Meanwhile, the Biden administration is falling all over itself to push transgender pronouns, to promote drag queens, and to celebrate Pride—even on Easter Sunday!

It’s enough to drive anyone with common sense up a wall. Yet when Americans dare to say, “Enough!” they find themselves branded “authoritarian” for wanting a moment’s peace.

If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.

Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.

That report reads like a dispatch from a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia, where evil white Christian jackbooted thugs have seized control of the government and are forcing everyone to adopt their propaganda. The report is so divorced from reality, it would be downright hilarious if so much of the legacy media, corporate America, the Democrats, and the Department of Justice didn’t take it deadly seriously.

In a classic case of projection, the SPLC report warns that the Right is trying to take control of the culture and erase the poor persecuted left-wing minority groups while the SPLC covers for the woke movement, which has already seized the commanding heights of American culture and is straining to silence dissent. It calls conservative efforts “ethnocide” (the erasure of an ethnic group’s culture, akin to genocide), and “Christian supremacy.”

Back at home in the real world, the woke elites have already taken control of the culture and worked to dismantle America’s heritage. Christians, Jews, and even atheists who hold beliefs about the world and America that used to be the norm find themselves living in what feels like a different country—nay, a different world.

Education

Woke ideology has seeped into the education system at an alarming pace.

Critical race theory, or CRT—a lens by which teachers tell white students they are oppressors and black students they are oppressed in a “systemically racist” America—amounts to a new form of “anti-racist” discrimination on the basis of race.

Transgender ideology teaches kids that males can become female and vice versa, encouraging experimental medical interventions while ignoring the horrific toll that “gender-affirming care” takes on young bodies.

Yet for the spin masters at the SPLC, efforts to weaken the suffocating grasp of woke ideology on America’s institutions amount to cultural tyranny. To them, commonsense Americans’ campaign against critical race theory and transgender ideology in schools is a form of oppression, while “drag queen story hour” is a symbol of “freedom” and is important for “democracy.”

The SPLC has something of a fetish for drag queens. Not only did it praise drag as a symbol of "freedom" and a tool to promote "democratic engagement," but it attacked @againstgrmrs for protesting "drag queen story hour." pic.twitter.com/DhIHCyxW86

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) June 7, 2024

The “Year in Hate and Extremism” includes a long section demonizing parental rights groups and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for “ethnocide through authoritarianism.” That section compares Florida’s efforts to prevent discrimination (what else do you call shaming students for the color of their skin?) to the “forced acculturation” of Native Americans in previous eras. It suggests parental rights groups and DeSantis are trying to “control a man’s thinking” to make minority groups more subservient.

Another section raises the alarm about school choice, suggesting that it is a secret “Dominionist Christian” plot to take over society.

The SPLC warns against “dominionism,” the idea that “only Christians … have the right to control government and all influential posts in society and culture.”

“The goal of much of this theology is to strip government of functions such as education and welfare and … reserve those for churches,” the SPLC warns. It claims “dominionists” want to “siphon off public funds and put them in the hands of a reactionary minority.”

The SPLC strains to connect its attack on school choice to racial segregation. It warns that dominionism aims “to fulfill a decades-old dream, begun when segregated schools were ruled unconstitutional, to keep education shackled to a narrow, authoritarian version of Christianity.”

So, parents who are fed up with the woke takeover of public education, who want to find schools that won’t indoctrinate their kids into CRT and transgender orthodoxy, and who want the education dollars they pay in taxes to follow their children when they leave this woke school system are pushing a form of segregationist “authoritarianism?”

If anyone is “authoritarian” in this situation, it’s the leftist activists who subverted the public school system in the first place, not the parents who want another option.

Religious Freedom

The SPLC report also demonizes efforts to defend religious freedom.

The “Year in Hate” goes out of its way to attack House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., mostly for his previous work with the Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom. The SPLC claims that ADF “often pits Christians unfairly against LGBTQ+ people in a legal gambit to undermine nondiscrimination laws through claims of ‘religious freedom.’”

