In a year when Americans pushed back against the ideology of wokeness, the organization that equates non-woke opinions with white supremacist hatred has emerged as the biggest loser.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is known for using the heavy-handed tactic of compiling an annual “hate map” that lumps together genuinely hateful neo-Nazi organizations with mainstream socially conservative organizations — obviously for the sake of smearing the latter by association. For example, the World Congress of Families, the Illinois Family Institute, the Ruth Institute, and the California Family Council are all pro-life, pro-family organizations that are placed on this “hate map” because their leaders hold a traditional understanding of marriage. Also on the exact same list? The Church of the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Old Glory Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Ku Klos Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Give me a break.
The tactic is aided by the SPLC’s historical success in helping to bring down the Klu Klux Klan. The SPLC also maxes out the search engine optimization on its “hate map” profile pages to amplify the smear campaign.
As you might expect, the SPLC labels anyone who opposes “transitioning” preteens through intensive medical interventions as hateful. Thus, the SPLC has long included the American College of Pediatricians — an organization that was early and vocal in its opposition to so-called “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children — on its “hate map.”
In 2019, when I was a student at the University of Notre Dame, I invited the American College of Pediatricians’ executive director, Dr. Michelle Cretella, as well as a professor of pediatrics and endocrinology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Dr. Paul Hruz, to give a lecture on the medical dangers of “transgender” treatments for children. At the time, it was not really acceptable to question such “care”; the ideologues were at the height of their power to cancel those who dissented. We had to have police officers sneak the speakers in through a back door and plain-clothes officers hidden in the audience. We of course attracted a number of protesters. In reaction, there was a poster covered in fake blood, a video with said poster being menacingly hacked at with a crowbar, and a poem published in the school newspaper accusing people of having “queer blood on [their] hands” and mentioning the student group I belonged to that held the lecture.
I say this because this was all seemingly justified under the rationale offered by the Southern Poverty Law Center. When Notre Dame student newspaper reporter Serena Zacharias covered the medical lecture, she dutifully bowed to progressive dogma by noting — oh-so neutrally! — near the beginning of her article that the SPLC had designated the American College of Pediatricians as a “fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science.” For her and many others, the SPLC hate group designation represented and reinforced the mentality that anyone who questioned transgender ideology was an evil bigot.
I remember Zacharias asking me about the SPLC “hate group” designation, as though it were the ultimate trump card — proof that opposing mastectomies and testosterone injections for little girls was hateful. I told her, “The SPLC has expressed hatred towards certain groups in the past, but the American College of Pediatricians has not.” When I said this to her and it was printed in the newspaper, I initially regretted that I had said this. After all, the SPLC, as the vanquisher of the Klu Klux Klan, held a status among many as a great civil rights organization of our time. Maybe my classmates would interpret my problem with the SPLC’s smearing of pro-life, pro-family organizations as a racist statement, I fretted.
This is, of course, exactly the power that the SPLC has held and wielded for so many years. But that time is no longer. After this year, all Americans should be able to see the SPLC for what it is: a disgrace to its past.
Even as much of Europe has moved away from transgender medical interventions for children — with the U.K. notably banning such treatments indefinitely this month — and 69 percent of U.S. adults now opposing the inclusion of boys in girls’ sports, the SPLC has continued full-steam ahead with classifying any dissent from transgender ideology as hateful. For instance, in its designation of the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, the SPLC cites a statement from the group’s legal counsel that, in the SPLC’s words, “refers to trans female athletes as male.”
Similarly, when socially conservative organizations — including the American College of Pediatricians, the Family Research Council, and the Alliance Defending Freedom — filed amicus briefs in the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, which concerns a Tennessee law banning so-called “gender-affirming care” for children, the SPLC dismissed them as “[e]xtremist groups” and “hate groups.” This fall, the SPLC went even further, “doxxing” anonymous contributors to Not the Bee for writing articles that, in the SPLC’s words, “frequently misgender … trans people.”
The SPLC’s insistence on smearing dissenters at a time when open debate on transgender ideology is proliferating across party lines — including from Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton — is making the group more and more irrelevant. Note what the New York Times reported last month: “[S]ome [transgender] activists say it is time to rethink and recalibrate their confrontational ways, and are pushing back against the more all-or-nothing voices in their coalition.”
Then there’s DEI. Suffice it to say that the SPLC views people who oppose DEI as racists. Earlier this year, in an op-ed in USA Today, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote this: “Today, we find ourselves fighting back against a powerful, multipronged assault on diversity, equity and inclusion. Opponents of DEI seek to repeal the centuries of progress we have made to ensure equitable opportunity for all Americans.” Essentially, if you oppose DEI, you want to take the country back to a time of racism and slavery.
This ham-fisted tactic, which the SPLC and its ideological soldiers have relied on for years, will work no longer. Americans are standing up against the pernicious effects of a racial hierarchy that assigns value based on skin color rather than merit and favors some races while disadvantaging others. Even Walmart — the largest company by revenue in the United States — and the University of Michigan — long the home of the most intensive DEI programs in the country — have rolled back some DEI policies. Smearing opposition to DEI as racist doesn’t work as well when the University of Michigan is getting rid of its DEI policies. (RELATED: The High-Water Mark of Woke Corporate Activism)
Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defending Freedom put it absolutely perfectly in an op-ed for Fox News this summer. “The SPLC has overplayed its hand with the American people,” he said. “Disagreement is not discrimination or hate. We’re tired of seeing our neighbors slandered as bigots and bullied from polite society simply because they have the nerve to say what everyone else is thinking.”
Amen. Americans are so done with the liberal ideological sledgehammer’s silencing of dissent. Tactics like those employed by the SPLC should be shunned and excoriated as we move into a new era where free inquiry is embraced; ideological conformity is no longer demanded; and the strength of an idea is tested through reason, not silenced by force.
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It gets even better because the SPLC has not just been ideologically defeated this year. It has also faced internal problems. This June, the organization laid off more than 60 employees, saying that it was “undergoing an organizational restructuring.”
What do you get when you combine layoffs with an organization made up of hypersensitive ideologues who smear everyone who is not progressive as racist and bigoted? That’s right, said employees wage a campaign to smear and discredit their organization. It’s really not surprising.
The SPLC Union (yes, the SPLC has a union, but of course it does) responded to the layoffs by noting the organization’s poor reputation among charity watchdogs: “Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center — an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for ‘hoarding’ donations — gutted its staff by a quarter.” Several fired staffers came forward individually to bash the organization for its “abandonment of its core mission.” The SPLC Union then went on to vote 92 percent in favor of a motion of no confidence in the group’s president, Margaret Huang. One current employee then publicly said the layoffs were “designed with trauma as a feature, not a bug — to keep us confused, hopeless, afraid, divided.”
Please, SPLC staffers, keep up this good fight and destroy this organization from within. You might even succeed before the SPLC fades into irrelevance.
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With the SPLC being the loser of 2024, the winners are Dr. Michelle Cretella and Dr. Paul Hruz and all those who joined them in speaking out about the dangers of “transgender” medical treatments for children at a time when the cost of doing so was being smeared as hateful. Thanks to their efforts, which must have come at great personal cost, we are moving ever closer to banning such treatments nationwide and having them be repudiated across American society.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes:
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The post The Loser of the Year: The Southern Poverty Law Center appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
