“This is not 1960 anymore. It’s 2026.”
Rep. Wesley Hunt delivered that blunt message during a fiery hearing Wednesday as Republicans unloaded on Democrats and the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center over years of “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric surrounding voter ID laws and election integrity measures.
And Hunt was clearly done being polite about it.
The Texas Republican tore into Democrats for repeatedly comparing modern voting laws to segregation-era America, arguing that today’s political rhetoric has completely lost touch with what actual Jim Crow looked like.
Sitting beside giant side-by-side images showing segregation-era scenes next to modern Americans simply showing ID at voting booths, Hunt described what actual racial discrimination looked like in America.
“Jim Crow was a time when black Americans could not sit in classrooms with white Americans,” Hunt said. “It was colored-only water fountains. It was beatings in the streets. It was lynchings.”
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Wesley Hunt levels Democrats with one brutal Jim Crow reminder" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ORPiJA15S2M?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Then the hearing got personal.
Hunt recalled how his own father had to enter restaurants through the back door in New Orleans just to buy a sandwich because black Americans were barred from using the front entrance.
“That is precisely why it is so offensive to compare that era of legalized discrimination and racial terror to showing a photo ID at the voting booth,” Hunt said.
The hearing itself centered around growing backlash involving the SPLC after outrage erupted over a recent Department of Justice indictment over accusations that donor funds were funneled toward organizations linked to racist or extremist activity.
Republicans argued the controversy raises serious questions about whether the SPLC has spent years profiting off fear and political division while presenting itself as an authority on extremism.
Hunt did not hold back.
“The Democrat Party survives on manufacturing grievance,” he said. “They want emotional manipulation. They want outrage. They want division.”
The congressman also pointed to something Democrats rarely know how to respond to: black Republicans consistently winning in majority-white districts.
Hunt noted that he, along with fellow Republican lawmakers Byron Donalds (R-FL), John James (R-MI), and Burgess Owens (R-UT), all represent overwhelmingly white constituencies.
“Nobody cares about what we look like,” Hunt said. “We are being judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.”
For conservatives frustrated by years of “Jim Crow 2.0” rhetoric surrounding voter ID laws, the hearing quickly became another reminder of how dramatically the conversation around race and voting has shifted since Democrats first sounded alarms over Georgia’s election law years ago.
Back then, critics predicted widespread voter suppression and comparisons to segregation-era America dominated headlines for months.
Instead, Georgia later posted record turnout numbers — including strong minority participation.
Now Republicans like Hunt are increasingly arguing that comparing modern voter ID laws to actual segregation is not just inaccurate, but deeply insulting to Americans who truly lived through Jim Crow.

House GOP Capitol Hill Club Jan 22

Wesley Hunt Levels Democrats With One Brutal Jim Crow Reminder

Democrats

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

Voter ID

Wesley Hunt

While it is an honor to testify before Congress, it can also be frustrating. <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/05/20/jasmine-crocketts-unhinged-tirade-against-me/">House members</a> will ask you yes-or-no questions, without allowing you to elaborate. They want to prove their own points, and sometimes they prevent you from making yours.
I testified before the House Judiciary Committee about <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/05/19/poverty-palace-how-is-splc-wealthier-than-ymca-planned-parenthood/">the Southern Poverty Law Center</a> (SPLC) on Wednesday, and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked me if I was familiar with the name Michael Donald.
I knew the exact point he was going to make — that when a Ku Klux Klan group horrifically lynched Michael Donald in 1981, the SPLC represented Donald’s bereaved mother, Beulah Mae, and sued that Klan group into bankruptcy.
It’s one of the SPLC’s favorite stories, and it is indeed noble — the first half, anyway.
But that’s not the whole story, and when I tried to tell the full story, Hank Johnson cut me off.
That’s his prerogative — he got five minutes to question me, and it is not my place as a witness to interrupt him.
The story matters because the SPLC built its massive fundraising engine off the clout it earned by rightly suing chapters of America’s most notorious hate group into bankruptcy. Today, the SPLC has weaponized its reputation. It publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters — a map the SPLC says reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”
This “hate map” kills two birds with one stone: it demonizes conservatives who oppose the SPLC’s agenda, and it also exaggerates the amount of hate in America, which helps the <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/04/26/splc-hate-inflation-strategy/">SPLC fundraise</a> off supposedly combating this “hate.”
A <a href="https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/o-neil-testimony_0.pdf">federal grand jury indicted the SPLC</a> on fraud charges based on the claim that the SPLC was actually propping up Klan groups by directing money to members. The SPLC did not deny the payments, but said it was paying “informants” to prevent violent threats before they happen. The indictment suggests, however, that these “informants” weren’t just tipping off the SPLC but acting on the SPLC’s direction in ways that strengthened the groups.
Hank Johnson wanted to bring up the Michael Donald case to highlight the SPLC’s noble history and to suggest the indictment puts the Trump administration on the side of “hate.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
THE REST OF THE STORY
I&#8217;m glad Hank Johnson brought up Michael Donald. A Klan group l*nched Donald in 1981, and the SPLC rightly represented his bereaved mother in court. But that&#8217;s not the whole story&#8230;
The story&#8217;s second half shows SPLC corruption.<a href="https://t.co/bpMUAIRrFi">https://t.co/bpMUAIRrFi</a> <a href="https://t.co/A3v8vl8nRD">pic.twitter.com/A3v8vl8nRD</a>
— Tyler O&#8217;Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) <a href="https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/2057464199828131887?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 21, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
As I wrote in my first book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Making-Hate-Pay-Corruption-Southern/dp/1642934399">Making Hate Pay</a>: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” (first published in 2020 and updated this month), the Michael Donald case highlights some of the very corruption that would ultimately lead the SPLC to become a far-left smear factory.
Contrary to popular belief, the SPLC wasn’t founded during the civil rights movement, but afterward. Also, contrary to popular belief, Morris Dees and Joseph Levin didn’t found the SPLC to go after the Klan or white supremacy — they founded it as a public-interest law firm to represent poor people in the South.
In fact, when Dees redirected the SPLC’s efforts to focus almost entirely on opposing the Klan, the legal team quit en masse in 1985. SPLC lawyers said suing the Klan into bankruptcy wasn’t the SPLC’s original mission, that it was too easy — they compared it to “shooting fish in a barrel” — and that Dees prioritized this because he focused on fundraising more than helping the less fortunate.
In 1987, a jury held the United Klans of America liable for Michael Donald’s death and ordered the group to pay $7 million in restitution to Beulah Mae Donald, in a clear victory for justice.
Yet this wasn’t the 1920s Klan or the 1950s Klan. By the 1980s, anti-black racism had significantly declined, and the United Klans of America had little in the way of assets. The group owned a building and sold it for a little over $50,000.
Beulah Mae Donald received that money, but what did she do with it? She gave $37,500 to the SPLC, which had given her a loan for her home. Meanwhile, the SPLC went to its donors and raked in millions.
Beulah Mae Donald tried to make a documentary about her story, but Morris Dees edged her out.
Don’t get me wrong: representing Beulah Mae Donald was one of the high-water marks of the SPLC’s storied career. But Dees’s focus on fundraising and his desire for the spotlight taints even this noblest of SPLC stories.
I tried to sum up this story in a few words while responding to the honorable representative from Georgia, but Hank Johnson cut me off.
The real truth about Beulah Mae Donald is just too inconvenient for his narrative — just like the full truth about the SPLC’s corrupt demonization of conservatives is inconvenient for <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/04/23/democrats-beclown-themselves-defending-splc-amid-kkk-funding-scandal/">Democrats beclowning themselves</a> by trying to defend it.
***
Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “<a href="https://amzn.to/3Kmvi0u">Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woketopus-Money-Manipulating-Federal-Government/dp/B0DFVK74TZ/">The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government</a>.”