In reality, ADF’s most famous client, Christian baker Jack Phillips, will gladly sell cakes to anyone, but he refuses to craft custom cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings because he believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Colorado’s government used a “nondiscrimination” law to punish him for this, and ADF sued on his behalf. ADF did not “unfairly” pit anyone against anyone. LGBTQ activists are constantly demonizing conservative Christians and attempting to silence them. The SPLC demonizes ADF for pushing back.

Shoring up the Deep State

The SPLC report also condemns an effort to restrain the federal bureaucracy, which has acted like a “deep state” under former President Donald Trump and under President Joe Biden. Bureaucrats bragged about opposing Trump from within, and many officials have openly complained about Biden’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza.

Project 2025, a coalition of more than 100 commonsense and conservative organizations led by my former employer, The Heritage Foundation, aims to rein in the administrative state and make it more accountable to the people’s elected president, as the Constitution envisions. The SPLC faults the coalition for working with “at least nine hate and antigovernment groups with strong ties to the Republican Party,” singling out mainstream conservative organizations that the SPLC has repeatedly attacked: ADF, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Moms for Liberty.

“The coalition’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ [a manual for the next conservative president containing policy recommendations for reforming federal agencies] characterizes Christianity as under threat and frames some policy recommendations as part of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition,’” the SPLC notes. “It also calls for staffing the federal bureaucracy with ideologues recruited with the assistance of many partner groups.”

The SPLC suggests that Christianity is not under threat, that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not undergird American freedom, and that the federal bureaucracy has not already been flooded with ideologues—and the SPLC is completely wrong on all three counts. The organization and its allies are the very people threatening conservative Christianity, demonizing the Judeo-Christian tradition, and seeding the administrative state with left-wing activists.

When conservatives launch a plan to counter this influence and restore sanity to the situation, the SPLC cries foul.

Antisemitism

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the SPLC’s report involves antisemitism, however.

The SPLC admits that “antisemitism on college campuses” is a “legitimate issue,” yet it does not condemn any group for harassing Jews on campus. It does not mention the anti-Israel agitators at the New York college Cooper Union who locked Jewish students inside a library while shouting, “Free Palestine!” It does not mention the anti-Israel demonstrator who physically blocked a Jewish student from walking on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus.

Instead, the report states that “a faux hypersensitivity toward antisemitism was particularly visible among right-wing media and politicians in the United States as they utilized the legitimate issue of antisemitism on college campuses to disingenuously further an attack on higher education.”

Almost as an afterthought, the SPLC notes that colleges should “review and revise their policies,” before it moves on to condemning the conservatives who call out antisemitism.

These “accusers need to acknowledge their own ties to antisemitic narratives before accusing others,” the scolding SPLC intones. “Certain politicians targeting education overlook their associations with groups like Moms for Liberty, which has a chapter that quoted Hitler, and entities like PragerU, known for promoting right-wing ideas and neglecting the realities of slavery and indigenous peoples in American history, and fostering a pro-white Protestant narrative that emboldens extremist groups.”

In other words, conservatives can’t criticize anti-Israel rioters for antisemitism because one Moms for Liberty chapter quoted Hitler—never mind that the chapter was quoting Hitler ironically to demonstrate how the woke Left took over education. Conservatives can’t speak up about Jews getting harassed because they might agree with PragerU, which presents Judeo-Christian heritage as a good thing. Oh, horrors!

The SPLC also warned, “The upcoming election year will likely witness a continued use of George Soros as an antisemitic trope to symbolize the existence of the ‘deep state.’”

Never mind that George Soros, a Hungarian American hedge fund billionaire of Jewish heritage, bankrolls a broad swath of the modern Left and is largely responsible for the “Rogue Prosecutor” movement that helps elect left-wing local prosecutors who refuse to prosecute most crimes, all in the name of racial equity. Never mind that his son, Alex Soros, who has now taken the reins at his father’s Open Society Foundations, is providing free political advice to Democrats in opposing Trump.

