The America First Legal Foundation. Combating the left's radical agenda. Fight for the American people. Defend the Constitution and save this nation for the next generation.
Welcome to this week's episode of The Arena with America First Legal. We have a very special guest who will be joining us momentarily. But we're going to start off today's show actually by looking at a little bit of a bad legal take. So in fact, we're just going to go ahead and play our little bit for you and get right into it.
All right, so everybody, it's been a few weeks, a month or so, since the Department of Justice indicted the SPLC. And there was a lot of Democrats, a lot of people who said, 'Oh, this was an example of the Department of Justice weaponizing its tools of the federal government against its political opponents and against the SPLC.' And this was just a brazen act and all these other just ridiculous statements. So just recently the Department of Justice secured a superseding indictment and Tyler O'Neal with the Daily Signal in fact did a really splendid job. So, congrats, Tyler, on breaking this indictment down and some of the allegations. Again, allegations, it's an indictment. You know, got to make that caveat. It's an indictment. But I mean, you just listen to some of these things in here about what the SPLC was doing and then you can draw your own conclusions from it and what the department's able to prove, of course, at trial.
The SPLC. Of course, the general allegation and the general case that was that they were making against it before was that they were raising money to fight something that the SPLC was in turn then funding, right? They were creating the need for their own existence by doing different things. Well, there's a lot of details that Tyler O'Neal breaks down here that of course, go to the real source, too. Read the indictment yourself. Never rely just on what anyone says, including us, about things. Go read the source for yourself. But, for example, there's one post in here where he describes some paragraphs from the indictment said that the SPLC paid over $1.2 million to F9, who was in a romantic relationship with an SPLC employee. And while receiving SPLC donor funds, F9. So this is the kind of cooperating witness. This is the person, F9 is the person who is part of the white supremacy movement supposedly that the SPLC is using as one of their folks as though they were the Department of Justice themselves. Says, 'While receiving SPLC donors money, F9 also raised funds for the National Alliance.' Odd. Then they have another example here. The SPLC paid more than $70,000 to F-30, a Nazi KKK, an Aryan nations leader. F-30 asked the SPLC to help him slash her leave the movement, but instead SPLC gave F-30 a salary to stay and F-30 used the money to host extremist rallies, recruit members, and publish materials. It goes on and on and on.
The description here that's again in the indictment and I'm reading you some of the descriptions Tyler O'Neal has made about it. It describes how SPLC was obtaining money from donors to fight these various causes and if you get into the heart of the actual indictment that's put out there you see pretty clearly based on what's alleged that in fact, if proven true, this is not an example of weaponized justice. This is exactly an example of the Department of Justice doing its job and stopping this type of fraudulent activity from occurring. And just remember everybody, everybody at home, remember the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Just remember that. That was the event that supposedly, if you believe sleepy Joe Biden, that was the event that led him to decide to run for president of the United States. And the fact of the matter is that the more and more you see it, the more and more it is proven what a lot of people have thought for a long time that that entire event was completely astroturf, completely made up and used as justification by the left to pursue their own political ends. So bad legal take, bad factual take. The bad legal take is and it belongs to all the people who said that the Department of Justice was in fact weaponizing its resources and tools against his political opponents with this SPLC indictment. So I would say based on what's in here that is a very bad legal take open to be challenged.
Oh my god. You know, you just think about, you know, all the times under Obama that the IRS, you know, investigated conservative nonprofits, you know, no question that the Biden administration, you know, didn't do anything in terms of investigating this. And as far as I know, SPLC still has its, you know, tax status.
It's insane. It's insane. And if this administration was to audit them, you know, you would have Jamie Rascin investigating the administration, I'm sure.
Well, Lois Learner, where is she today? Miss IRS, remember her?
I was actually... Where is she?
I don't know. But I was actually in Charlottesville the week before the weekend of this whole thing. And it was honestly the talk of the town, like in anticipation. So, this wasn't this spontaneous event. You're 100% right. It was planned. They knew it was coming. I was there for an event. UVA was having a graduate school event and the dean who was the medical school was saying for any of you staying in town this weekend, this is what's going to happen. So it was definitely a well-planned event that was about to transpire.