SPLC hate map

The SPLC Is Absolutely Corrupt. The Democrat Response Is: Shut Up

DW Opinion

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has spent years being treated by mainstream media as the go-to expert on hate groups and extremism. Now it is facing an 11-count federal indictment for wire fraud, lying to a bank, and money laundering.
As Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto recently put it, the SPLC does not act like a neutral watchdog. It behaves more like a competitor to real journalism, with every incentive to hype threats because “hate pays.”
The real test is whether the institutions that have propped it up will finally take these charges seriously. So far, the response has been disappointing. The indictment claims the SPLC secretly funneled millions of dollars to leaders of the very white-supremacist groups it claims to track, including more than $270,000 to an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. That rally gained instant notoriety, and it became prime fodder for left-leaning media that endlessly replayed former President Joe Biden’s misleading claim about Trump saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Three of the Big Four news apps — Google, Yahoo, and MSN — completely ignored the April 21 indictment. Apple News featured just two stories on the scandal, both from left-leaning outlets. As for the other three apps, the story did not crack their top 20 headlines in the days after it broke. Wikipedia went even further than ignoring it. Editors buried the indictment deep in the SPLC’s page, 65 paragraphs down under a mild “criticism” heading. Efforts to move it higher, including into the lead section, were quickly shot down. One editor said it had “no place so far up.” Key details, like the payments to the Unite the Right organizer, were stripped out as “UNDUE.”
They also removed references to the indictment from the Unite the Right rally page itself, despite the obvious connection, and blocked it from the list of groups the SPLC labels as hate groups. This protective editing stands in sharp contrast to how quickly Wikipedia highlights indictments against Republicans and conservatives.
It is not just dishonest coverage. Wikipedia still treats the SPLC as a “generally reliable” source, letting editors cite it over 7,000 times. Meanwhile, right-leaning outlets like Breitbart, Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire are heavily restricted or blacklisted. After the indictment, editors shut down debates about the SPLC’s special status and even topic-banned a dissenting editor.
The bias runs deep. The SPLC’s “extremist” files and hate lists still get prominent placement on pages about conservatives like Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, Jack Posobiec, Moms for Liberty, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. At the same time, the SPLC is accused of quietly paying an Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America and a leader of the National Socialist Party of America while publicly condemning them.
Wikipedia matters because it dominates Google search results and AI summaries. Google has given millions to the Wikimedia Foundation, and tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft partner with it. When these platforms downplay damaging news about a favored group while keeping its power to label enemies intact, tens of millions of people get a distorted picture every day.
This fits a broader pattern tracked by the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America project. Our monitoring of the Big Four news apps shows consistent favoritism toward liberal sources. Paired with Wikipedia’s practices, it shows how big tech amplifies left-leaning gatekeepers and sidelines stories that do not fit the narrative. In short, major news aggregators and Wikipedia have buried the SPLC indictment. They have protected one of the Left’s most powerful smear machines from real accountability while it keeps attacking conservatives online.
When the information gatekeepers suppress a major federal corruption case against an organization that shapes so much of our public debate, they erode trust across the board. Millions of Americans end up seeing a cleaned-up version of reality that serves the SPLC’s defenders, not the truth.
***
David Bozell is president of the Media Research Center.

Wikipedia

How The SPLC Gets Big Time Protection From Big Tech — And Why It Matters

Big Tech

Media Bias

The third <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew7wez72vxo">assassination attempt</a> on the president’s life, this time by left-wing extremist Cole Allen, has once again exposed the blind spot among academics and journalists when it comes to left-wing violence.
I’ve experienced this in academia. When Portuguese professor Pedro Zuquete was trying to publish his <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-30897-0">Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism</a>, to which I am a contributor, he repeatedly hit brick walls. One reviewer for a publisher grudgingly admitted that the volume filled a gap and that there were no handbooks on left-wing extremism in existence, but focused mainly on ideology: “Chapter 15 … equates BLM and Antifa as a ‘destructive’ force of extremism, but shows no indication that a balanced investigation of the context and causes of these movements will be provided.”
Needless to say, there is no such equivocation or calls for “context” and understanding when it comes to interrogating right-wing extremism. Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/fighting-the-last-war-9781978792296/">convincingly argue </a>that a moral panic around fascism has been consistently manufactured since 1945 by Western intellectuals. Lazy and nebulous definitions of terms such as “fascism,” “racism,” and “far-right” go unchallenged by their peers, reinforcing a continuous “fascist scare.”
While a staple of left-wing discourse is that words lead to violence – think ‘hate speech’ or <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17539153.2024.2305742#abstract">‘stochastic terrorism’</a> — and that this justifies censorship and cancel culture, such reasoning falls away when it comes to expressing hatred toward conservatives. In fact, left-wing assassins like Luigi Mangione, or those who condone political violence such as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/opinion/shoplifting-political-protest-microlooting-whole-foods.html">Hasan Piker</a>, are viewed by many progressive elites as chic radicals.
The media practices a blatant double standard in its treatment of Left and Right violence, exhibiting the classic features of what psychologist Keith Stanovich terms <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/The-Bias-That-Divides-UsThe-Science-and-Politics">myside bias</a>. The pattern has accelerated in the past decade. For instance, a big data <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/4/167">study </a>of content from major American and British newspapers by David Rozado and me revealed that superlative adjectives like “extreme,” “far,” and “radical” were used far more often to describe the Right than the Left, with this lopsided rhetoric taking off in the mid-2010s.
Mainstream institutions and outlets continue to have a log in their eye when it comes to leftist extremism. After the latest attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, the Economist ran a <a href="https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/1967966886320050373">story</a> arguing that most political violence comes from the political right. Batya Ungar-Sargon <a href="https://www.batya-us.com/p/debunking-the-data-that-claims-to">tore</a> the analysis apart, showing that the source material used by the Economist comes from progressive organizations whose coding decisions memory-hole leftist violence while manufacturing right-wing incidents. This cooks the results to serve up the right conclusion. For instance, the source data failed to record two previous assassination attempts on Trump or the murder of Charlie Kirk. It omitted the dozens killed and over $2 billion in property damage due to George Floyd rioting, but somehow saw fit to record 10 drug-related crimes committed by the Aryan Nations. Pro-Palestinian violence is not coded as leftist but as ethnonationalist.
Hating conservatives does not appear to fall under the definition of “hate” recorded by self-styled “anti-hate” expert groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) or their fellow-travelers in Britain (Hope Not Hate) and Canada (Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN). These well-funded activist groups have repeatedly laundered partisan radicalism as dispassionate analysis.
The SPLC, currently <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and">under investigation</a> by the Department of Justice, was successfully <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maajid-nawaz-v-splc/562646/">sued </a>for $3.4 million by British Muslim writer Maajid Nawaz, whom the SPLC smeared as an “anti-Muslim extremist.” The SPLC learned nothing, continuing to routinely label mainstream conservatives like Chris Rufo, Dinesh D’Souza, or the late David Horowitz as extremists. This is a stock-in-trade of these organizations. In Britain, Hope Not Hate <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/05/nick-lowles-hope-not-hate-apologise-tweet-acid-attack/">claimed </a>that a Muslim woman was the victim of a far-right “acid attack” during the 2024 Southport riots, with over 100,000 retweets, which it was later forced to retract. In the febrile atmosphere of the riots, this could have stoked Muslim attacks against whites. In Canada, CAHN, which regularly smears conservatives, <a href="https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jonathan-kay-if-there-really-are-300-neo-nazi-groups-in-canada-why-cant-anyone-name-them">failed to name</a> the 300 phantom far-right “hate groups” they claimed existed in Canada. Meanwhile, the organization has been <a href="https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jon-kays-legal-victory-exposes-canadian-anti-hate-networks-anti-conservative-agenda">exposed </a>as having Antifa ties.
These organizations ignore anti-conservative leftist extremism while stretching the definition of “hate” to include mainstream conservatives. Yet due to progressive bias and elite credulity, they can hide behind the “expert” label and are regularly cited as a credible source by journalists, courts, and governments.
Despite this, there is growing evidence that the left is becoming more violent. YouGov <a href="https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll">found </a>that 25% of “very liberal” Americans say violence can be justified to achieve political goals compared to 3% of “very conservative” Americans. After the first Trump assassination attempt, I <a href="https://manhattan.institute/article/third-of-democrats-wish-donald-trump-had-been-killed">discovered </a>using a <a href="https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/List_Experiments">list experiment</a> survey that one-in-three Democrats wished he had been killed. Young leftists are especially prone to such thinking. Increasingly, young educated progressives do not believe that <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00031224211041094">morality is absolute</a>, but rather relative. They are <a href="https://noahcarl.medium.com/who-doesnt-want-to-hear-the-other-side-s-view-9a7cdf3ad702">much more likely </a>to cut ties to friends and family who do not share their political views. In a recent survey, <a href="https://research.skeptic.com/violence-is-often-necessary-to-create-social-change-agreement-by-generation-and-political-orientation/#:~:text=Follow%2520us:-,%25E2%2580%259CViolence%2520is%2520often%2520necessary%2520to%2520create%2520social%2520change.%25E2%2580%259D%2520%255B,the%2520use%2520of%2520political%2520violence.">nearly half</a> of Gen-Z liberals agreed with the statement, “Violence is often necessary to create political change.”
While men and gun owners are more likely to be violent and on the Right, this is counterbalanced by the fact that leftist young men support political violence at greater rates than conservative young men. The <a href="https://rankings.fire.org/">Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)&#8217;s </a>massive annual college student surveys show that ‘very liberal’ and ‘democratic socialist’ male students are significantly more likely to agree that violence is an acceptable form of protest than conservative or moderate male students. Minority and LGBT students are also significantly more likely to endorse political violence.
Though our institutions are blind to it, a new intolerant strain of the Left is on the rise, and with it support for vandalism, looting, and violent groups like <a href="https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/andy-ngo/unmasked/9781546059585/">Antifa </a>or Black Lives Matter.
***
Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham.