Ignore all that and remember: It is the height of “antisemitism” to suggest that George Soros may be impacting our political system!

Democrats should refer to Trump as a convicted felon at every opportunity. Repetition is the key to a successful message and we want people to wrestle with the notion of hiring a convicted felon for the most important job in the country! ⁦⁦ https://t.co/WLLMWatlkP

— Alex Soros (@AlexanderSoros) May 31, 2024

Of course, the SPLC doesn’t just defend Soros out of the goodness of its heart. It has financially benefited from Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society, which gave the SPLC a $75,000 grant in 2016.

Rather than addressing the antisemitism on college campuses, the SPLC weaponizes the issue against conservatives and defends its political allies.

‘White Supremacy’

Longtime readers know that I almost always bring up a few points when writing on the SPLC. First, my book, “Making Hate Pay,” documents how the SPLC became the far-left smear factory it is today. It took its “hate map”—a fundraising tool masquerading as a report on white supremacist terror networks left over from the Ku Klux Klan—and weaponized it to demonize conservatives. Second, both my book and my reporting illustrate how the SPLC is notoriously unreliable, and a court is actively considering defamation claims against the center.

The latest SPLC report once again demonstrates that the “hate map” smears mainstream conservative and Christian organizations by associating them with the Klan. The SPLC spells out that association in black and white in the report’s introduction: “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s preeminent ‘Year in Hate’ report provides a comprehensive analysis of the organizational infrastructure—the groups—upholding white supremacy in the United States.”

In short, if you disagree with the SPLC’s agenda, you’re part of the “white supremacy” nexus supporting “ethnocide,” “Christian supremacy,” “authoritarianism,” and whatever new term we can think of to make you seem nefarious.

The only way to escape these epithets, you see, is to get with the all-of-government, all-of-society woke CRT transgender program, which isn’t authoritarian at all.

The department also appears to have hosted training that described groups the SPLC has attacked as “our opposition.”

According to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, Dietra Trent, executive director at the White House initiative on historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), met with Southern Poverty Law Center staff on July 5, 2022, one year before the SPLC put parental rights groups on its “hate map” June 6. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“It is shocking to see in writing the evidence that innocent parents were harassed and targeted by their own federal government for exercising their right to free speech and for speaking out during the COVID school shutdowns,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Liberty Justice told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday.

“We have known for some time the Biden administration has made it their mission to attack parents who publicly advocate for their children’s education,” she added. “Attending public school board meetings and voicing concerns about our children’s education should not put a target on our backs to be silenced by the federal Government.”

“Though the Biden administration would like to believe otherwise, parents are the only people that should get to make decisions on behalf of their children,” Justice said. “We are grateful for the Heritage Foundation for standing up on behalf of all parents. “

The Meeting

Taylor Emerson, then a confidential assistant to Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, organized the meeting.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has leveraged its track record of suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy to develop a “hate map” it uses to smear enemies. The SPLC has put conservative Christian groups, immigration-reform groups, parental rights groups, and other organizations that oppose its leftist agenda on the “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.

Last June, the SPLC added a new category to its map, “antigovernment extremist groups.” That new category includes groups in an “anti-student inclusion movement”; namely, parental rights groups including Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education, Courage is a Habit, and others.

Biden’s White House notoriously helped craft the National School Boards Association’s letter comparing concerned parents with domestic terrorists back in October 2021. That letter, later retracted, led to an FBI memo, also later retracted.

SPLC leaders and staff met with White House officials at least 11 times since January 2021, when Biden took office, and Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a federal appeals court. The SPLC’s ties with the Biden administration raise troubling questions about whether the administration plans to target concerned parents again, and these new documents suggest the Department of Education considers the SPLC a credible partner.

Nina Patel, then a senior policy counsel at the SPLC, reached out to Trent on May 10, 2022. “The SPLC has tracked extremist groups for over 50 years and has offered institutions and government officials practical, evidence-based recommendations and resources to understand and deal with these types of threats,” Patel wrote. “If we can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out.”

