The Southern Poverty Law Center does one of the Left’s filthiest jobs: It smears political enemies as “hate groups,” putting these organizations’ staff at risk. It thus spreads hatred while mawkishly pretending to fight it. It foolishly believes its wall of sanctimony will obscure its ruthless tactics.
This week, the SPLC turned its screws on a slew of parental rights groups that have emerged over the past three years to keep racialization and sexualization (basically, pornography aimed at children) from infesting our schools. It issued a report that put them on its “hate map.”
Why the SPLC did this is no mystery. These parent groups are the spearhead of a national movement that is successfully retaking the country from the advances the Left has made since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, when the "woke" thought the “transformation” they lust after was within grasp.
Every major figure in the movement to racialize the country, from critical race theory pioneer Kimberle Crenshaw to hucksters such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, has complained this year that they are losing that grasp, their progress has been stopped, and they are losing ground.
That’s why they’re hitting the panic button, and the bottom-dwellers of the SPLC have been let out of the crypt.
This is literally what may have happened, in fact. Conservatives, in Congress and in public interest law firms, should start looking for communications between the SPLC and the Biden administration. We know already that the administration requested that the National School Boards Association ask the Justice Department to treat parents protesting sexualization and racialization as “domestic terrorists.”
Among the groups that the SPCL hit were Moms for Liberty, a national group started by Florida mothers who had finally had it, and started taking the country by storm. Another is Parents Defending Education, one of the most successful groups fighting to “reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas,” as its website says. I urge you to visit it and relish in its progress. It has actually forced school districts to stop segregating children by race.
Never has the hack phrase “full disclosure” been written with more pride, so here it goes—full disclosure: I am on the advisory board of Parents Defending Education and have participated in their meetings, just as I have spoken at Moms for Liberty events and have also had meetings with its leadership.
I then can attest that they are brave, patriotic women who are glad to take daily risks for the sake of their children, their communities, and their country. Their leaders have told me how they and their children have been insulted and maligned. Yet they have kept moving forward undeterred.
They will continue fighting, I am sure, for their love will not abate. And I hope to be back in the trenches with them very soon.
Unfortunately, the SPLC’s cowardly move will take the threat to new levels.
In 2012, a domestic terrorist by the name of Floyd Corkins, who had been browsing the SPLC’s hate map, walked into the headquarters of the Family Research Council armed with a gun. He also had a bag of 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches to stuff into the mouths of his corpses. He ended up shooting a security guard before being wrestled to the ground.
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The sniveling staff at the SPLC are well aware of what the consequences could be when it put these mothers on its “hate map.” And if the Biden administration put it up to this, just as it did with the NSBA under very similar circumstances, it, too, was on notice.
But don’t expect the SPLC to have any scruples about this. Domestic terrorists are not just inspired by the center’s work. The center actually has people on staff who are charged with it. Atlanta police arrested one of the SPLC’s lawyers in March and charged him with domestic terrorism after vandals protesting the building of a police training facility threw Molotov cocktails at police.
The SPLC also has a history of controversy. In 2018, it had to pay a settlement of $3.37 million to a group it had smeared as an “anti-Muslim extremist.” The following year, the center dismissed co-founder Morris Dees, then in his 80s, for unspecified misconduct. One of the center’s leaders, Maureen Costello, told the Washington Post that he was seen “as racist and sexist.”
So much for a social justice warrior group.
This time, the SPLC is picking on mothers. But trust me. It has picked on the wrong people.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner
