☕️ LOOK OUT BELOW ☙ Thursday, August 13, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

SPLC's Intelligence Project director indicted for bankrolling neo-Nazi she was dating; Phoebe Gates's app calls its alleged fraud "cookie dropping"; and Milwaukee finds 5 bad USB sticks. Of course.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Thank you for your patience. An evil combination of tech hiccups and a court hearing conspired to delay today’s post. Your belated but fiery roundup includes: the superseding indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s longtime hate-hunter-in-chief, who the government says spent six years routing donor money into a joint account with the neo-Nazi informant she was also dating — which raises the uncomfortable question of who, exactly, was infiltrating whom; the Bloomberg exposé of Phoebe Gates’s shopping app, which allegedly spent months collecting commissions on sales it never made, a practice the founders discussed in writing, in Slack, on the record, using the phrase “cookie dropping,” and I need you to understand that I could not have invented that if you gave me a week and a thesaurus; and Tuesday’s Wisconsin governor’s primary, where a democratic socialist sitting at ninety-six percent on the prediction markets lost by four tenths of a point after five of Milwaukee’s nine USB drives turned out to have the wrong files on them, which everyone involved has agreed to describe as a download error.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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August 2026 is now, officially, the “month of collapses.” Here’s the first one. A giant crater is opening underneath the SPLC, which has $886 million in the bank, $30 million in the Cayman Islands, and fourteen Klan groups it has been funding. Yesterday, CBS reported, “U.S. indicts former SPLC executive in alleged fraud scheme over payments to informants in white supremacist groups.” Ruh roh.

The news was that the DOJ filed a superseding indictment expanding charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Director of Investigations Heidi Beirich, a crack, highly motivated woman who wasn’t afraid to get her, uh, hands dirty. Formally, Heidi’s title was Director of the Intelligence Project, which is totally normal for a 501c3 charity, and also fabulously ironic, given how things are turning out.

This newest indictment evoked disquieting comparisons with the Fani Willis catastrophe from Fulton County, where the lovelorn District Attorney showered taxpayer money and cheap luxuries on her ‘romantic partner’ Nathan Wade, a stomach-turning arrangement that duty required us to mock and lampoon for over a year during the Trump prosecutions (even though we didn’t want to, especially when we were forced against our will to compare Fani to a juvenile hippopotamus). No. It was just duty.

Director of Investigations Beirich invested donated funds into a particularly close investigation of a particular neo-nazi infiltrator, who was both ‘infiltrating’ an aryan group and, simultaneously, Director Beirich. His ‘penetrations’ was, by all accounts, thorough, consisting mostly of helping make the Klan bigger and more active, and once, of “borrowing” some of its records so Heidi could prove to donors what an imminent threat the group the SPLC had helped build was.

In 2010 the SPLC’s slanderous Hate Map counted about 221 Klan groups. By 2024 it counted only 14. Over the same stretch, the SPLC’s net assets swelled to $886.6 million, $30.7 million of it tucked away for safekeeping in the Caymans, which, again, is totally normal for a 501c3 charity.

Heidi investigated Mr. F-9, up close and personal. Above his “regular” compensation, she showered at least $140,000 more of donor money on him in a joint account in a series of unaccounted deposits that, charitably, we’ll call embezzlement. The DOJ identified her white supremacist boyfriend —the real victim here, let’s be honest— only as “F-9,” a code name that sounds like either a robot dog on an Adult Swim police procedural or possibly a rogue Cylon.

This went on, apparently, from 2007 all the way to 2019. F-9 got more than $1.2 million during that time. More materially, and possibly more salacious, Heidi streamed clandestine financial support from SPLC to various hate groups, which was laundered through bank accounts in the names of made-up companies like the “Rare Books Warehouse.” I did not make that up.

The cut-out companies were used to funnel money to the Klan groups, such as by approving reimbursements for hate group members’ on-the-job expenses. The DOJ’s indictment described costs “incurred for cross-burning events, to include the wood and fuel used.”