Web Summit Qatar 2026 – Day Three

The Left Is Swimming In Radical Chic Violence, Blind To Their Extremism

Academia

Hate-Group

Radical Left

The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Moms For Liberty a hate group just days before its national conference, causing protests to descend on the event and inundate attendees with threats of violence.
Over 600 parents, conservative leaders, and five presidential candidates — including Donald Trump — gathered for four days at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott Hotel for the <a href="https://portal.momsforliberty.org/summit23/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Moms for Liberty</a> National Summit 2023. Just three weeks before, the SPLC added the grassroots parents&#8217; group to its list of extremist groups. Tina Descovich, co-founder and CEO of Moms For Liberty, told The Daily Wire that the pushback was almost immediate — and frightening.
“Their label sent thousands of protesters to our event, protestors smashed in windows of the venue the night before, and spray-painted over historical displays,&#8221; Descovich said. &#8220;They surrounded the venue for days. Philly PD had to call in the riot force and extra equipment. The following months and weeks were filled with continued threats and harassment.&#8221;
“Adding us right before our 2023 National Summit, where we hosted five presidential candidates, was not an accident; it was calculated and coordinated,” Descovich added.
The SPLC has come under renewed scrutiny after the Justice Department last week released a sweeping indictment of the controversial leftist group. The SPLC is alleged to have funneled millions to hate groups like the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-hints-at-major-2020-move-if-splc-found-guilty-of-fraud?row=0&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;rowType=Web+Search+Overlay" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ku Klux Klan</a> from 2014 to 2023. The group claims it was paying informants, but critics say the SPLC was simply propping up its own targets — most notoriously by allegedly helping fund the infamous 2017 &#8220;Unite The Right&#8221; rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
&#8220;Once the SPLC labeled us, it gave people in my community and even extended family justification for really vile behavior towards me. I tried to protect my kids from the hate I received, but it wasn’t long before even they knew I was a target for people’s hate,&#8221; Kit Hart, Moms For Liberty membership engagement coordinator, told The Daily Wire. &#8220;It’s something no innocent mom should be subjected to.&#8221;
&#8220;A group of us had dinner reservations offsite and the moment we exited the building, we were berated and screamed at,&#8221; Hart recalls. &#8220;The protestors had been waiting all day for members of our organization to leave the doors of the hotel to shove signs in our faces, curse at us and show every sign of aggression you can think of. As we were walking to our Uber, we needed to be escorted by security.&#8221;
An LGBTQ+ group called The Agenda PAC obtained the hotel room numbers of Moms For Liberty members, and while they slept, left door hangers on their hotel rooms that said &#8220;Please Disturb: Fascism In Progress. Did you know a designated hate group is staying at this hotel?&#8221;
Pennsylvania State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, who is currently a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/new-political-group-forms-campaign-anti-lgbtq-candidates-rcna45710" target="_blank" rel="noopener">chaired</a> The Agenda PAC.
A heavy police presence was stationed outside the hotel for the duration of the conference to keep attendees safe. Protesters, carrying pride flags and signs with hateful messages such as &#8220;Ban The Fascists,&#8221; &#8220;F*ck Nazi&#8217;s,&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-moms-for-liberty-summit-protest-photos/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Klanned Kookie Karens</a>,&#8221; camped outside the hotel for the duration of the conference and harassed women as they entered or exited. One group of moms was <a href="https://x.com/scarlett4kids/status/2048178067299017024?s=46&amp;t=ZAoIkqhiKpZyQayFV_2XbQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">swarmed</a> by a group of protesters when they tried to leave the hotel in an Uber. Several protesters were <a href="https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-moms-for-liberty-summit-people-arrested-during-protests/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">arrested.</a>
Despite the tensions and security concerns, the planned programming was uninterrupted, and President Trump commented on the SPLC label during his speech.
&#8220;The radical Left is even slandering Moms for Liberty as a so-called hate group,&#8221; President Trump stated during<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_D7iYcQACU" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> his speech</a>. &#8220;Can you imagine Moms for Liberty, a hate group? I&#8217;m telling you, these people are sick.&#8221;
The conference gained attention from national media outlets, which<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/moms-for-liberty-republicans.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> consistently</a> associated Moms For Liberty with the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/30/moms-for-liberty-convention-philadelphia-protests/70363926007/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SPLC</a> hate group label. A group of Democratic Pennsylvania state senators used the SPLC label to fuel their <a href="https://epgn.com/2023/05/11/philadelphia-marriott-facing-criticism-for-hosting-right-wing-summit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ongoing campaign</a> to get the 2023 summit canceled. The politicians sent a <a href="https://x.com/SenatorSaval/status/1672011058834206721/photo/1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letter</a> to the Museum of the American Revolution, where a welcome event for the summit was held, asking that it cut ties with Moms For Liberty.
“Moms for Liberty, put plainly, is a hate group. This is not hyperbole — on June 6, 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated Moms for Liberty a hate group, and specifically, as an ‘anti-government extremist group,'&#8221; the letter reads. “The Museum’s leadership has demonstrated a lack of judgment in agreeing to host a hate group. Fortunately, the mistake can be fixed with a simple and elegant solution: cancel the Moms for Liberty event scheduled for June 29.”
This reporter was present at the June 2023 summit and can easily recall the throngs of protesters and increased security. To avoid harassment from the mob of protesters outside of the hotel, attendees exited the Marriott hotel from a discreet side entrance and were covertly bused to the museum, where we were greeted by a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XuDs2bbVJE" target="_blank" rel="noopener">raucous crowd</a> screaming from behind a metal barricade, &#8220;Get the f*ck out of here&#8221; and &#8220;Philly is a trans city.&#8221; Police officers acted as a human shield and formed a path that allowed us a safe entrance to the museum.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The door hangers on each hotel room door in Philadelphia tonight where the Moms for Liberty hate convention is taking place are incredible. <a href="https://t.co/KKREKXCLas">pic.twitter.com/KKREKXCLas</a>
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) <a href="https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1674642405985861633?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 30, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The impact of the SPLC’s extremist label extended far past the summer of 2023 and continues to weigh on parents today. The SPLC has an interactive &#8220;<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map/?hm_year=2024">hate map</a>,&#8221; and Moms for Liberty chapters make up the single <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/splcs-favorite-conservative-targets-get-the-last-laugh">largest</a> bloc of any organization on it, putting a target on the back of each local group.
“Every day since the SPLC added Moms for Liberty to its hate map, our organization has had a dangerous target on our back. Members have been doxed, cancelled, and threatened,” Descovich told The Daily Wire. &#8220;The fabricated lies told by the SPLC have caused extensive harm to our organization and our members.&#8221;
For the past three years, Moms For Liberty Wisconsin leader Scarlett Johnson has also been harassed, defamed, and feared for her own safety after being labeled a far-right extremist by the SPLC.
“I lived this. I was harassed, doxxed, and even sued. And almost every article, every interview, every news segment about me included the same line — that I’m part of Moms for Liberty, a group the SPLC labeled as extremist,” Johnson told The Daily Wire. “That label followed me everywhere. It changed how people looked at me, spoke to me, and treated me.&#8221;
&#8220;It was the slow, grinding loss of normalcy that no one ever gives back,&#8221; she added.
Johnson said the SPLC label didn’t just draw the ire of leftists, but made some local Republicans hesitant to be affiliated with her and the group. Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director for research, reporting, and analysis at the SPLC, admitted that was the group&#8217;s goal in a June 2023 interview with <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/07/1180486760/splc-moms-for-liberty-extremist-group" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NPR</a>.
“Carroll Rivas said she hopes that adding Moms for Liberty and similar groups to its extremist list will help inform communities, reporters and politicians who are just learning about them,&#8221; NPR reported. &#8220;And, perhaps, that it might tarnish association with those organizations.&#8221;
Johnson told The Daily Wire she is thankful SPLC is being investigated, but the reputational damage they’ve caused can&#8217;t be undone.
“Not everyone understands what the SPLC is or how those labels get used — but politicians and media repeated it without question,” Johnson told The Daily Wire. “And when you repeat something like that over and over, it doesn’t just shape a narrative. It hardens into something people act on.”
The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Wire&#8217;s request for comment.

Republican Presidential Candidates Speak At The Moms For Liberty Summit

The SPLC Burn Book That Damaged The Lives Of Everyday Parents

Parental Rights in Education

Philadelphia

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
As we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, it seems our nation is falling apart. Assassinations have claimed the lives of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/unthinkable-charlie-kirk-31-assassinated">Charlie Kirk</a>, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/lawmakers-spouses-gunned-down-in-targeted-shootings">Melissa and Mark Hortman</a>, and UnitedHealthcare CEO <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-murder-of-brian-thompson-how-individual-acts-of-evil-get-justified">Brian Thompson</a>. President Donald Trump has now survived three assassination attempts in the past two years, including the incident at the White House Correspondents&#8217; Dinner this past weekend. While political violence has long been part of our country’s history, this recent wave reflects a deeper deterioration of America’s core values. But the origins of this cultural and spiritual rot are not a mystery.
Since the early 2010s, America’s polarization has been furthered by individuals and interest groups profiting from emotional outrage. Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently exposed for fraudulently siphoning money to the white supremacists it was publicly fighting, have engaged in malicious smear campaigns designed to make us suspicious of one another. This political stratification, deepened by online echo chambers, has spawned a new generation of violent radicals.
One of these radicals, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, checked into the Washington Hilton Hotel on Friday with the alleged intention of carrying out a mass assassination at the White House Correspondents&#8217; Dinner the next day. The event has been held for over 100 years to celebrate America’s press freedom.
The sound of shots fired outside the banquet hall brought the celebration to an abrupt end. Journalists and attendees hid below tables as administration officials were quickly swept away. Erika Kirk, widow of the late Charlie Kirk, was seen leaving in tears. The shooter was quickly subdued by security officials and taken into custody.
As news broke, Americans around the country were likely struck with deja vu. This shooter is one among many who have attempted to silence political opponents with bullets in the past few years.
Cole Tomas Allen does not fit the American imagination of a mass shooter. He was not a bullied, anti-social teen or a crazed maniac, as far as we know. He blended into society as a well-educated teacher and video game developer who participated in No Kings protests and donated to Kamala Harris. His manifesto offered more insight into his motivations for carrying out the attack. 
“I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure,” he <a href="https://katu.com/news/local/read-the-full-manifesto-by-shooter-at-white-house-correspondence-dinner">wrote</a> to family members. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Allen evidently feared being morally complicit in Donald Trump’s presidency and viewed everyone in attendance at the dinner as fair targets for being in his proximity.
The grandiose sense of self and catastrophic views expressed in his manifesto are eerily similar to the rhetoric repeated daily across social media platforms and news stations. For years, Americans across the political spectrum have been spoon-fed paranoid and hyperbolic narratives about their political opponents. On the Left, this was particularly aided by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC gained prominence in the 2010s for its <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/">&#8220;Extremist Files,&#8221;</a> which frequently equated conservative groups such as PragerU and figures such as Daily Wire host Matt Walsh with neo-Nazi and far-right organizations. Soon its practice of labeling moderate political and religious opinions as hateful, racist, and bigoted trickled into the language of mainstream media, college classrooms, and our homes. This language is often used to justify violence against conservatives.
According to the federal <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.almd.90265/gov.uscourts.almd.90265.1.0.pdf">indictment</a> released last week, the SPLC took things further than mischaracterizations. The group paid $3 million to leaders and organizers in the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and others between the years 2014 and 2023 without the consent of donors. The group now faces 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
When the Southern Poverty Law Center was unmasked last week as the Scooby-Doo villain hiding under the KKK hood, it called into question how much of our political reality has been falsely constructed or magnified for financial gain. The SPLC <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/us/southern-poverty-law-center-doj.html">claimed</a> the money was used to save lives through information gathering and infiltration, but Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and">said</a>, “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
As political rhetoric and violence continue to heat up, we must ask ourselves: Where does this end?
If we continue to fan the flames of political hysteria, America will not see another 250 years. This great experiment in peaceful democracy and diversity of thought could disappear because we’ve lost the understanding that our civic responsibilities secure our rights. When shots ring out, people harden their hearts as if they are at war. Journalists and politicians will likely continue to turn up the heat, but we must do something different. We must extend an olive branch of understanding to one another and love our neighbors. If we don’t, we risk losing it all.
***
Maggie Anders is a video journalist and commentator at Young Voices. Her work explores international political movements, history, pop culture, economics, the cost-of-living crisis, and Gen Z social issues.

