Free Republic

WASHINGTON — A former Southern Poverty Law Center chief finance officer declined to face charges in person that she fraudulently funneled $1.2 million in donor money to white supremacist groups. Heidi Beirich waived her right to appear at a virtual court arraignment in the Middle District of Alabama on 14 felony charges involving alleged wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. Instead, her defense team appeared for the Zoom arraignment and entered a not-guilty plea before US Magistrate Judge Kelly Pate on all counts. Pate set a trial date of Oct. 5, which both prosecutors and Beirich’s defense attorneys indicated...

When pipe bombs turned up in the mail of Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats this week, the first recipient — billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros — quickly fell out of the headlines. But there’s no chance his many critics and enemies have forgotten him. White nationalists and others on the political fringes have long cast Soros as the supposed leader of a globalist Jewish plot to undermine white Christian civilization. Now, President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other political leaders have brought the vilification of Soros into the mainstream. This year, Soros has been...

The White Lives Matters movement will be listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center when it releases its annual Hate Map this February. "I can't speak to how many chapters will be listed, but it's clear that the leadership of the group, the ends of the group -- it's just a flat out white supremacist group," said Heidi Beirich, Director of Intelligence Project at SPLC, in an interview with Chron.com. "The ideology behind it, the racist leaders, everything about it is racist," Beirich added. The leadership Beirich refers to is 40-year-old Rebecca Barnette. In addition to...