement.
Now, the morning after Todd Blanch said that, attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion to address the government's materially false statements and to enforce rules prohibiting further prejudicial extrajudicial 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 that the SPLC absolutely has shared information with the FBI.
Many times.
Specifically, in relation to the Unite the Right rally, the SPLC says they sent a 45 page report to the FBI's Mobile, Alabama field office before the rally that summer.
From a filing in the case, the SPLC's lawyers write 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 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 SPLC's attorneys cite some pretty specific examples, including one 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 2024.
It was about a handful of white supremacists who've 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 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 2, the sequel held in DC in 2018.
And Fred Arena is just one of several examples the SPLC gives of white supremacists that they've informed the government about based on information they got from their paid sources.
The motion to make the government stop lying on TV lists several statements from administration officials on TV or social media that misrepresent the case against the SPLC.
In response, The government filed a brief reply, but Todd Blanch 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 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.
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.
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 Viola Liuzzo, we talked about an FBI informant who very likely fired one of the shots that killed Liuzzo.
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 the American Nazi Party in the 60s.
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 hitman on their payroll out on the streets.
We know they've 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.
But that aside, I think a 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?
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 an amateur paid infiltrator to exist?
Yes, there are examples of this.
But it's not practical.
If you're someone like the SPLC, why would you pay someone to pretend to be a Klansman when it's much easier to find an unscrupulous Klansman 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, 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 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 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.
He even gave the names of former members of his own organization that he just didn't want around 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 in the Torch March in 2017.
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 Cantwell doxed him because they had a falling out.
Now, in the end, all Cantwell managed to do was 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 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 powerful enemy of their movement.
So, if they need cash and the SPLC is paying, why not sell them 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 he probably just wants to embarrass.
Inconvenience, or incarcerate a rival.
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 the men who are desperate enough to sell out their own organizations.
And I think regardless of the motivations of F 37, 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 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 source's behavior or the content of their posts.
Maybe we'll find out.
But even if SPLC founder Morris Dees 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 bad faith paid actor turned the tide of the conversation and tricked everyone else into pretending to be white supremacists.
But here's the thing I've read those chats.
You can read a lot of them too.
Unicorn Riot published the 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 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 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 showed up with the weapons they bragged about packing.
They did all of that on their own.
No one paid them to do that, 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 pudding where his brain ought to be.
Rally Cost Breakdown00:02:25
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 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 attendees' own pockets.
Because there are answers to some of these questions.
Obviously, we'll revisit this criminal case 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 want to let this one breathe, so I'll save it for next week.
I have a collection of responses from the real.
Nazis, Confederates, secessionists, white nationalists, and assorted bigots who really did attend 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 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 doxxed, they got sued, they were ostracized and ridiculed.
They feel like martyrs.
Now that the political tide has turned and the slogans they shouted that day are 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 reputations attending that Nazi rally are furious that the MAGA media ecosystem has decided the whole thing was a hoax all along.
Multi-Million Dollar Mess00:02:45
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy 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.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy?
Not quite.
On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform?
We do some retirement homes.
Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Life is full of hurdles.
So, how do you keep going?
On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions, about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward.
At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like I can do anything.
I can do anything.
Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
Hey, what's good, y'all?
You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Keir Gaines.
This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor?
It signals to the world that you're not to be played with.
And just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to.
Listen to Learn the Hard Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on.
A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion-dollar fraud.
But how long can this alliance last?
Tell me what you know.
Is somebody coming after me?
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.