Let’s be honest. Nothing says “working our informants” like paying for them to burn crosses.

🔥 Most of this was already known.

This week’s ‘news’ was Heidi’s superseding indictment (and presumably, arrest)— which makes her the first SPLC officer to personally come under criminal charges. The looming question nobody at the SPLC is asking out loud is: who’s next?

The SPLC lawyers put on a brave front, laughing mirthlessly and sniping that the DOJ was only using Heidi’s story to make the organization look bad before trial. Defense counsel to the stars Abbe Lowell said, “This charge reflects a desperate government confronting a weak case, scrambling to make something — anything — stick as we approach trial.”

They completely missed the irony that the SPLC itself handed the DOJ all the raw material it needed. So.

Two more fascinating new facts emerged from the CBS story. The first was that, last Friday, Judge Emily C. Marks of the Middle District of Alabama (Trump 1.0 appointee) denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the indictment for vindictive prosecution, which had also requested extraordinary discovery, like Stephen Miller’s text messages and, if they got their way, probably even deposing President Trump.

In other words, they wanted a circus. The judge saw right through it.

In her opinion, Judge Marks described the SPLC’s legal brief as “heavy on heated rhetoric, better suited for cable news, or a podcast. It emphasizes noise over substance.” Trust me, as a practicing lawyer, it’s a very bad sign when the judge starts out by calling your brief “mostly noise.”

“The SPLC has failed to offer evidence tending to show animus on the part of the prosecutors involved in bringing this case and that such animus resulted in the prosecution,” Judge Marks wrote, which is “the showing required for discovery. Because it cannot satisfy that standard, it necessarily fails to satisfy the higher standard that would entitle it to dismissal.”

Judge Marks continued demolishing them. She wrote, the SPLC “cannot merely provide the rough outline of a theory — the President is out to get it — and expect the Court to fill in the blanks.”

This pitiful example does not make the SPLC’s lawyers look very impressive. Even assuming they understood the law (which itself is questionable), at minimum, they failed to read the room. You don’t take a thin theory based on mean tweets to a skeptical judge, who will never stretch to help you out.

In other words, they took “Trump did it” to a Trump judge and were shocked —shocked— when she wanted to see a document. The same people who spent twenty years putting Baptist bakers on the Hate Map are suddenly crying about political persecution.

Remember: on August 15, 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins walked into a Christian lobbying group, the Family Research Council, with a gun, a plan for murder, and fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Building manager Leo Johnson took a round in the forearm, disarmed him, and held him at gunpoint until police came. Johnson needed surgery and metal plates.

The government’s sentencing memo stated his motive flat-out: “Corkins had identified the FRC as an anti-gay organization on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.” He got 25 years, which was the first-ever conviction under DC’s Anti-Terrorism Act.

This Saturday is the shooting’s 14th anniversary. The SPLC’s Intelligence Project director is under indictment for allegedly bankrolling a hate group in the same week as the anniversary of the time a man used her map as a target list.

If this motion to dismiss was the best the SPLC’s lawyers could come up with, it might be in real trouble. They keep saying they are looking forward to trying the case, but are also filing desperate, long-shot motions to dismiss that get swatted away like houseflies. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

But that wasn’t all.

🔥 A second fascinating detail also dropped as a throwaway sentence in CBS’s story: this investigation began during Trump 1.0 in 2018 under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “From victim to target,” the CBS story teased.

According to the SPLC itself, and hilariously, the DOJ got the ball rolling in 2018 by trying to protect the SPLC from potential embezzlement, a sort of financial wellness check. We are just here to help. Later, in 2019, the internal investigation transitioned into SPLC wrongdoing on a tax avoidance theory.

It promptly fell into a coma under Biden. An anonymous Biden-era DOJ official told CBS they “were not aware of the existence of the investigation until recently.” Uh huh.

Then Todd Blanche took the smoldering embers, fanned the flames into bank fraud, donor fraud, and money laundering, and here we are.

