In the four-plus years since the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) ousted its co-founder Morris Dees in 2019, the organization has, if it were possible, further intensified its attacks on conservative, pro-family and/or Christian groups. It’s the same tactic the SPLC has used for decades and which has proven such a lucrative cash cow. At Dees’ departure, conservative political commentator and social media personality, Mike Cernovich, reportedly quipped: “Hate group founder has been fired by his hate group.”

These days, the SPLC appears to be flailing wildly at every pro-freedom, pro-parent group in the U.S., but it may have overplayed its hand with its recent attempt to destroy the successful national organization Moms for Liberty.

While as Cernovich indicated, many on the right consider the SPLC to be a “hate group” in and of itself, the organization pretends to be the arbiter of this designation. Its “hate map” is a longstanding feature, and the map includes most right-leaning and/or Christian groups of any size or influence.

Moms for Liberty is also included on the SPLC’s 2022 Hate and Extremism Report where it is described as “an extremist hate group,” and accused of being, among other things, “an anti-government organization.” The report claims the Moms advocate “for book bans in school libraries” and for using “their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.” Evidently, the more successful a parents’ rights group is in defending the rights of parents and protecting children, the more likely it is to be targeted by leftwing zealots such as those of the SPLC.

But perhaps most concerning is the fact that the federal government may be consorting with the SPLC to determine who and what constitutes “hate,” and then using its findings to target individuals and groups with which it disagrees. The Washington Examiner writes that, according to the Heritage Foundation, “SPLC officials have made 11 visits to the Biden White House and potentially coordinated with federal agencies to create what it calls an ‘unhinged mob harassment campaign’” against organizations like Moms for Liberty.

Heritage Foundation files suit

On September 29, the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet, The Daily Signal (dailysignal.com), reported that after repeated requests for records from various federal agencies under the “Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)” were ignored, the Foundation and its Oversight Project Director Mike Howell “sued the FBI, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education.”

The lawsuit is an attempt to obtain information pertinent to the federal government’s potential coordination with the SPLC to target conservative groups in general and the Moms for Liberty in particular. It specifically “seeks the disclosure of records held by the United States government concerning actions that each defendant has or is planning on taking following the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of Moms For Liberty as an anti-government extremist group.”

“We know that the radical Southern Poverty Law Center has targeted the patriots at Moms for Liberty ...,” Howell told The Daily Signal. “We also know the Biden Administration and their weaponized law enforcement agencies work closely with the [SPLC].”

Referring to the Biden Administration, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice rhetorically asked The Daily Signal: “Why would they not comply with public records requests? What do they have to hide? We look forward to the truth coming to light.”

As Justice noted: “Exercising our free speech rights to attend public school board meetings that decide how our public schools operate is not ‘extremism.’ It is American. We are very thankful The Heritage Foundation is standing with our moms and fighting to get the public information surrounding the Biden administration’s work with the SPLC.”

The Washington Examiner reports that “the SPLC’s extremist group tag has had real-world effects on Moms for Liberty.” For example, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin chapter organizers planned an event at the Italian Community Center before the first GOP presidential debate, “only for it to be cancelled after a reporter for the local Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contacted the center.” The opening sentence of the newspaper’s story about the cancellation reads, “Moms for Liberty, a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist antigovernment organization....”

Justice notes that the SPLC has “put a target on our backs.”

The real ‘extremists’

In 2020, The Federalist published an exposé on the SPLC, written by Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy. It described how the Alabama-based law firm, which was founded in 1971, did initially target “truly racist and hateful groups, most famously the United Klans of America, which the SPLC devastated in a successful lawsuit it launched in 1984.” But co-founder Morris Dees was an intrepid and skilled marketer, and he capitalized on this good work, turning it into “financial largesse.”

The Federalist found that “to keep the money flowing, the SPLC kept insisting hate groups and white supremacy were expanding,” which required an ever more generous definition of “hatred.” Shideler wrote:

• By the late 1980s, the SPLC’s trajectory was clear. It would continue to emphasize its fight with so-called “hate groups” while fundraising millions of dollars from northern white liberals anxious to lend their dollars to the ever-widening fight.

During the 1990s, pro-life, pro-family, and religious groups found themselves in the SPLC’s crosshairs. After 9/11, “national security organizations concerned with Islamic terrorism” were targeted. “For its efforts,” wrote Shideler, “the SPLC was richly rewarded, posting nearly half a billion dollars in assets, including more than $120 million in offshore accounts.”

In 2018, the SPLC finally got some comeuppance; it was forced to settle a lawsuit with liberal Muslim reformer “Maajidd Nawaz for more than $3 million.” Nawaz sued the SPLC for defamation after being included on its “Hate List.” At that time, more than 60 other organizations were reportedly considering lawsuits as well.

When Dees was forced out in 2019 at the age of 82, ironically for alleged racial discrimination and sexual harassment at the center’s Montgomery, Alabama headquarters, “his behavior, as well as the corrupt nature of the SPLC’s ever-expanding fundraising, was well known, particularly on the left — yet it was ignored.”

