The Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left outfit that disparages conservative organizations by categorizing them as “extremist” alongside actual racist groups, was indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday night for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. According to the indictment, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million it received from unsuspecting donors toward racist groups by paying “a covert network of informants” who were part of “violent extremist groups.”
One of the SPLC’s chief activities is what it calls “tracking hate,” which includes cataloguing racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan as well as mainstream civil liberties groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. The smear campaign it wages against Christian and conservative organizations by equating them to actually extreme groups threatens not just their reputations but their fundraising prospects and even their physical safety. In 2012, a gunman opened fire at the D.C. office of the Family Research Council, intending to “kill as many as possible” because he didn’t “like what they stand for.” He told law enforcement afterward that he was inspired by the SPLC’s inclusion of the Family Research Council on its list of so-called “hate” groups.
The Federalist has also found itself in the SPLC’s crosshairs. In the summer of 2017, the SPLC posted an article under its “Hatewatch” category attacking The Federalist as a “rabidly partisan” purveyor of “anti-LGBT and specifically anti-trans writings.”
Our “rabidly partisan” offense was obtaining and publishing an exclusive story from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. A few days prior, Sessions had given a private speech at an event put on by Alliance Defending Freedom. One of the most hard-hitting civil liberties nonprofits in the country, ADF is a legal powerhouse with a record of success defending religious and free speech rights as well as the right to life. But since 2016, the SPLC has smeared it as a “hate group” for its defense of Christian clients’ religious convictions about sex and marriage.
BuzzFeed reporter Dominic Holden — whose tenure at the web magazine included hard-hitting headlines like “The New York Times Needs To Stop Calling All Transgender People ‘Gay’” — tried to spin the existence of the speech into a scandal, and the SPLC was waiting in the wings to fan the flames.
At first, they were incensed that Sessions would dare to address a group disliked by the SPLC without inviting members of the corporate press. It was a manufactured scandal, but Sessions obliged them anyway by publicizing his speech, publishing the transcript as an article in The Federalist. In it, he discussed the importance of religious freedom and promised the Trump administration would defend religious liberties for all Americans. He did not mention, much less malign, the LGBT lobby.
But the fact that Sessions would “attempt to deliver an off-the-record speech to a group with a record like ADF” was a scandal in the telling of the SPLC. It claimed The Federalist, by publishing an exclusive from the sitting attorney general, had “Attempt[ed] to Rescue ADF” and Sessions from “Explaining [his] Secret Speech.”
The same “bigotry” the SPLC imagined in Sessions’ speech was “proudly displayed in the pages of The Federalist,” according to the SPLC’s Alex Amend. (Amend is now a freelancer “focusing on the far right and the politics of climate change” and living on “occupied Tano land” in New Mexico, according to a personal website.) He cited an article published in The Federalist in 2014, about a Washington, D.C. elementary school that announced to parents that Mr. Robert Reuter, the school’s “writing inclusion” teacher, would now be going by the name “Rebecca” and should be addressed as “Ms. Reuter.” Slate had described the reporting as “odiously transphobic,” a colorful description which the SPLC regurgitated.
Amend claimed that “The Federalist’s anti-trans bias is literally embedded in its style guide,” by which he meant that it is our policy to use biologically accurate pronouns. He also objected to The Federalist publishing an anonymous article “from an attendee from a trans rights conference,” which ended with questions such as “If gender is not biological, then why do we think someone who claims to be trans-black is crazy?” and “Under what moral standard do we prosecute polygamists?”
Such questions, Amend concluded, “attack[ed] the idea that trans people should be treated with respect.” The Federalist was “a reliable apologist for anti-LGBT discrimination,” he said, because Media Matters for America said so.
Like the SPLC, Media Matters has made an entire brand out of maligning conservative groups. It was investigated in 2023 for “potentially unlawful business practices.” Now the two organizations have that in common, too.