Ironically, these fascinating historical facts came to light in the SPLC’s motion to dismiss, where it was attempting to create an inference of a bad motive on the part of the entire Trump Administration, arguing see, Biden’s DOJ didn’t think there were any crimes. Thus— political persecution.

So what we see looks like a carefully laid, eight-year arc, and helps explain why the Trump 2.0 DOJ had such quick access to the SPLC’s financials, the money trail, and the twelve-armed spanking machine. Soon, in October, it will be up to an Alabama jury, which, if I know my Bama people, and as a Gator I think I do, will be even more skeptical than Judge Marks.

The irony is thicker than Alabama honey. SPLC founder Morris Dees pioneered the tactic of trying Klan cases in Southern courtrooms to get sharp-nosed local juries— take them to Alabama and let the neighbors decide. Dees famously said, “I’m not ashamed to say I’m a salesman.”

Well, salesman Morris Dees has died. Dees built the SPLC by trying Klan cases before Alabama juries; the SPLC now faces an Alabama jury in October. History rhymed again, and one of the most poisonous left-wing groups in the last 25 years is collapsing into a stadium-sized hole.

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Much more is collapsing than just the SPLC. Would you believe it could be the Gates empire next? Yesterday, Futurism reported, “It Seems Like Bill Gates’ Daughter May Be in Serious Legal Trouble.” The subheadline, just a little overdramatically, said, “Gates could be facing a max penalty of up to 20 years in prison plus fines/restitution.”

Bill Gates’ 23-year-old daughter started her own e-commerce company called ‘Phia,’ and laudably said she plans to make it on her own and not through her father’s billions. In February, she said she has “a chip on my shoulder” and is building Phia with “no ties to my privilege or my last name.”

In other words, not using her inherited wealth— she wants to do it the old-fashioned way, through cheating, cutting corners, and a little software sleight of hand called “cookie stuffing” that can get you 20 years in chokey.

“Cookie stuffing” is not eating the icing out of an Oreo, sticking the two chocolate wafers back together, and then putting it back in the package “in case somebody else wanted it.” Having three teenage boys and personal experience, I can assure you that kind of cookie stuffing is worse. This is different.

In this case, it means defrauding legitimate e-commerce sites into paying millions of dollars in commissions for sales that Phia didn’t actually earn. E-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay routinely pay small referrers for pointing people at products on their websites. That is fine. Stealing their commissions is not fine.

Phia makes a free browser extension that offers coupons for products you look at on the web. So, if you are on Amazon, browsing for a battery-powered rotary saw (definitely not for cutting down camera poles), Phia might suggest a coupon code. So far, also fine.

But Phia went further. While you’re eyeing that saw, Phia quietly opens a background tab and pretends it sent you— and is therefore entitled to the commission, not whatever hard-working blogger actually sent you there. Phia pulled this off by re-visiting the store on the invisible tab as if it had sent you, and the store politely handed Phia the commission “cookie,” which is a special software file with a weird name.

🔥 Apparently, to technology nerds, the phrase “cookie stuffing” is not funny at all. Of course they find nothing amusing about the word “dongle,” either, which just goes to show you.

Let me give you an example: “Safety Advisory: sticking your dongle into unapproved orifices may void the warranty.” See how easy it is? I wasn’t even trying that hard. And please don’t get me started on cookie stuffing jokes. I mean, whose cookie did you stuff? These names are a feast, especially for middle-school boys, who love my jokes the most.

As if all that weren’t enough, in newly released internal Slack messages between Phoebe Gates and her glamorous co-founder, Sophia Kianni (the youngest “UN climate advisor” in history), they called this high-tech fraud “cookie dropping.” I am not making that up.

For instance, Sophia told one of the firm’s engineers, “whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing thank you.” Phoebe chimed in, “can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites… so we are monetizing on all GMV.” (GMV is a metric investors use to value companies.)

An engineer wrote back that this might be “against compliance.” Ms. Kianni thanked him. He is, as far as I can tell from these documents, the only person in this story who is going to be fine.

