The Southern Poverty Law Center was deeply involved in setting federal policy during the Biden administration, as well as law enforcement and even school policies across the country, despite labeling mainstream right-of-center organizations as “hate groups,” experts told a House panel Tuesday.
The SPLC previously claimed it was not anti-Christian, citing how it did not label Focus on the Family on its “hate map.” However, earlier this year, the group did add Focus on the Family to the list—and removed the defense of being anti-Christian from the website, said Tyler O’Neil, senior editor of The Daily Signal and author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The hate map is intended to chill speech, O’Neil told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government on Tuesday.
“This contributes to the hostile climate in which conservatives keep their mouths shut in order to avoid being accused of racism, Islamophobia, or hate,” O’Neil said. “It is no accident that activists use this hate map to deplatform conservatives, or that activist groups have tried to pressure donor-advised funds to blacklist the SPLC’s targets.”
The subcommittee held a hearing investigating the SPLC’s coordination with the Biden administration, titled “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy.”
The SPLC has frequently labeled conservative groups as comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.
O’Neil noted the Biden White House hosted SPLC staff at least 18 times. During the Biden administration, the FBI cited the SPLC in its memo targeting “radical-traditional Catholics.”
He highlighted an SPLC staffer who advised the Justice Department on hate crimes and spoke at a symposium for prosecutors about the “anti-LGBTQ movement.” Further, Biden nominated SPLC attorney Nancy Abudu to a federal judgeship on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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During the hearing, Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., asked about why the SPLC hasn’t warned about Antifa, pro-Palestinian groups that targeted Jewish students at college campuses, or pro-abortion agitators that targeted pro-life centers.
O’Neil said it was an “absolute travesty” that conservative groups such as Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty were labeled as anti-government extremist groups, while the SPLC “did not put actual groups that are hurling Molotov cocktails at government buildings” on its list of threats.
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Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said no one from the SPLC has ever been convicted in a violent crime.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has been a vigilant voice in civil society, against radical white nationalist violence and extremism, neo-Nazism, and other forces across the political spectrum that spread organized hate,” Raskin said.
Members and witnesses noted that earlier this year, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to its hate map. In October, a gunman assassinated TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk in Utah. Kirk warned about the SPLC’s rhetoric, said Andrew Sypher, executive vice president of field operations for TPUSA.
“Charlie warned, just before his murder, that the SPLC’s hate map designation, equating campus kids who promote the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and pro-life, pro-family values with the KKK and neo-Nazis, would put Turning Point in the crosshairs. This proved prophetic,” Sypher said.
Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy, R-Texas, said the SPLC began as a legitimate civil rights organization, but “has reinvented itself as a political fundraising machine built on an ever-expanding ideologically defined hate mission.”
Roy noted the SPLC has more than $829 million in assets with an endowment of more than $738 million.
“Fear is profitable, and this organization built a financial model around it,” Roy said.
Toward the conclusion of the hearing, Roy asked if the SPLC rhetoric created an atmosphere that led to Kirk’s assassination. Sypher, of Turning Point USA, replied, “Most definitely.”
“I find it ironic that a civil rights organization is marginalizing the country,” Sypher said.
In 2012, an LGBTQ+ activist opened fire at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council after the gunman saw the conservative group on the SPLC’s “hate map.” The shooter was stopped and later convicted on terrorism charges.
“To the SPLC, the life-threatening gunshot suffered by our African American building manager, Leo Johnson, was a little more than collateral damage, acceptable if it intimidated Christians who uphold biblical teaching on marriage and human sexuality,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said of the shooting.
“Local law enforcement agencies circulate SPLC lists as though they were intelligence bulletins,” Perkins later followed. “Schools have incorporated SPLC’s material into curriculum presented to children as objective facts. Major corporations from online platforms to payment processors have used SPLC’s label to deny services, restrict donations, and cut off basic financial tools to Americans.
“Once a group is branded, the SPLC label functions like a digital scarlet letter deployed to restrict speech, marginalize, and financially ruin individuals in organizations.”
The SPLC did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this story on Tuesday. Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., complained the SPLC was not invited to the hearing to defend itself.
The Democrats’ witness was Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
“Civil rights organizations, Southern Poverty Law Center included, are part of the essential infrastructure of American civil society,” she said. “Civil rights organizations have historically helped communities in many ways, including documenting and combating discrimination.”