She introduced Trent to her colleagues, LaShawn Warren, chief policy officer, and Michael Lieberman, senior policy counsel for hate and extremism. She said Lieberman “led the effort to enact federal hate crime legislation and continues to work on combatting radicalization upstream through education and prevention.” She also mentioned SPLC President Margaret Huang‘s testimony to a House committee “about the threats targeting HBCUs and discussed the need to ensure that students have digital literacy skills, taught in an inclusive educational environment, along with other recommendations.”

“I would be interested in learning more about the digital literacy skills you referenced below,” Trent responded. She said the Department of Education is “working with federal partners to host a series of campus emergency prevention, recovery and response trainings on several HBCU campuses.”

After scheduling back and forth, Patel ultimately organized a meeting between Warren, Lieberman, and Emerson, the confidential assistant to Education Secretary Cardona. The meeting took place on July 5, and that morning, Patel asked Emerson to include Kevin Myles, the deputy director of programs and strategy at the SPLC’s education arm, Learning for Justice.

A later follow-up email showed that Myles, the Learning for Justice staffer, was able to join the call on July 5.

Neither the Department of Justice nor the SPLC responded to a request for comment on the call as of press time.

‘Our Opposition’

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project also turned up a document from the left-leaning group Equality Federation, which appears to be an employee training document.

The document, titled “The Legal Assault on Trans Youth & How to Fight Back,” describes conservative organizations as “our opposition.” The federation highlights Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization SPLC has branded an “anti-LGBTQ hate group”; Moms for Liberty; The Heritage Foundation; and the American Principles Project.

The slide deck lists the "Christian Right" as opposition, along with @ADF, and @Heritage and @Moms4Liberty pic.twitter.com/MApkrPldeE

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) January 29, 2024

The Department of Education did not respond to a request to clarify the circumstances surrounding the slides in question. The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment about whether the SPLC worked with the Equality Federation to develop the “opposition” list.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

“We’re proud of the willingness of both Liberty Counsel and Todd McMurtry of agreeing to represent us in defense of our good name and reputation from the ridiculous charges of the hatemongering Southern Poverty Law Center,” King, an anti-illegal immigration activist whose organization the SPLC branded an “anti-immigrant hate group,” told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Monday. “We’re also proud of Mr. McMurtry’s experience and success in defamation law.”

“I hope we are successful in court and that no violent, hate-filled supporter of the SPLC finds us first,” the plaintiff added. King was referring to a 2012 incident in which a now-convicted terrorist targeted the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting, relying on the SPLC’s inclusion of the group on its “hate map” of organizations the left-wing SPLC considers bigoted or hateful in some way.

I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, the SPLC fired its cofounder and a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

McMurtry and the Christian law firm Liberty Counsel joined with King’s current lawyer, James McKoon, on Monday. McKoon, of the McKoon and Gamble law firm in Phenix City, Alabama, initially filed the lawsuit.

Legacy media outlets attacked Sandmann in 2019 when a video of him near the Lincoln Memorial while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat after the annual March for Life went viral. McMurtry represented Sandmann in multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against legacy media outlets, securing undisclosed settlements from CNN, NBC Universal, and The Washington Post. A federal judge dismissed Sandmann’s other defamation lawsuits in July 2022.

King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process earlier this year. Other conservative groups have sued the SPLC for defamation, but King’s succeeded because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported.

The lawsuit cites an SPLC definition for “anti-immigrant hate group” that dates back to 2020, which no longer appears on the SPLC website—although the center appears not to have adopted a new definition:

Anti-immigrant hate groups are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist groups that have proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigration xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Most white hate groups are also anti-immigrant, but anti-immigrant hate groups single out that population with dehumanizing and demeaning rhetoric. Although many groups legitimately criticize American immigration policies, anti-immigrant hate groups go much further by pushing racist propaganda and ideas about non-white immigrants.