GettyImages-1304923265

The Moment That Shattered The Night Started Long Before The First Shot

Political Violence

Upstream

White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Conservatives have long been ahead of the curve on corporate-culture agendas. Conservative investors were <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-year-the-dei-tide-turned?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=15&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=The+Year+The+DEI+Tide+Turned">raising skepticism</a> about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives years before executive orders signaled the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/americas-defense-sector-is-ditching-dei-at-the-best-possible-moment?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=America%25E2%2580%2599s+Defense+Sector+Is+Ditching+DEI+At+The+Best+Possible+Moment">end</a> of the post-George Floyd racialism push. At Bowyer Research, we’ve been <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/corporations-that-pushed-gender-ideology-owe-america-an-explanation?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=10&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Corporations+That+Pushed+Gender+Ideology+Owe+America+An+Explanation">engaging</a> with companies about the increasingly real risk surrounding gender-affirming care for years — it’s only been recently that the culture at large has seemed to be <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/corporate-america-quietly-backs-away-from-gender-ideology-for-children?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Corporate+America+Quietly+Backs+Away+From+Gender+Ideology+For+Children">catching on</a>. But sometimes, the events of the real world are so monumental that there’s very little delay between investor scrutiny and brand movement. Case in point: the very rapid fall of the Southern Poverty Law Center as a guide in corporate America.
For those who have not been paying attention, the Department of Justice recently <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and">indicted</a> the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) over allegations of “wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.” If true, it’s a massive scandal for a group that has fundraised for decades by framing its mission as fighting white supremacy. But the indictment, and the allegations associated with it, are just the latest in the group’s social downfall. The outcome of that indictment will not determine the future of the SPLC in corporate America. That part is already in motion.
Formed in 1971 as a legal organization aimed at combating Jim Crow, the SPLC has gone from a leading opponent of racism to one of the most disingenuous, misleading, and blatantly politicized organizations in America. Its “hate map” <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map/">claims</a> to “track hate and anti-government groups” across the nation (interesting phrasing, given that the SPLC also<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/resources/guides/trump-cabinet/"> asserts</a> that the Trump administration “uses its power to roll back civil rights [and] deepen racial injustice.” In reality, it lists mainstream conservative and religious groups like the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA as on par with genuine hate groups.
There are many issues with this blatantly political smear job, but perhaps the most disturbing is the way that those mainstream groups became the target of violence after being placed on the list. Family Research Council? Victim of a 2012 shooting by a gunman who<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/christian-nonprofit-family-research-council-remains-splcs-hate-map-10-years-terrorist-attack"> told investigators</a> the SPLC’s resources<a href="http://www.apple.com"> informed</a> his targeting. Turning Point USA, specifically Charlie Kirk? Shot in the neck in front of his wife and kids, with the shooter<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tyler-robinson-text-messages-roommate-charlie-kirk-shooting-suspect-rcna231732"> explaining</a> his rationale as “some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Against that backdrop — politicization and an eyebrow-raising correlation with violence — it’s not a surprise that corporate America is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-the-southern-poverty-law-center-poisoned-corporate-america?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=3&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=How+The+Southern+Poverty+Law+Center+Poisoned+Corporate+America">moving away</a> from the SPLC. After engagement from conservative investors, including David Bahnsen and The Heritage Foundation, results are coming in. Brands as big as <a href="https://www.heritage.org/press/salesforce-ends-reliance-splc-after-heritage-shareholder-proposal">Salesforce</a> and <a href="https://x.com/1792Exchange/status/2047307820136104309">Texas Instruments</a> have moved away from using the SPLC’s metrics to guide charitable policies. Platforms like Meta have <a href="https://bowyerresearch.substack.com/p/meta-hits-the-unlike-button-on-political">clarified</a> that they do not rely on SPLC to determine objectionable content. To be clear, not every brand has done so. Companies like Starbucks, Disney, PayPal, and Amazon are still dodging investor scrutiny on their use of politicized “hate group” measures. Chances are, however, that the DOJ’s indictment may spur more movement from corporate America.
There’s more movement to be had. 1792 Exchange has <a href="https://1792exchange.com/press-releases/1792-exchange-corporate-america-must-fully-disassociate-from-disgraced-indicted-southern-poverty-law-center/">identified</a> over 200 major companies that likely use the SPLC’s “hate list” to vet charitable recipients. Charitable providers like Benevity, which process billions in employee donations annually, use SPLC data to screen nonprofit recipients. As more and more companies back away from the SPLC, now is the moment for providers like Benevity to demonstrate leadership in forwarding the goal of political neutrality for its corporate clients. Using a “hate map” that treats TPUSA and the Klan as morally equivalent doesn’t do that.
This is an argument that companies are coming around to. Many didn’t realize the extent of the SPLC’s bias until investor <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-pro-sanity-coalition-is-winning-again-in-corporate-america?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=4&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Why+The+Pro-Sanity+Coalition+Is+Winning+Again+In+Corporate+America">coalitions</a> urging political neutrality appeared. I recently told one company, “This probably isn’t a perspective you hear from activists. It’s a conversation that should have happened years ago. But we’re here now. So let’s have the conversation.”
The reality, apparent to entities across the political landscape, is that the Southern Poverty Law Center is the reputational risk gift that keeps giving gifts no one wants. The scope of this issue is unbelievably broad. The SPLC doesn’t just owe a general sense of accountability to the public. However, weaponizing the legitimate human desire to fight hate to serve political ends would be damaging enough. It doesn’t even end with a debt of accountability to the many mainstream, non-hateful groups, such as ADF, TPUSA, American Family Association, and Moms For Liberty, whom they’ve smeared as somehow equivalent to racial supremacists and violent extremists. They owe a debt of accountability to every company that’s used their list to guide charitable policies. The SPLC’s “hate list” wasn’t merely the anti-hate mechanism it was billed as. It was a Trojan Horse that helped inject politics into corporate America. It helped perpetuate the lie that faith and right-of-center politics are tantamount to genuine hatred. This lie not only damages America’s social fabric but also creates genuine danger for real people.
Undoing that damage takes work, conservatives who can handle the details, and corporate courage to choose neutrality over activism. But that’s how we turn outrage into cultural change. That is the fundamental task of this moment. You cannot destroy hate with more hate. It takes the kind of love that pushes for meaningful change.
***
Isaac Willour is the director of corporate engagement at Bowyer Research, America&#8217;s leading pro-fiduciary proxy consulting &amp; corporate engagement firm. A graduate of Grove City College, Isaac is an award-winning journalist, Young Voices contributor, and frequent commentator on ESG, DEI, &amp; the culture war. He can be found on X <a href="https://x.com/IsaacWillour">@IsaacWillour</a>.