As Tyler O’Neil, a senior editor for PJ Media, states in his revealing and well-documented book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, many of the so-called “hate groups” that “aren’t just plain silly may never have existed at all,” as they were not able to be traced, even by law enforcement. But the SPLC raised funds to battle these fictional demons anyway.

In the words of an adherent

Not long after Dees’ dismissal, former SPLC writer Bob Moser penned a sort of tell-all article in The New Yorker. A believer in the SPLC’s social justice agenda, Moser described how he became disillusioned at what he discovered during his employment from 2001-2004.

Moser complained that “the Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics....” He described how he and some of his colleagues would “cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble [of the center’s Maya Lin—designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs] —’Until justice rolls down like waters’—and intone, in our deepest voices, ‘Until justice rolls down like dollars.’”

Other disparities further disturbed Moser. He wrote of the contradictions, which some might more aptly call hypocrisies, that became obvious in the operation to anyone willing to “peer behind the façade.” For example, Harper’s reporter Ken Silverstein revealed that the center “had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do.”

Moser also quoted who he called “the great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive,” who had “painted a damning portrait of Dees ... as a ‘super-salesman and master fundraiser’ who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. ‘We just run our business like a business,’ Dees reportedly told Egerton. ‘Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.’”

Allegations of longstanding racial and gender discrimination dogged the center in the wake of Dees’ ouster. Moser quoted Yale professor and longtime SPLC critic Stephen Bright as saying: “These chickens took a very long flight before they came home to roost.” But Bright may have spoken too soon. During the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the SPLC became awash in fresh donations from the likes of George and Amal Clooney’s foundation, from Apple, which added a donation button for the SPLC to its iTunes store,” from JP Morgan, and others. “The new money pushed the center’s endowment past $450 million,” Moser wrote, “more than the total assets of the ACLU ... But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money.”

In the several years since Moser’s article, the SPLC may be enjoying a different kind of prosperity with its apparent partnership with the Biden Administration to squash any opposition to their shared far-left agendas.

Pushing back

But while the SPLC has many unsuspecting Americans in its camp, not everyone is fooled. Veteran television journalist and pundit, John Stossel, described the SPLC on Rumble.com, as “a left-wing, money grabbing slander machine” that has tarnished the reputations of 1,225 groups it characterizes as “hate groups.” Stossel said: “What many don’t know is that the center smears good people,” citing as an example the Family Research Council (FRC), for crimes such as daring to assert the truth that marriage is between a man and a woman, which has been known and accepted for 5,000 years.

“When they don’t agree with you politically, they are going to list you as a hater,” FRC’s General Jerry Boykin told Stossel. “Of course we don’t hate gay people.” But as Stossel pointed out, “once you become a ‘hate group,’ you’re a target.” The direct result of SPLC’s labeling of the FRC was an attack by a gunman at the organization’s Washington, DC office during which a security guard was shot in the arm. The assailant was subdued and taken into custody, but later admitted he was there “to shoot as many people as he could because the FRC is ‘a hate group.’” (Years later, the FRC remains on the center’s hate map.)

Another SPLC target is the Ruth Institute, an organization that believes a mother and a father are best equipped for raising children. Its president, Jennifer Morse, says her group does not hate anyone but that in general, “children are best served by a married mother and father.” Stossel reported that for taking this common-sense stand, the Ruth Institute was placed on the SPLC’s hate map, and its bank “cut them off.” The bank accused the group of promoting hate, violence, and harassment, and therefore “we’re not doing business with you.”

Stossel said the SPLC “smears people to raise more money.” They now label people “who simply oppose sexually explicit content in schools as anti-government extremists.” He pointed out that while groups like “Moms for Liberty and Moms for America are on the hate map, Antifa, the hate group that beats up people on the right, is not.”

Conservative political analyst, writer, commentator, and owner of GOPUSA.com, Bobby Eberle, also discussed the SPLC’s attack on Moms for Liberty on his streaming Rumble show. “The last thing any Marxist wants is for parents to be involved in the education process,” Eberle said, “because over the last few decades, our children’s education has become completely transformed. Math, science, reading, and other core subjects are no longer the end game, but merely window dressing for the real education, which is to produce a generation of activists bent on destroying the status quo and implementing a Marxist state.”

Eberle observed that the biggest problem with the SPLC’s hate map designations is that mainstream media outlets reference “this fringe left-wing group as if it’s credible. That’s why when people look at this list of hate groups and see Moms for Liberty, they wonder what’s going on. The real hate group is the SPLC because advancing the leftist agenda of conflict, division, and hate is all it cares about.”

In October 2021, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland made news with his infamous memo accusing parents of “harassment, intimidation,” and “threats of violence” for speaking out at school board meetings. (See Education Reporter, October 2021.) Parents pushed back, charging that the federal government was trying to silence them, and the Justice Department ultimately retracted the letter. Now, in 2023, we have the Biden Administration partnering with the leftwing private-sector SPLC in trying to silence parents more covertly — by vilifying them in the public square with the bogus “hate group” label, courtesy of the SPLC.

The Heritage Foundation is trying to ensure that this scheme does not succeed. As The Daily Signal states: “The Freedom of Information Act requests from Heritage’s Oversight Project seek to uncover whether the Biden administration has revived its attack on concerned parents in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Many parents are counting on the Project’s success.

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