While the SPLC brands the society an “anti-immigrant hate group,” it does not point to any specific evidence that King or the society “maligned an entire class of people” or fit the definition cited above. “Further, a cursory review of [Plaintiff] DIS’s [Dustin Inman Society’s] website would have revealed that the Board of Advisors of [Plaintiff] DIS is a diverse group of Americans with a variety of racial and immigrant backgrounds,” the lawsuit alleges.

Inger Eberhart, a member of the society’s board and its director of communications, is a black woman; Everett Robinson and Catherine Davis are also black; Mary Grabar is a legal immigrant from Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia); Maria Litland is a legal immigrant who appears on the Austrian Society of America website; and Sabine Durden-Coulter immigrated legally from Germany. Durden-Coulter lost her son in a 2012 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant (with no connection to the crash that killed Dustin Inman).

King’s organization is raising money for its legal defense on GoFundMe and the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo. While the SPLC has an endowment with more than $730 million, King had to mortgage his home to keep his organization afloat.

Immigration enforcement activist D.A. King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process while so many other lawsuits have failed precisely because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. This smear inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, but when conservatives sue to defend their good names in court, they repeatedly fail, in part because they do not allege that the SPLC itself doubted the “hate group” smear.

King can claim that, and newly revealed evidence bolsters his claim even further.

According to an article King unearthed on the SPLC website, not only did the SPLC state publicly that his group was not a “hate group” before it reversed course, but an SPLC whistleblower who went on to describe the SPLC’s “hate” accusations as a “highly profitable scam” had himself been involved in the SPLC’s monitoring of King’s organization. He even quoted a source who stated that an early version of King’s organization was not a “traditional ‘hate’ group.”

In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that barely made a blip in the legacy media. At the time, a former SPLC employee by the name of Robert Moser published an article, “The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center” in The New Yorker.

Moser wrote about the guilt he “couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.” He wrote that SPLC staffers would chat “about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups.”

“‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say,” he wrote. “It was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”

Moser’s revealing article has become even more important since he published it in 2019. Moser himself wrote for the Intelligence Project, the SPLC division that produces the “hate group” list. In fact, he also wrote an article about King back in 2005, in which one of Moser’s sources said the first version of King’s organization—known as American Resistance—was not a hate group.

The SPLC has since removed that article from its website at some point between 2007 and 2016, according to the internet archive, but users preserved the article through screenshots. King tipped off The Daily Signal to the article’s existence.

Moser’s article used King’s favorite term for his home state—”Georgiafornia”—in the headline, but didn’t introduce the immigration activist until page 3. Instead, his article focused on a 54-year-old legal immigrant from Guatemala who reportedly suffered a violent attack at the hands of high school boys who pretended to offer him an hourly job. The article then turned to a Ku Klux Klan rally against Hispanic immigration in 1998, and neo-Nazi rallies in 2001 and 2002.

After this set-up, Moser finally brought up King, whom he introduced as “an ex-Marine from Marietta, a white-flight suburb just outside of Atlanta.” He noted that King organized counter-protests combatting left-wing groups, and claimed King’s activism featured a “white-victimhood theme.” He also wrote about King’s decision in 2003 to report illegal immigrants to what was then the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now known as ICE.

Perhaps most notably, Moser quoted Democratic state Sen. Sam Zamarripa, who sponsored a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. King opposed the bill and publicly criticized the senator, who claims he received threats as a result.

“I think these people are operating just barely north of vigilante,” Zamarripa said. “They might not be traditional ‘hate’ groups, like the Klan, but that’s part of the appeal. They provide a safe, so-called respectable haven for hatred and bigotry.”

While Moser wrote that King worked with the Georgia Coalition for Immigration Reduction in the 1990s, King told The Daily Signal that he “was nearly unconscious politically in the 1990s and only heard about the very loosely organized Georgia Coalition for Immigration Reduction in 2003 after I had my first ever [letter to the editor] published in [the Atlanta Journal-Constitution].”