Wall Street Sign

The SPLC Does Not Define Hate Groups — Corporate America Shouldn’t Act Like It Does

Corporate America

Many of you first became aware of me either through my coverage of the BLM/Antifa riots in 2020 or during the Biden-Harris border crisis, but it was far from my first time covering a chaotic event.
I had covered the protests at the Republican and Democratic conventions in 2016, but they were mainly filled with hippies who set up tents. Nothing crazy.
Then comes August 2017. A friend of mine at the time asked if I wanted to cover this rally Richard Spencer was hosting at a statue in Charlottesville. I had a car, and he did not. Since it was during the weekend, I said, “Sure, why not?”
Once we arrived, to say I was unprepared for the day ahead is an understatement. No helmet, no gas mask, no vest, and shorts instead of pants. Walking through the crowd of counter-protesters and Antifa, I was expecting to see a police line to separate the two sides to prevent fighting. Instead, I found myself in “no man’s land” between the groups. No police.
Because the park where the “Unite the Right” was being held had stairs, it created a minor buffer for people to come down, fight, and then fall back. Again and again, the two sides clashed. One man on the alt-right side picked up a metal newspaper stand and chucked it, hitting no one. Another was bleeding from the head after being pulled from the Antifa crowd. For my part, I was hit a few times by thrown sticks and paint bombs, along with pepper spray.
Upon entering the park, riot police, who had been on a nearby street, standing and watching the violence unfold, were pushing the rally goers out and into the street where counter-protesters were waiting. This led to more violence, unsurprisingly.
I was not present for the car ramming that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. What most people do not realize is that the crash happened much later, after the majority of the “Unite the Right” crowd had marched away. We thought the day was over and were eating lunch at a nearby restaurant when the news broke.
It was this event that started it all for me. Despite conventional wisdom, it was then, and there, I wanted to continue reporting on hectic protests and riots. Not just for the adrenaline rush, but because it was important to document as much as possible since Charlottesville turned into a major story afterward.
This is why the recent news that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) allegedly had at least one person on its payroll involved with the “Unite the Right” rally is interesting. SPLC defenders say the organization was simply paying informants, but the indictment says SPLC’s man on the inside was an organizer who helped with transportation for the event.
If that is indeed the case, it should be determined whether any of their funds were used or made it easier to make the rally happen.
At the end of the day, I don’t think it will matter if SPLC’s money was used for the rally, but I could be wrong. The Left’s reaction and weaponization of President Donald Trump’s “fine people on both sides” of the statue debate (not the riot) set the tone for the rest of his term. Heck, it is still used as an example by the Left against Trump nearly seven years later. Not to mention, I am sure people acted independently of the SPLC.
The fault for the violence mainly falls on state and local leaders who clearly did not prepare for the day. No roads were blocked off for the crowds, thus allowing a car to enter the march, and police stood by for a long time before doing anything. Much like the 2020 riots, a lot could have been prevented had the people in charge acted like they had a pair.
***
Julio Rosas is a field reporter at <a href="http://mostlypeaceful.media/">MostlyPeaceful.media</a> covering immigration, protests, and national flashpoints across the U.S. He writes at <a href="https://www.mostlypeaceful.media/">Mostlypeaceful.media</a> from where this essay is adapted with the author’s permission.

Organizers Of Saturday’s Alt Right Rally In Charlottesville, Virginia Hold News Conference

Charlottesville: My First Riot

Charlottesville

Riots

President Donald Trump commented on the federal charges facing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) early Friday morning, arguing that the leftist group&#8217;s potential fraud &#8220;is another Democrat Hoax&#8221; that places the 2020 election results into doubt.
Trump made the comment in a <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116457972455781406">post</a> on Truth Social, marking the first time he has publicly addressed the allegations against the SPLC, which was charged earlier this week with multiple counts of wire fraud over its scheme to pay the leaders of multiple white supremacist groups in exchange for information.
&#8220;The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others,&#8221; Trump wrote. &#8220;If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter.&#8221;
The SPLC, which started in the 1970s as an organization to push back against racism and segregation in the South, has been paying leaders of extremist groups for decades, according to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department on Tuesday. The indictment states that the SPLC secretly used donor cash to pay so-called informants affiliated with racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, over $3 million between 2014 and 2023.
The SPLC is closely aligned with Democratic Party goals and talking points and has a political action fund that almost exclusively <a href="https://www.splcactionfund.org/endorsements/">endorses</a> Democrats in state and local elections in the South.
Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/lefty-anti-hate-group-paid-white-supremacist-to-plan-infamous-charlottesville-rally-indictment">paid</a> a member of a white supremacist group that planned the &#8220;Unite the Right&#8221; rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, according to the indictment. The rally, which turned deadly when a man drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters, became the main reason behind former President Joe Biden&#8217;s 2020 election campaign. Biden pointed to the rally in his campaign announcement video, pinning blame on Trump and saying, “In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
The SPLC has also engaged in a campaign to label mainstream conservatives as &#8220;extremists&#8221; and has used its influence to pressure social media companies and the federal government to censor conservative voices. The SPLC was used as a resource by the FBI to identify extremists before FBI Director Kash Patel cut the bureau’s ties with the leftist organization last year.
In his post on Friday morning, Trump also called out Democratic Party fundraising platform ActBlue, which is under scrutiny over accusations that it allowed foreign contributions in American elections. Trump maintains that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, which Biden won by over 70 electoral votes amid major controversy over mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting methods.

Donald Trump

Trump Hints At Major 2020 Move If SPLC Found Guilty Of Fraud

2020 Election

Democratic Party

Executive

Politics

Famed writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was infamously targeted with murderous threats from Islamic terrorists, <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-splc-targeted">welcomed</a> the federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), arguing it validates long-standing criticisms of the organization’s practices and influence.
Earlier this week, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, charged the SPLC with multiple counts, including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023, the group diverted more than $3 million in donor funds to individuals linked to extremist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, while publicly condemning those same organizations. The SPLC has denied wrongdoing and says it will contest the charges.
In an opinion piece titled, &#8220;The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come,&#8221; Hirsi Ali wrote that the indictment did not surprise her, but rather raised questions about why it took so long. She pointed to her own experience with the SPLC, which in 2016 included her in a publication labeling certain figures as “anti-Muslim extremists.” Hirsi Ali said the SPLC’s 2016 blacklist was especially dangerous because it came at a time when Islamist violence was already killing writers, cartoonists, and dissidents across Europe.
She noted she had spent more than two decades under armed protection after extremist threats against her intensified following the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose killer left a note naming her as the next target. That history, she argued, made the SPLC’s decision to classify her as an “anti-Muslim extremist” not just defamatory, but potentially dangerous.
Hirsi Ali argued that the list unfairly grouped together critics of Islamist ideology and exposed them to potential danger at a time of heightened terrorist threats in Europe and elsewhere. She also referenced a 2018 lawsuit by Maajid Nawaz, another figure named in the report, which resulted in a multimillion-dollar settlement and a public apology from the SPLC. Hirsi Ali noted she did not receive a similar apology.
She wrote:
<blockquote>The list handed journalists a ready-made roster of 15 people whose views were to be seen as toxic. But to call it a mere reference guide is to understate what it was. It was published at the peak of a jihadist campaign of terror against the West. The ISIS caliphate still held territory across Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was issuing hit lists of writers and cartoonists in its English-language magazine. In January 2015, two of AQAP’s followers walked into the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-charlie-hebdo-attack-and-the-war-within-global-jihad/" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_2o_" data-state="closed">murdered 12 people, some of them cartoonists whose offense was drawing. Ten months later, a coordinated ISIS cell <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H73ChavVXZo" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_2q_" data-state="closed">killed 130 at Paris’s Bataclan theater and the cafés around it. Terror attacks <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/remembering-brussels-terror-attacks-10-years-later-2026-03-20_en" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_2s_" data-state="closed">in Brussels, <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63954860" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_2u_" data-state="closed">Nice, <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://www.dw.com/en/5-years-later-germany-remembers-victims-of-berlin-christmas-market-terror-attack/a-60148540" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_30_" data-state="closed">Berlin, and <span class="underline hover:opacity-70 cursor-pointer" tabindex="0" title="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40012738" role="button" aria-haspopup="dialog" aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="radix-_r_32_" data-state="closed">Manchester soon followed. This was the climate in which the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of “anti-Muslim extremism.” The list endangered everyone it named. &#8230;
I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy; for writing about Islamist-driven antisemitism and the subversive actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the West; for drawing attention to practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation; for arguing that Muslim women deserve the same protections under the law as other women. &#8230; an organization founded to combat bigotry chose to place me on a list together with others whose lives were already under threat from the same movements, just for having the audacity to combat Islamist bigotry.</blockquote>
Hirsi Ali highlighted broader concerns about the organization’s finances and fundraising. She cited past reporting and watchdog criticism alleging that the SPLC accumulated large reserves, including funds held offshore, while continuing aggressive fundraising campaigns. According to her account, major spikes in donations followed high-profile events such as the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s death.
Hirsi Ali further questioned the integrity of the SPLC’s widely cited “Hate Map,” arguing it expanded over time to include mainstream conservative and religious groups. She referenced a 2012 shooting at the Family Research Council, where the attacker reportedly used the SPLC’s map to identify the target, as an example of potential real-world consequences.
In interpreting the current allegations, Hirsi Ali framed the SPLC’s trajectory as part of a broader pattern in which institutions drift from their original missions. She argued the group evolved from a civil rights organization focused on combating violent white supremacist groups into one that targets ideological opponents while maintaining its public authority.
The indictment also includes claims about an SPLC informant allegedly involved in organizing the 2017 Charlottesville rally while being paid by the organization, an allegation Hirsi Ali said underscores the seriousness of the case if proven. SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair has called the charges politically motivated and said the organization will defend itself in court. 
Hirsi Ali acknowledged that an indictment is not a conviction, but argued the case represents a significant moment of accountability. She concluded that donors, journalists, and the public should apply greater scrutiny to influential advocacy organizations, especially those that position themselves as arbiters of extremism and hate.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Book Presentation On Reforming Islam

