After SPLC Quietly Admits Subjectivity, Corporate Media Amplify Baseless Smears Against Parents
The Southern Poverty Law Center continued its smear campaign against conservative groups this week when it named 12 parents’ rights organizations, including the incredibly effective Moms For Liberty, as “anti-government extremist groups” in its 2022 “hate and extremism” report.
Over the last two years, the Biden administration, with the help of the National School Boards Association, used manufactured reasoning to target concerned parents as potential “terrorists.” For his participation in the intimidation campaign, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was hauled in front of Congress where he not only denied that the Department of Justice was weaponized against Americans for political reasons but also indicated he would keep targeting parents.
The SPLC continued the Biden regime’s mission by sullying the dozen grassroots groups as “reactionary anti-student inclusion” organizations that promote “anti-LGBTQ, racist and nationalist themes.”
“Groups like Moms for Liberty are a new battlefront vs inclusivity in schools, but are rooted in age-old white supremacy,” SPLC’s Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke tweeted on Tuesday.
“Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school – parents or government employees? We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that,” Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich told Fox News after the report’s release.
Outrage about the SPLC’s latest designation was not limited to the afflicted parent groups.
“I’ve long argued that the SPLC should lose its tax exempt status,” Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted on Tuesday after the report surfaced. “Engaging in systematic defamation is not a tax-exempt purpose.”
In 2019, the Arkansas Republican penned a letter to then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig urging him to investigate the SPLC for abusing its nonprofit status to “regularly engage[] in defamation of its political opponents.” Cotton additionally noted that the SPLC “operates as a tax-sheltered slush fund to enrich its leadership.”
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and J.D. Vance, similarly, warned that the SPLC is a “hateful, bigoted, and despicable organization” whose “pronouncements must be met with scorn.”
Meanwhile, the report received nothing but praise from corporate media outlets like MSNBC which reiterated the SPLC’s “hate” talking points and promoted the organization’s recent smears of parent groups as “extremely comprehensive, well-written, well-packaged.”
USA Today was also happy to amplify the SPLC with glowing coverage the moment its latest report was published.
“The SPLC is one of the most widely recognized research organizations tracking hate and extremism in the United States,” USA Today claimed. “Being added to its watchlist means almost certain notoriety. Over the years, the center has brought new focus to self-described militias, anti-immigrant groups and outright hate groups. The SPLC has also sued hate groups and individual extremists in the civil courts, often with great success.”
Even though most of the organizations like Moms for Liberty were founded in just the last few years, USA Today marketed the SPLC’s claim that parent groups “copied and pasted from the scripts of past groups, adapting old racist and homophobic ideas, as well as conspiracy theories asserting Marxist indoctrination” as a fact that is “based on longstanding criteria.”
Smear Factory
The SPLC may have found a friend in the corporate media complex, but its reputation precedes it.
The SPLC has long been known for tarnishing organizations with Christian missions or conservative ties as “hate groups.” The smear factory’s resolve to lump legitimate faith organizations into the same category as real threats like the Ku Klux Klan galvanized a Virginia man to attack the Family Research Council, a notable pro-marriage and pro-life player in the Washington D.C. area.
The 29-year-old’s attempt to “kill as many people as possible” was ultimately foiled by a heroic front desk employee. Despite the man’s confession that his mass shooting aspirations were rooted in the SPLC’s list of “anti-gay groups,” the SPLC, to this day, still classifies the FRC as a “designated hate group.”
It’s no secret that the SPLC’s lists are rooted in nothing more than the group’s own political preferences and vendettas. The SPLC’s political campaigns against conservative groups are largely why its influence among Democrat allies in Congress, Big Tech, and woke corporations has expanded in recent years and its “hate group” list has grown to encompass 1,225 organizations nationwide.
In fact, despite corporate media’s insistence that the SPLC’s designations are “based on longstanding criteria,” even the SPLC admitted in a recent lawsuit that its findings are subjective.
The plaintiffs, immigration enforcement activist D.A. King and his organization The Dustin Inman Society, alleged that the SPLC did not conduct a “meaningful fact finding or investigation” before dubbing the organization a hate group for “vilifying all immigrants,” in the SPLC’s 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 annual Intelligence Report magazine.
At the time of classification, plaintiffs argued, the SPLC was “aware of Mr. King’s documented history of opposing only ‘illegal immigration’ through the ‘enforcement of immigration laws’ and of not opposing legal immigration.” The SPLC even “explicitly stated” that The Dustin Inman Society was not a “hate group” in 2011.
As court documents from King’s defamation lawsuit against the SPLC suggest, the SPLC claimed its classification of King and the society can’t be used against the organization because “anti-immigrant hate group” is “an expression of opinion protected under the First Amendment” and “not capable of being empirically proven true or false.”
Despite the SPLC’s quiet confession, the radical organization still boasts of being and is “widely accepted” as the preeminent national database that tracks “hate groups,” something that King said cannot be discounted in court as “merely an opinion” because it suggests “some rigorous analysis.”
“Plaintiffs have the better argument,” Judge William Keith Watkins of the U.S. District Court for Alabama’s Middle District agreed in his opinion issued in April.
“SPLC no doubt has a well-established presence and prestige on the national stage for ferreting
out ‘hate groups.’ The allegations about SPLC’s portrayal of its elite status in tracking
and investigating hate groups and its specialized knowledge make it plausible that a
reasonable reader would discern that, when SPLC designates a group an ‘anti-immigrant hate group,’ the designation is factually based after extensive investigation,” Watkins added.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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