When King struggled to grow the American Resistance, he started The Dustin Inman Society instead, naming the group after a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed by an illegal immigrant in a car crash in 2001.

King’s initial lawsuit did not mention the article, and its later inclusion may strengthen his case even further.

Moser did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request to comment on whether he considered the “hate group” attack on King’s organization part of the SPLC’s “scam.” The SPLC also did not respond to a request for comment.

King’s organization is raising money for its legal defense on GoFundMe and the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo. While the SPLC has an endowment with more than $730 million, King had to mortgage his home to keep his organization afloat.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

Michael J. Matt, editor of The Remnant newspaper and producer of Remnant TV in Forest Lake, Minnesota, said he was surprised to see his organization on a leaked FBI memo in February, alongside other groups he described as “defunct.”

The memo demonstrated the “FBI phoning it in,” he told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. He said the list of “radical-traditional Catholic hate groups” in the FBI memo reminded him of the SPLC’s list tracing back to 2007, when Heidi Beirich, then head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and Rhonda Brownstein, then an SPLC lawyer, discovered his newspaper.

“They took Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein’s word for it, from 2007?!” he asked, incredulous.

“There has been an explosion of traditional Catholic groups since Pope Benedict XVI brought back the Latin Mass. None of the new groups who are in positions of real influence are targeted in the memo,” Matt explained.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has branded mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Former employees have condemned the “hate” labeling as a “highly profitable scam” tracing back to the co-founder’s talents as a fundraiser. In 2019, the SPLC fired that co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, the full truth of which has yet to be revealed.

The FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, office cited the SPLC in a January memo, which the national FBI office publicly rescinded in February. That memo listed nine organizations, most of which the SPLC first added to the list of “hate groups” in 2007. The SPLC suggested that those organizations espouse and support antisemitism, and it has kept most of them on the list and the “hate map” for nearly two decades.

Matt went through the list and told The Daily Signal that many of the organizations are defunct. He said the SPLC attacked the groups in the memo due to their founders, most of whom are now deceased.

Robert Sungenis, founder of Catholic Apologetics International, told Matt that “the organization is done now.”

“Christ or Chaos, I think, is completely defunct,” Matt added, noting that it only ever amounted to two people. E. Michael Jones, who runs Culture Wars, “is not a Latin Mass Catholic at all and regularly attacks The Remnant.”

As for Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Town of Richmond, New Hampshire, it is a convent full of nuns.

“They just sat up there and said their prayers,” Matt told The Daily Signal. The SPLC targeted them because they followed the now deceased Father Leonard Feeney, who “was very serious about the doctrine that outside the church there is no salvation. They were serious about converting Jews.”

The only traditional Catholic groups on the list that remain “fairly active” are Tradition in Action, Catholic Family News, and The Remnant, he said.

Much of the attack comes down to a mistaken view of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Matt argued. “The SPLC are huge defenders of the Second Vatican Council, saying the Catholic Church was antisemitic, full of hate,” he said. “So, anybody who likes the old Latin Mass, that’s just code for hate, especially antisemitism. That’s the broad brush that they paint traditional Catholics with.”

Matt said the SPLC brands Catholics “extremists” if they “still accept traditional church teaching on faith and morals,” describing Vatican II as an “updating of the church’s moral teachings, even though the teachings of the church haven’t actually changed at all. If you look at a Catholic catechism now, it’s as opposed to gay marriage as it ever was. But they’re trying to say there’s this huge awakening or coming of age in the church, and traditionalists are dangerous because they still accept the pre-Vatican II teachings.” (The SPLC brands many conservative organizations “anti-LGBT hate groups,” due in part to their stances on traditional marriage.)

The SPLC has repeatedly attacked the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditional international priestly society that comprises almost 700 priests and supports the Latin Mass, accusing it of supporting antisemitism.

“The SSPX has priests from many races and ethnicities among their ranks, and welcomes anyone of any race or ethnicity to the treasures of the Catholic Church maintained in their chapels,” James Vogel, the SSPX director of communications, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “Any claims of the SSPX espousing racial or ethnic hatred, by any group, are so clearly refuted by this reality that any further commentary seems absurd.”