‘Its Reckoning Has Come’: Famed Writer Targeted By SPLC Strikes Back

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Crime

Islamic terrorists

U.S.

For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has had an outsized influence on American government and society, much of it malignant, but that may be coming to an end. Federal prosecutors have announced that a grand jury has indicted the SPLC for financial offenses related to its alleged funding of supposed infiltrators in various white-supremacist groups and events, most notably the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” riotous demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. The government claims the SPLC took money from donors who wanted to counter organized extremism and then funneled it into support for leaders of extremist groups.
Legally, it’s a bold claim, and courts will have to decide whether the allegations constitute federal crimes. But politically, the government has a powerful claim. As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
The charitable group was founded in 1971. By the end of its second decade, its lawsuits assaulting Ku Klux Klan groups had <a href="https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/southern-poverty-law-center-splc/">successfully bankrupted</a> that ugly movement. Its original mission accomplished, the SPLC didn’t declare victory and shut down. Instead, it became a fundraising factory that enriched its coffers by tarring mainstream conservative and religious groups by unfair association with extremists, lumping together neo-Nazi cadres with respectable conservative groups like the Family Research Council.
Compared to other nonprofits, SPLC is lavishly funded. In 2023, the group reported almost $170 million in total revenue — more than the revenues of the Special Olympics, the United Service Organizations (USO), and the National Park Foundation. SPLC’s vast wealth totals roughly <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/630598743/202511199349300716/full">three-quarters of a billion dollars in assets</a>, tens of millions of which are held in offshore accounts, leading to jokes that its Alabama headquarters building is the “Poverty Palace” and that the group’s motto should be “The SPLC — making hate pay.”
Other than swelling the SPLC’s domestic and Caribbean bank balances, what did donors get for all this cash? The group’s institutional donor list — which contains such left-wing luminaries of Big Philanthropy as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (a conduit for Big Tech billionaire giving) — suggests the SPLC had strong ideological motives.
Before allegations that the SPLC was funding people at the top of radical white-supremacist groups, its most notorious product was its list of “hate groups.” In addition to counting what seemed like every racist knucklehead who could afford to register a URL as a “hate group,” it also tarred as hate groups such mainstream conservative organizations as the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, the education advocacy groups Moms for Liberty and Defending Education, and immigration-restriction groups like the Center for Immigration Studies. It also branded the conservative political group Turning Point USA an &#8220;anti-government extremist group&#8221; just months before its founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated, apparently by a young man who <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5506576-charlie-kirk-suspect-hatred-texts/">told</a> his roommate in a text, “I had enough of his hatred.”
Ominously, Kirk had warned that SPLC’s listing of his group could lead to violence, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2026/04/21/splc-under-criminal-doj-investigation/">recalling</a> that a shooter had attacked the Family Research Council after SPLC hate-listed it. That would-be mass-murdering extremist was stopped after shooting a security guard; he later <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/06/justice/dc-family-research-council-shooting">said</a> he chose his target based on the SPLC’s hate map and planned to also kill persons at three more conservative groups.
Thanks to ideologically sympathetic tech and major media companies, as well as law enforcement <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fbi-antisemitism-patel-comey-kirk-f997bd60b92a07023c00cfbf6c4ed7e6">authorities</a> like the FBI, the SPLC had its “designations” treated as if they were somehow official and neutral, rather than ideological weapons that often succeeded in <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/guidestar-drops-splcs-fake-hate-group-label/">harming targeted mainstream groups’</a> ability to raise money. In 2017, GuideStar, a widely used watchdog of charities, was persuaded not to apply SPLC “hate” labels to groups. By 2019, SPLC was <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/amalgamated-bank-part-3/">partnering</a> with the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation — a donor-advised fund provider closely tied to <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/amalgamated-bank-part-1/">the bank</a> that services the Democratic National Committee and is nearly majority-owned by affiliates of the Service Employees International Union — on a pressure campaign to ban contributions from donor-advised funds to so-called “hate groups.”
Still more scandals plagued SPLC, even as its wealth ballooned. Morris Dees, its founder and longtime litigation director, was <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/embarrassment-about-splc-should-be-shared-by-others-ii/">canned in 2019</a> amid widespread allegations of misconduct, including sexist and racist discrimination and sexual harassment. A former employee wrote a long, devastating tell-all in the New Yorker, confessing that folks on the left had known for decades that Dees was “a ‘super-salesman and master fundraiser’ who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”
It remains to be seen if the Justice Department’s indictment of the SPLC will prevail, but should the shameless operation finally meet its downfall, that downfall would be well deserved. At a minimum, the latest revelations should knock down any last support for the group’s claim to moral authority.
Scott Walter is president of the <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/">Capital Research Center</a>.