Cookie droppings and auto pops? Do they think I’m made of stone? Impervious to temptation?

🔥 To be clear, this is a federal crime, and people have been convicted for stuffing their cookies, but so far there is no evidence the DOJ is pursuing it. So, while technically true, it’s a reach to say Phoebe Gates is “facing” 20 years, the maximum sentence for this type of fraud.

But the last time this happened, it pretty quickly led to a class-action lawsuit that collapsed another cookie-stuffing e-commerce company, which was sold to Paypal, who is now defending the lawsuits. So it’s bad even without criminal charges. Either way, Bloomberg just dumped the evidence plaintiffs’ attorneys will need to make their cases sting. Not only did the whistleblower give Bloomberg the Slacks, but they also told Bloomberg exactly how to reproduce the invisible tab.

That’s not the real story. The bigger story is that Phoebe Gates and her notorious father represent the elite Epstein class. They’re not like Elon Musk, for instance, who actually makes stuff that people want to buy. They are scam artists with pedigrees.

Phoebe played the game. She always donated to Democrat political groups and progressive institutions (particularly pro-abortion groups) and endorsed Kamala for president. People, September 2024:

So she should have enjoyed elite immunity.

🔥 But two baffling, unexpected things happened. First, Bloomberg outed Phoebe as a fraud. It was like … real journalism. Where did that come from? And second, equally mysteriously, Bloomberg got the goods from an anonymous whistleblower.

We are meant to believe this person is just a selfless, altruistic insider who, sensing that Phoebe’s stuffed cookies were wrong, decided to take a great personal risk of being fired or sued or something by sliding the incriminating Slack messages to… Bloomberg?

I mean, that joke stinks worse than cookie droppings.

Look. A 2013 press release called Epstein a “long-time supporter of Bloomberg.” In October, 2013, Ghislaine Maxwell was photographed with Mike Bloomberg at a Four Seasons book launch party. And Epstein’s Gates connections are well known. They all partied together. From 2007 until Epstein’s arrest in 2019, Bloomberg media gave him the kid-glove treatment.

Using Bloomberg for this release was brilliant. Brilliant, if the plan was to inflict the greatest possible damage on the Bill Gates crime family. Bloomberg has progressive elite chops. If this story appeared in the New York Post, liberals would’ve filed it under “supermarket tabloid.”

How did the whistleblower know Bloomberg would run the story and not bury it in the “friends and family” file? In short, this “whistleblower” was extremely savvy, launching the exposé in the one spot that couldn’t be easily written off as a Republican hit job.

That’s why I’m filing this story under “collapsing narratives,” since the untouchable Epstein class of inbred elites is clearly facing a reckoning.

Let’s do one more.

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Behold the latest “miraculous” come-from-behind late-night ballot dump that once again favored establishment Democrats (eDems). Allegedly. Local affiliate WXOW reported, “David Crowley bests Francesca Hong to win Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor.” This sordid tale featured the most predictable post-Millennium thing in Democratic politics: five of nine USB sticks in Milwaukee with the wrong files on them.

Francesca Hong was the future. She was the open, DSA-endorsed candidate for Wisconsin governor on the Democrat ticket. On election night, Polymarket had her odds of winning the primary at 96%. David Crowley is … something else.

“One month ago, David Crowley was out of the race,” WXOW began. “But by Wednesday morning after the votes were tallied, he upset frontrunner Francesca Hong in a tightly contested race to win the Democratic nomination for governor.”

It was a stunning reversal —after the ballots closed— that featured a 90-minute gap while Milwaukee elections officials dramatically “fixed” a USB snafu, leaving one national reporter speechless. NBC’s Steve Kornacki, reporting live, who’d just heard about the USB delay, hunched, eyes wide, exclaimed, “Are you serious? They have to do … God … What were they doing – OK.”

NBC went to bed without declaring a winner.