What I don't understand is well SPLC stands for Southern Poverty Law Center. Where does any of this have to do with poverty?
Yeah.
Great question. No one knows.
Like no one knows. I mean, the craziest part of what you just read was that I guess the member of that extremist group wanted to leave and then the SPLC person was like, 'No, you have to stay.' Like, 'You can't leave this extremist organization. We need you here.'
I mean, as alleged, right, as alleged in the indictment, the whole notion that, 'Oh, actually, you know what? Why don't you stay there? We'll pay you money and you keep doing racist things.' And you just keep doing this stuff and we'll pay you. Is just really bonkers. As I've said on social media and elsewhere, it'd be as if we went to major corporations and universities across the country and told them, 'Guys, look, our business model really requires you to keep doing all this corporate DEI stuff. So, why don't you just keep doing it and keep discriminating against Americans based on their race?' Because it's really good for our business, right?
I mean, that's the insanity of this whole situation. Oh, I would never do that. And number one, Mike, I hope that in fact that those our business line there, so to speak, our work on those fronts. I hope that someday we don't even have to be in that business line. That's how we're successful. But, you know, apparently the money was too good. Apparently, the funds were too good and they decided that they just needed to continue to manufacture racism and problems using donor funds, which is crazy.
That's how you raise money, right? You have all these fundraising events and they say, 'You guys need us. We need to fix all this. So, you guys need to give us more money' as they're funneling money to keep the bad guys going.
That's exactly... Look, I mean, it's the left people, you either realize this now because you've experienced it and or you're just a smart person or whatever, or you're going to realize it at some point. Nearly 90 plus percent of everything that the left does is completely astroturf, is completely made up. And so you know another example is all these protests at Delaney Hall this ICE facility up in New Jersey right so this whole thing originates people saying oh there's bad conditions bad conditions in this detention center and these congressmen are saying oh the people are saying the food is rotten poisoned and all these other things and blah blah blah and it's horrible and they don't but the here's the thing number one the food's fine if the food wasn't fine I maintain my position what they would do is somebody would park a taco truck or they would park something outside of the detention center and they would offer free food to anybody in the detention center and they would work it out and say, 'Hey, look, I heard you guys the sandwiches are bad or something, so please we want to make these available to the people there.' No one does that. No one ever does anything that's actually helpful. All they do is agitate and they go outside and they do all these things and they raise all these issues because they have nothing else to do. They're trying to provoke a response. They're trying to row people up and get them thinking that they're part of challenging some authoritarian regime when in fact everybody's fine. Most of the people in there are criminals. Criminal aliens. Some might not be. But guess what? We have immigration laws which means that if you're subject to being deported from the United States, you can in fact be detained. You can and should be detained. They don't want these people detained. They don't want them detained anywhere. It's not about Delaney Hall. It's not about the conditions there. They just need a political cause. And so this is the way that they do things. This is the way they've always done things. And you can just look at it time and again across every issue that they get agitated about. Every single thing they get riled up about. Half of it's fake at least.
Yeah. But this is the whole thing, right? The left believes that the ends justify the means. Well, you know, if we need to commit crimes to create our utopia, it's fine. It's absolutely fine. And that's how they... that's Marxism, right?
At a classic Marxist adaptation.
Yes. I saw exactly what you're talking about. What did Rahm Emanuel say? Never let a good... What was that?
Never let a good crisis go to waste. Yeah.
Yeah. Look, I mean, I just again, you either already know this or you've gotten, you know, you're about to take your red pill or whatever, whatever the language is that people want to use. A lot of people learned this during COVID, right? And they've learned since then that so many of the things even associated with that were completely false and made up and fake. And there's this tweet that's gone around that people have been or this post on X, I should say. That's gone around recently, that was a reminder from 2020. I forget who made it, but it had something to the effect of, a major medical organization recognized that systemic racism was present. And so, we had to, you know, do all these different things to address it and to remediate it. And this was in the summer of love with George Floyd and all these other things. And of course, mind you, people who were paying attention to world affairs are aware of what happened just recently in the United Kingdom with the poor innocent young man. Completely different world reaction compared to what happened to George Floyd back six years ago. So again, you either realize the stuff is fake or you just are willfully blind or something. But very little of the things that they actually complain about or challenge or say have any basis in reality.