Acting AG Todd Blanche And FBI Director Kash Patel Hold Justice Department Press Conference

The Many Misdeeds Of The SPLC

When Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), came to speak at Claremont McKenna College in the 1990s, I was a student there. I don&#8217;t remember what he said, but I remember the gun sticking out of his sports coat. It was a .357, something Clint Eastwood would carry in Dirty Harry. We had heard that this was the man who had taken on the KKK in the heart of Alabama, and the gun made the legend real.
On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a sweeping federal indictment against the SPLC, accusing it of funding the very terror groups it claimed to be fighting.
A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. It was not the Department of Justice, not a political appointee, not a press conference, but a grand jury of American citizens that sat in judgment.
According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the United Klans of America, the Aryan-Nation-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and other white supremacist organizations. These are the very same groups the SPLC was raising hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy. The money was allegedly funneled through shell companies with names like &#8220;Fox Photography&#8221; and &#8220;Rare Books Warehouse,&#8221; and loaded onto prepaid cards to conceal its source from the financial institutions the organization used.
One recipient, identified in the indictment only as F-37, was a member of the online leadership group that organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. On August 12 of that year, a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Heather Heyer, 32 years old, was killed. Dozens more were injured. Fields is now serving life in prison. F-37 helped put that rally together. He made racist postings. He coordinated transportation for attendees. He did all of this, according to the indictment, at the direction of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And from 2015 to 2023, the SPLC paid him roughly $270,000, all while publicly condemning the very event he helped organize.
&#8220;The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,&#8221; Blanche said. &#8220;It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
FBI Director Kash Patel put it simply: &#8220;The money never lies, and they got caught.”
Nothing has been proven yet. The SPLC will have its day in court. Its interim CEO has called the charges false and politically motivated. The organization says the payments were part of a confidential informant program designed to gather intelligence on violent groups, and that the program&#8217;s secrecy was necessary to protect those informants. Those are defenses a jury will evaluate.
But what strikes me most about this indictment is not the fraud itself. It is the why behind it. Why would an organization founded to fight racism need to pump up racism? Why manufacture the very evil you claim to oppose?
The answer is white guilt. And to understand it, you have to understand what white guilt actually is.
White guilt is not a feeling. Most people treat it as one, rejecting it with some variation of “I never owned slaves.” Both responses describe an emotion. Both miss the mechanism entirely. You cannot feel actual guilt for sins you did not commit.
White guilt is instead the cultural and institutional atmosphere that Americans live inside, whether they feel it or not. It is the language permitted in public life and the language that ends careers. It is the criteria by which institutions measure their own virtue rather than their actual outcomes. It is the moral authority that determines whether you are on the “right side of history” or stand condemned as a racist.
My father, Shelby Steele, has spent 40 years on this question. To paraphrase him, white guilt, at its core, is the vacuum of moral authority that was created when America finally confessed to four centuries of racial evils in the 1960s. That confession ended legal discrimination. But it also left whites accused of racism, whether they had personally discriminated or simply lived in a nation that had. Even though many whites had bravely confronted these racial evils, including members of my own family, the end result was a collective loss of moral authority. They were stripped of their innocence, the very innocence that would become the most coveted thing in American institutional life to this day.
This was not innocence in the legal sense, but moral innocence, the status of being on the right side of the nation&#8217;s deepest wound. As my father wrote in his 1988 Harper&#8217;s essay, &#8220;I&#8217;m Black, You&#8217;re White, Who&#8217;s Innocent?&#8221; — &#8220;Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power. Now to be innocent, someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other&#8217;s backs.”
The driving force in American society became not true compassion for the oppressed, but the desperate need to prove that you are not the oppressor. Whoever can most credibly claim innocence of the nation’s racial sins, or claim to represent those who suffered, gains the moral authority that translates into institutional power, political influence, and cultural dominance. Innocence became the currency. The SPLC understood this better than almost anyone.
The SPLC did not begin as the institution now facing these charges. Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dees and Joe Levin, with civil rights legend Julian Bond as its first president, the SPLC took on genuine fights. Growing up, my parents told me stories over the dinner table about how the organization integrated state troopers, challenged unfair electoral districts, and sued the Klan after violent attacks. That early work, using the law to make the promises of equality real, especially in the heart of the Deep South, is why I was excited to meet Dees. It makes what followed all the more devastating.
Rather than meet the post-1960s reckoning through color-blind standards, genuine accountability, and the equal application of American principles, many whites chose the easier path: the performance of perpetual atonement. Instead of investing in the genuine development of black Americans, they became professional fighters against racism, the only remaining way to purchase the innocence that the vacuum of moral authority had taken from them.
From suing real Klan violence, the SPLC institutionalized white guilt. It built a vast donor base by mapping extremists and labeling an ever-growing list of dissenters as “hate” that must be fought. Conservatives like Charlie Kirk, who never committed violence, found themselves listed alongside actual white supremacists. Far from the days of fighting the Klan, the SPLC was now slaying windmills. The mission expanded not because the threat grew, but because the machine required an enemy. The emergency could not be allowed to end.
Perhaps we should have seen this corruption earlier in 2019 when Morris Dees himself was fired. The official reason was unspecified misconduct. Staff members sent letters to management describing &#8220;decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment&#8221; inside the organization, founded to fight those exact things. One letter was signed before Dees&#8217;s firing was announced; a second, sent after the firing, accused leadership of being &#8220;complicit in&#8221; decades of such misconduct and demanded an investigation into an alleged cover-up. An outside review was commissioned, but its conclusions were never made public.
The grift formula, once you see it, is simple. You inflate the threat, sound the alarm, position yourself as the brave slayer of hate, and collect hundreds of millions from donors desperate to feel they are on the right side of history. The donor gets innocence. The corporation gets its ESG credential. The foundation gets its social justice bona fides. And the SPLC gets paid.
Real black communities bear the cost of this bargain. Real black families in real cities, especially those in the underclass, live with the consequences of institutions more interested in the performance of anti-racism than in the far more difficult and unglamorous work of developing individuals into productive members of society. The SPLC raised hundreds of millions in the name of protecting the vulnerable. The real product here was donor innocence.
If these charges hold, this is not merely fraud. It is white guilt at its most predatory.
The vacuum of moral authority that the civil rights reckoning created was supposed to produce genuine accountability, genuine repair, genuine progress. Many Americans truly sought that. They were eventually outmaneuvered by those who saw white guilt not as a wound to be healed but as a resource to be mined. And if the grand jury&#8217;s indictment is proven true, that industry did not just fail to reduce racism. It paid racists to keep racism alive, because alive racism was worth more to the machine than a color-blind society could ever be.
But this false innocence is not a simple lie. A lie knows itself to be false. False innocence is a moral credential claimed without moral action. It is innocence purchased through performance rather than earned through character. It is the DEI certificate that substitutes for actually caring about black lives. The hate list that substitutes for actually reducing hate.
This false innocence is more than a personal corruption or failing. It has become the air that we breathe. The man who says he feels no white guilt may be telling the truth about his feelings. But ask him if he would say, openly and without hesitation, everything he actually believes about race in America. In certain rooms, in certain institutions, around certain people, he already knows the answer. The cost is real. He is living inside the world of white guilt, whether he feels it or not. The machine does not require his confession. It requires only his silence.
This is what makes false innocence genuinely evil in the precise sense. It has corrupted the conditions under which honest people can speak honestly. It has made false virtue more valuable than the actual remedies. It has turned moral authority into a commodity that the loudest performers collect and the most honest people forfeit. And when an organization like the SPLC allegedly takes that logic to its endpoint by manufacturing the very hatred it claims to fight, because hatred is the raw material the innocence machine runs on, you are looking at the very heart of the white guilt machine.
I still think about Morris Dees and his gun at Claremont McKenna. If the indictment&#8217;s allegations are proven, the gun was the whole point. The prop that made the performance credible. The danger that made the donors open their wallets. The legend that kept the white guilt machine running. The windmills had to keep turning. So someone had to be paid to tilt at them.
The SPLC&#8217;s story is not an outlier. It is white guilt in America, followed to its logical conclusion.
***
Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker. He writes at <a href="https://manofsteele.substack.com/">Man of Steele</a> on Substack.

US-POLITICS-RACISM-DEMONSTRATION

The SPLC Institutionalizes White Guilt By Manufacturing The Very Hatred It Claims To Fight

Racism

White Guilt

Menu