The SPLC Was Always Awful

Agrand jury returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, suggesting that the organization — which claims its mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and fight discrimination broadly — has secretly paid informants to participate in the groups it deemed “racist” or hateful, as well as organize activities under the guise of these groups, such as the “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. If the allegations are true, then it means that SPLC has been coordinating some of the very events it raises funds to fight against — and as anyone familiar with the organization knows, it then construes those demonstrations as representative of the entire right-wing coalition.

But here’s a challenge: Engage in a hypothetical and assume, purely for the sake of argument, that absolutely everything alleged in the indictment is completely false. Even if the SPLC neither committed financial crimes nor helped orchestrate bogus “hate” events to create bad optics for conservatives, the organization has long been deserving of ire. The SPLC is societal poison dedicated to disparaging any individual or group perceived as even mildly right-wing. Rather than bashing the SPLC because it allegedly misrepresented its organizational activities and use of funds, we should emphasize that the SPLC misrepresents everything all the time.

For those unfamiliar, the SPLC is well known for awarding the “hate” label to certain organizations or individuals. While these designations might seem negligible, they have facilitated actual hate: Floyd Lee Corkins II was motivated to attempt a mass shooting and “kill as many people as [he] could” at the Family Research Council’s headquarters, in part because he had identified the organization as anti-gay from the SPLC website.

One might have hoped such an awful incident would have prompted the SPLC to reconsider its “hate” labels, and that the mainstream media would refrain from referencing such designations carelessly. However, high-profile publications routinely cite the SPLC-issued “hate” badge as if it is some sort of assessment grounded in a rigorous methodology. An article will read as follows: “[Right-Wing Organization], which has been named a “hate group” by the SPLC, blah blah blah.” (See here for an example about the Family Research Council in the New York Times, which was published after the terrorist attack on the organization.)

But only a quick skim of the SPLC’s profiles exposes that the “hate” classification is often applied prejudicially and then hastily defended with examples that undermine the claim. For example, in its summary of the supposed “hate group” the Alliance Defending Freedom, the SPLC notes that a member of its legal counsel publicly declared the following: “Allowing males to compete in the female category isn’t fair and destroys girls’ athletic opportunities. Males will always have inherent physical advantages over comparably talented and trained girls—that’s the reason we have girls’ sports in the first place. And a male’s belief about his gender doesn’t eliminate those advantages.” Not only are these statements entirely reasonable and based on fact, they are perfectly respectful and wholly lacking animosity.

The SPLC promulgates falsehoods — or what progressives might call “misinformation” — not only when borderline defaming individuals and organizations, but in its attempts to refute the claims set forth by those people and groups. In one article, the SPLC insists that “sterilization" is merely “an alleged medical risk” (emphasis mine) of “gender-affirming health care for children,” which is based on “myths, pseudoscience, and flawed historical comparisons to eugenics.” The SPLC further asserts that children are not receiving procedures that would render them infertile, nor does hormonal therapy pose fertility risks. This is difficult to reconcile with the fact that a reality-television show revealed to the world that Jazz Jennings, a male, underwent (botched) surgeries to construct a pseudo-vagina before age 18. Then there’s all the scientific data and personal anecdotes about how hormonal therapy can lead to infertility. Even Planned Parenthood produced materials for students as young as middle-schoolers conceding that puberty-blocking drugs may have long-term fertility consequences, saying they “might change someone’s body permanently, like affecting whether they can get or cause a pregnancy when they are older.” In another post, the SPLC claims that “anti-transgender” and right-wing individuals rely on “junk science” and “disinformation” — ignoring piles of evidence to prove that the so-called studies in support of medicalized gender interventions are not only wrong, but entirely nonsense. (For more thorough descriptions of large-scale scientific reviews on “gender-affirming care,” see some of my reporting here and here and here.)

But in my view, the most frustrating aspect of the SPLC is its apparent inability to construct a reasonable argument and defend it. Consider some of the SPLC’s “Hatewatch” posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. An article titled “Attack on public education and free speech rights of educators after Kirk killing” states, “Key leaders [‘of the hard right’] blamed ‘left-wing extremism,’ railed against ‘radical left lunatics’ and suggested that universities had fostered a climate hostile to conservative thought.” Naturally, the SPLC neglects to explain how assassinating a right-wing commentator does not qualify as “left-wing extremism” committed by a “radical left lunatic.” (Nor does the SPLC attempt to suggest that academia does welcome right-wing perspectives.) Weirdly, the supposed extreme threat to free speech identified in the article is people saying mean things about leftist professors and suggesting some of them should be fired from their university positions in light of their statements about Kirk’s killing, whereas the obviously more dire threat to free expression on college campuses was the assassination of a man for his views.

In fact, the SPLC identifies Kirk himself and Turning Point USA as villains against free expression on campus, in part because the organization maintained a “Professor Watchlist,” a site currently under maintenance. But the “Professor Watchlist” was not too different from the database the SPLC itself has compiled of “hate” perpetrators: Both were designed to describe and summarize an individual’s general ideology, in part by citing public statements and previous controversies. But of course, the SPLC is terribly unfair when it presents the views defended by others. For instance, in one post, the SPLC criticizes “the myth of a ‘trans shooter’ phenomenon” and rejects how “right-wing influencers and news outlets” have attempted to associate Tyler Robinson with “transgender ideology.” Yet it is public information that Robinson had a trans-identifying lover, while Robinson’s mother told law enforcement that he was “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

Curiously, there isn’t a “Hatewatch” post dedicated to explaining how the assassination of Charlie Kirk itself was a hate incident. Then again, the SPLC has overlooked plenty of hate: It reported in 2016 that 40 percent of the more than 10,000 teachers who responded to its survey “have heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation,” but omitted the finding that about 20 percent of educators affirmatively answered that they “have heard derogatory language or slurs about white students.”

While I’m thrilled to see the SPLC incur such significant reputational damage in recent days, we should not suggest that it deserves bad press solely because of the information presented in the indictment. Whether or not the SPLC’s agents dubiously orchestrated “hate” demonstrations, the organization has a long track record of promoting hate. It erroneously brands organizations and individuals as malicious, it espouses blatantly false claims about them, and it consistently pushes ridiculous narratives that our untrustworthy legacy media then embrace and weaponize against conservatives broadly.