But you learn and you learn from the time how people fell into place. You think about it, remember those big stickers on the ground where we're all supposed to stand six feet apart? How did that come from?
Right. Zero on the science front. And yet they showed up in airports and dry cleaners and anywhere you went, grocery stores and we were all and people did fall in line. And it's really frightening to see the power that ensued. The lockdowns like the 14 days to slow the spread whatever it was. I mean, there were all these things and it was like I think people just realized eventually that I mean the science wasn't there, right?
I mean, look, there's a part of me though to be honest. I mean, I kind of enjoy a natural non-government forced social distancing like just in crowds. I don't like crowds. I don't like to be smashed up against people on trains and things. So there's a part of me there was one part of being during COVID that thought you know it's actually kind of nice to not be smashed against somebody. On the other hand, the rest of it was horrible of course and it was also weird because people you'd be walking down the sidewalk I remember walking down the sidewalk in Fairfax Virginia and people would be approaching coming the opposite direction masked and whatever else and they would go to the opposite side of the street so as to not walk within, you know, feet of me as a human being during COVID. And it was just like bonkers.
Well, there's still people wearing masks. Oh, especially in DC.
Walking outside on the sidewalk.
Yeah. Still people traveling to and from DC on airplanes, too. Airports. It's like you're wearing your political ideology on your sleeve for the...
But it's so... I can understand your point about you like your space.
But it's different when it's imposed by the government. Right. And it's big brother telling you what to do. When there's not a basis for doing it other than they can. And of course then there was the double standard of what like Nancy Pelosi going and getting her hair done and our pal Gavin Newsome going to French Laundry or whatever that place is Napa Valley or it's like you're the proletariat...
We live by our own rules.
I mean it was so insane some of the things that were forced on everybody during that period and people think that we've moved past it. People think, 'Oh, well, you know, we've all learned our lesson. We all, you know, saw this thing.' I don't think that people... I don't think that the other side learned their lesson. I don't think that enough consequences were exacted afterwards. I don't think that it's a situation where we could say today that will never happen again in the United States. Based on the fact that the people who imposed some of those conditions, they're just out of power currently, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think if anything, it taught the bad guys how actually how easy it is to impose power.
Yeah. Absolutely. Which is, you know, a thing that people have to keep in mind as you make decisions in an informed democracy or democratic republic, I should say. Whether you show up to vote or not, you have to remember that there is a group of people in the United States that is just waiting. They're just waiting to impose their will on you again. And so you have a choice. You can either participate or you can't. But staying at home is not actually usually a very helpful solution in my opinion.
And you were right. So speaking of imposing and bad policy, we've been fighting. Thank goodness the administration is the administration of America first principles, but the prior administration imposing a whole bunch of DEI woke this that and the other. We just had a really good, I would say, win for the good guys the other week with the Biden administration having imposed this IOTA model this where they were regulations that were going to award kidney transplants based not on medical need not on saving people's lives as the first determination which is of course objective and science-based but based on equity based upon one's skin color. So if you have two people and one person has a medical need urgency for a kidney transplant and somebody else who is black or another minority according to the Biden administration's regulations, that person would get priority over medical need. And that's something that AFL discovered and we filed a petition for rulemaking and it's really good to see that as of July that's going to go away.
And the HHS has announced that. So that's like another example of people imposing whether it's government or private companies which we've also experienced at AFL and the fighting it of doing things imposing actions not based on science but based on philosophy and certainly not America first philosophy and laws violating federal law. I mean, it's insane that people would think that in some cases lifesaving organs should be awarded based on the color of your skin or where you come from. I mean, it should be based on medical need. Am I missing something?