“The SSPX also continues to reject antisemitism as anti-Catholic, as we say in no unclear terms,” Vogel added, citing the society’s statement on antisemitism.

“The Catholic Church teaches its members to pray that the Jewish people will recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah and convert to the Catholic faith for their salvation,” the statement reads. “This perennial teaching of the church is motivated by supernatural charity, not hatred. The Catholic Church desires the happiness of all people, both in this life and the next.”

The Society of St. Pius X had a notable break with the Vatican in 1988, when its leader, Archbishop Marchel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without the approval of Pope John Paul II. Lefebvre was subsequently excommunicated, although the excommunication was later reversed. The SSPX remains unreconciled to the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Raymond Burke, archbishop emeritus of St. Louis. told podcast host Matt Fradd that “at the present moment they [Society of St. Pius X] are not part of the one Roman Catholic Church throughout the world.”

Similarly, Matt noted that it would be spiritually destructive for him to espouse hate.

“To hate anyone or to encourage anyone to hate would be a mortal sin. It damns your soul,” he said. He fondly recalled sitting down for an interview with a journalist at the Minneapolis newspaper City Pages back in 2015. He said the journalist, who was in a same-sex marriage, enjoyed his company and later called him up to talk about religion. The May 2015 article notes that of the eight “hate groups” the SPLC found in Minnesota, most appear defunct.

“The SPLC never cleans up,” Matt said.

Despite the many hits to its credibility, the SPLC still carries a great deal of weight. Many prominent Democrats cited the SPLC’s 50th anniversary in 2021, and President Joe Biden has nominated an SPLC attorney to a federal judgeship. Amazon used the SPLC “hate map” to screen applicants for its charity donation platform for years, and Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to the SPLC in 2017. The center has an endowment of more than $700 million and offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.

In 2012, a gunman used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., planning to shoot everyone in the building. He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Matt recalled getting “spooked” when the SPLC first put him on the “hate map.”

“Our deal is the Latin Mass, and all of a sudden, we’re accused of hate and violence,” he said. “My wife was freaking out. We put security systems in our house. It is serious what they do to people.”

He described the FBI’s short-lived decision to cite the SPLC as foreboding.

“I have this suspicion that the SPLC was just laying the groundwork so that when the government gets far enough to the Left, they can start using these resources like the hate map to silence people,” he said.

At least one state government has done something similar. In 2019, Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel announced a “hate crimes unit,” referencing the SPLC’s “hate group” accusation. The Judeo-Christian law firm American Freedom Law Center responded with a lawsuit, which has been in limbo for years.

Neither the SPLC nor the FBI responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment by publication.

Article cross-posted from The Daily Signal.

The SPLC fully supports both lawyers: Thomas Webb Jurgens, a suspected Antifa terrorist arrested and charged for his involvement in a violent riot against the police in Atlanta, Ga., and Nancy Abudu, the SPLC’s director for strategic litigation, whose job involves overseeing all of the SPLC’s legal work – including its special litigation related to “hate groups.” Abudu is currently a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit awaiting a confirmation vote by the U.S. Senate.

Most organizations would, at a minimum, suspend an employee engaged in potentially criminal behavior, as Jurgens was during the violent attack in Atlanta in early March. But not only has the SPLC allowed him to retain his position, it has failed to condemn the horrific violence.

Within hours of Jurgens’ arrest, the SPLC released a joint statement with another radical group, the National Lawyers Guild. Instead of condemning the violence against police officers that took place, the SPLC denounced Jurgens’ arrest as “part of ongoing state repression and violence” and urged the “de-escalation of violence … against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.” The statement is ironic, given that Jurgens was engaged in terroristic and violent behavior toward those who risk their lives daily for public safety, including those from black, brown, and indigenous communities.

