Group labeled TPUSA ‘anti-government extremist’ group in May
In the months leading up to the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the far-left civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center sharply criticized the organization and Kirk as promoters of “hard right” ideologies, including white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
Kirk, 31, was fatally shot on Wednesday while hosting a TPUSA event on campus at Utah Valley University in Orem. During a press briefing late Wednesday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox described the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk as a “political assassination.” President Donald Trump said Friday morning that a suspect, a man identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of Utah, has been arrested.
In the wake of the shooting, questions emerged on social media about what role civil rights activist groups like the SPLC and others played in depicting Kirk and TPUSA as a threat to public safety.
Perhaps no other organization has covered Kirk and TPUSA as frequently as the Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC, which designated TPUSA as an “antigovernment extremist group” earlier this year as part of the SPLC “2024 Hate Map” report, placing the Christian group alongside groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizations.
In a section of its report titled, “Turning Point USA: A case study of the hard right in 2024,” the SPLC identifies TPUSA, its sister group Turning Point Action and Kirk as “sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the [LGBT] community and civil rights activists.”
The report also makes repeated references to the Christian faith.
“TPUSA and its spokespeople often warn their audience that their children, wives, religion, way of life and they themselves are under attack by various constructed enemies,” the report reads. “TPUSA exploits complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”
SPLC claims TPUSA’s faith-oriented subdivision, Turning Point Faith, “works at the intersection of Trumpism and Christian supremacy.”
Highlighting various TPUSA Faith initiatives, including “religious courses, sermon templates, and training opportunities to guide pastors toward political activism,” the report appears to call Christian persecution a “myth” and accuses Kirk of promoting an “extreme, authoritarian vision.”
The report criticizes TPUSA’s stance on traditional marriage and human sexuality. Taking aim at “TPUSA’s narrow vision of womanhood,” the SPLC warns that “women, men and nonbinary people who deviate from this rigid gender dichotomy are demonized because they threaten the hard right’s efforts to maintain white, male, Christian dominance in America.”
A CP review of the SPLC website found Kirk and/or TPUSA mentioned 38 times overall as part of the SPLC’s “Hatewatch” and other extremism categories.
In May, Kirk called the inclusion of himself and TPUSA on the SPLC “hate group” report a “badge of honor.”
“Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. … They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs,” Kirk wrote.
“But it’s 2025, and nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore. The SPLC is a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again.”
Kirk argued that SPLC is “irrelevant” and a “cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility.”
“Maybe someone should take a hard look at where all that ‘nonprofit’ money’s really going? Being on their list is a badge of honor. It means they’re terrified that we’re so effective,” he said. “Keep crying, SPLC — America’s done with your scam.”
Kirk pointed to SPLC’s role in the 2012 shooting at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council (FRC). Tony Perkins, president of the FRC, later called the shooting at the Christian conservative think tank an act of terrorism and accused the SPLC of fomenting anti-Christian sentiment, fueling the attack.
Perkins believed the gunman, Floyd Corkins II, “was given a license by a group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, who … labeled us a hate group because we defend the family and we stand for traditional, orthodox Christianity.”
The SPLC later called the claim “outrageous.” However, the shooter claimed during an FBI interrogation that he targeted FRC because it was listed as an “anti-gay group” on the SPLC website.
When asked for comment about SPLC’s content after Kirk’s shooting on Wednesday, spokesman Ricky Riley told CP: “The Southern Poverty Law Center unequivocally condemns the shooting of Charlie Kirk and all forms of violence. Violence is never acceptable.”
In addition to Kirk and TPUSA, SPLC — which is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization with a stated endowment of nearly $732 million — has targeted other Christian-aligned groups, including Focus on the Family, which is categorized under “extremist files” on the SPLC website.
The SPLC’s Focus on the Family page criticizes the group’s “biblical worldview strategy” on topics like LGBT and abortion. It targets Focus on the Family’s views about so-called “conversion therapy,” which SPLC says is designed to “change their [sp] sexual or gender identities” of LGBT-identified young people.