Reporter Craig Gilbert, the Journal Sentinel’s former Wisconsin guy, called it a “historically narrow” win and a “historically big upset,” a “head-snapping” finish “none of the statewide polls predicted.” At 10:55 pm, the Journal/Sentinel’s live blog said, “Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: We’re waiting results of absentee ballots from the City of Milwaukee.”

The late ballots handed David Crowley a narrow 3,200 vote win out of over 780,000 votes cast: 39.8% Crowley and 39.4% Hong. (For contrast, Sara Rodriguez, who’d dropped out last month, got 30,000 votes— ten times Crowley’s margin.)

🔥 But who is David Crowley?

David Crowley, 40, was formerly homeless, later a ‘community organizer,’ then a county manager who trumpets about how he helped close two juvenile prisons. Just a few weeks ago, Crowley told the Milwaukee Courier he is neither a socialist nor a capitalist.

Crowley announced his candidacy for governor in September 2025. By early July of this year, he trailed badly, polling in single digits, and he got out on July 8, endorsing Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the other eDem. He booked a Jamaica vacation. “The one thing that I’ve learned is to buy travel insurance.”

Sara Rodriguez then dropped out. A flurry of phone calls ensued. Ten days after he pulled out, on July 19 —just weeks before the primary— Crowley pivoted and pushed back in the race.

He explained he’d been going off “data,” which later evolved to “false data.”

🔥 Corporate media’s narrative is that moderate eDems narrowly eked out a win over radical DSA candidate Hong. But is that right? Because it looks to me like Crowley is no “moderate.” He’s another DSA-adjacent compromise candidate, a last-minute switcheroo, like how the Democrats substituted lumberjack Troy Jackson for oyster farmer Graham Platner in Maine.

When replacement candidate Troy Jackson was asked whether he is a democratic socialist, he ambiguously replied, “I see myself as a Mainer and a working-class person.” It was an almost identical dodge to how Crowley didn’t answer the same question.

It’s not just me. Tom Tiffany, the Republican who won Tuesday’s primary and now has to run against Crowley until November, made the same read within hours: “David Crowley will do the same stuff that Francesca Hong would have. He just didn’t say it.”

In other words, DSA voters can now embrace David Crowley as a stealth socialist, which avoids an ugly, open civil war. Cue the “big tent” speeches.

🔥 As we’ve watched the polycrisis unfold with fascinated interest, we’ve seen the Democrat party fracturing into Establishment Dems (eDems) versus socialist DSA Dems. Party consultants like James Carville and Julian Epstein have railed against DSA policies. “These people are paternalistic, and it’s a bunch of overeducated little White turds who think they know more than other people know,” Carville said, not mincing words.

“They think that Lenin was a more glorious human being than Martin Luther King,” the lifelong Democrat added for a historical touch. “We are in a civil war now.”

But party stalwarts like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have put on repeat that “we’re a big tent party.”

They have a big problem. Democrats are used to lazily running without a platform against Republicans. Orange man bad! That works with Democrat voters. Everyone can just assume the Democrat platform— open or closed borders, men in women’s sports or not, and so on.

But that won’t work intra-party. The DSA socialists are motivated. They are fired up. However crazy it may be, at least they have a platform. Machine eDems like Chuck Schumer can’t afford to chant DSA bad. And they also can’t afford to stake out actual positions on the 80/20 issues that the Trump Administration has masterfully placed front and center. Taking a stand on those issues would just create more conflict inside the party.

So they’ll do what parties do when they can’t afford the argument. They’ll keep putting bandaids on where the bleeding starts. They’ll run stealth socialists in Maine and Wisconsin, call it moderation, and pray nobody checks the receipts before November.

Which brings us right back around to where we started. Three collapses in one Thursday: a civil-rights institution collapsing into a fraud trial in Alabama; a billionaire dynasty collapsing into a cookie jar; and a political coalition collapsing so noisily it has to keep running candidates who won’t say which side they’re on.

August is only halfway over.

Have a terrific Thursday! Then race back here tomorrow morning, for an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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