Unfortunately, such egregious and violence-inducing actions are par for the course when it comes to the SPLC, which has a long track record of smearing its political opponents and putting them in harm’s way. In 2012, a gunman entered the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council looking to kill as many FRC employees as possible, and shot a security guard. The gunman later told the FBI that he had targeted the Family Research Council because the SPLC had labeled it a “hate group.” Similarly, the gunman who opened fire on Republican lawmakers and nearly killed now-House Majority Leader Steve Scalise in 2017 also followed the SPLC’s work.

The SPLC has also taken aim at public figures. In a February 2019 article titled “Hate Goes to Washington,” the SPLC curated a list of Republican candidates who SPLC said held “open white supremacist, nativist, anti-LGBT or antigovernment” views. This list included myself, as well as my colleagues Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn.

It’s not just conservatives who have been on the receiving end of the SPLC’s hatred. In 2018, the SPLC paid a $3.375 million settlement to Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who has devoted his life to advocating for a nonviolent expression of the Islamic faith. The SPLC had included Mr. Nawaz – as well as human rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali – on its so-called “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” In the words of Mr. Nawaz, the SPLC “put a target on my head,” resulting in death threats. And just this week, a federal judge denied SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought against them by a coalition that works to secure our borders, which SPLC has labeled a “hate group,” meaning the case will go to trial.

That’s not all. The internal corruption – including racism, sexism, and sexual harassment – within the SPLC is rampant. In fact, right after Ms. Abudu joined the SPLC as a senior leader, the outfit’s co-founder Morris Dees and longtime president Richard Cohen were both ousted for what employees called “a systemic culture of racism and sexism within its workplace.” According to at least one former staffer who spoke out, the situation there is still every bit as toxic despite a damage control campaign led by political operative Tina Tchen, whose underhanded tactics include running cover for Andrew Cuomo, which has recently come to light.

The violence inspired by the SPLC, not to mention its internal corruption, should disqualify Abudu from a lifetime appointment to the federal bench, given her role as one of the organization’s top lawyers.

Shockingly, when questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee on which I serve, Abudu repeatedly refused to condemn the SPLC’s violence-inspiring rhetoric. Instead, she repeatedly said how proud she is to work for an organization that has been discredited by investigative journalists and commentators from across the political spectrum for years and what even progressives have dubbed “everything that’s wrong with liberalism.”

I ask my colleagues in the Senate to reflect on the message it would send to the people we represent should we confirm someone from such a corrupt organization to the federal bench.

At a time when it’s often difficult to find points of agreement, surely we can all agree that it’s time to cut ties with the SPLC, its entanglement with racism and sexual harassment, and its campaign of hate and domestic terrorism.

Following Sunday’s attack by Antifa domestic terrorists on an Atlanta-area police training facility, arrests are being made. Law enforcement is turning again to the Southern Poverty Law Center, but this time for a different reason. One of the Antifa members arrested is Tom Jurgens, a staff attorney for the SPLC.

You can’t make this up. According to Greg Price:

One of the Antifa members arrested on domestic terrorism charges in Atlanta last night is a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The FBI has historically used the SPLC as a source for who should be considered domestic terrorists. pic.twitter.com/y5isk5AHaq

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 6, 2023

According to CBS News:

Authorities charged 23 people with domestic terrorism in connection with the protest, according to the Atlanta Police Department. The protesters facing charges, whose names and photographs were published by law enforcement online, are from various states across the U.S. as well as Canada and France, according to police. Their ages range from 18 years old to nearly 50. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation filed all charges.

In a statement, police called the incident “a coordinated attack” on equipment and officers by individuals who they allege “used the cover of a peaceful protest” to access the premises before changing “into black clothing and entering the construction area.”

Elon Musk even chimed in with a simple exclamation point in response to Price’s Tweet.

It’s important to know who the enemies of the people really are. It isn’t the cops. That’s not to say every cop is perfect, but the vast majority are attempting to protect and serve and they’re being hampered by domestic terrorist front group Antifa. One would think the radical leftists would want better training for cops, but stopping crime has never been their goal.

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