WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Experts testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday about the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), including its role in the Biden administration’s discrimination against Christian and conservative Americans.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing, titled “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy,” was billed as examining SPLC’s “coordinated efforts with the Biden-Harris Administration to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association,” as well as its “history, funding, and work to silence conservative and Christian Americans for their beliefs.”
Andrew Sypher, executive vice president of field operations for campus activist group Turning Point USA (TPUSA), suggested that SPLC’s placement of TPUSA on its “hate map” played a role in the climate of actual hate the group’s chapters and founder, the murdered Charlie Kirk, received from leftists.
“I was standing just 10 feet to his left when Charlie was assassinated at Utah Valley University—an act later condoned and justified by some of the very people who labeled him and Turning Point a hate group,” Sypher said. “At places like Berkeley, where we recently held a pre-scheduled event, violent protesters gathered and injured civilians. This mirrors years of organized protests involving groups like Antifa: breaking doors, destroying property, setting fires, and threatening attendees. Since Charlie’s death, political violence against conservatives has only risen.”
Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins testified about how his organization experienced the fruits of SPLC’s efforts in 2012, when would-be mass shooter Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the lobby of FRC’s headquarters armed with SPLC’s “hate group” list and planning to, in his own words, “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” Nobody was killed thanks to the intervention of security guard Leo Johnson, who was wounded, but the link between SPLC’s message and a violent left-wing extremist was far more linear than common claims of “dangerous extremism” on the political Right.
“Despite its connection to the attempted mass murder, and requests from FRC to remove FRC from the list, the SPLC has refused to acknowledge the link between its listing of FRC and this shooting or remove FRC from the ‘hate map’ to this day,” Perkins said.
He went on to note that SPLC has “worked closely with federal government, including training Biden DOJ prosecutors” (since ended by the Trump administration); “touts its own work influencing local law enforcement”; has so-called “Learning for Justice resources, previously entitled Teaching Tolerance, [which] are widely distributed to public schools, with an associated magazine being sent to 450,000 educators twice a year”; and that companies including Amazon, Spotify, GuideStar, PayPal, Alphabet, Mastercard, Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and Starbucks have all been swayed by SPLC to discriminate against customers whose views it opposes.
Perhaps most worryingly, Perkins said, SPLC has ties to violent far-left “resistance” group Antifa. “Its affiliation with Megan Squire is one prominent example,” he explained. “Squire is a former professor at Elon University in North Carolina, who subsequently served as the SPLC’s Deputy Director for Data Analytics and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) from March 2022 to March 2025. A data science researcher and expert in cyber security and database management, Squire shared her ‘intelligence’ with ANTIFA cells and others.”
Next came Daily Signal senior editor Tyler O’Neil, who noted that while SPLC’s hate map “has inspired violence, it also likely helps pay the bills. According to its most recent Form 990, the SPLC had $786.7 million in net assets as of Oct. 2024. The SPLC also has millions in offshore accounts.9 As the Capital Research Center’s Robert Stilson noted, the SPLC is wealthier than the Make-a-Wish Foundation of America, the YMCA of the USA, the Special Olympics, Chicago’s Field Museum, and many colleges and universities, including Tuskegee University.”
“In the fall of 2021, after President Biden took office, then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a donor meeting that many agencies in the administration had reached out to ‘solicit our expertise’ to ‘help shape the policies’ to ‘counter the domestic terrorism threat,’” O’Neil continued. “Public records requests have fleshed out the close relationship between the administration and the SPLC. The Biden White House hosted SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times. Dietra Trent, executive director at the White House initiative on historically black colleges and universities, met with SPLC staff on July 5, 2022. The FBI cited the SPLC in its notorious memo on ‘radical traditional Catholics,’ before rescinding the memo after a brave whistleblower published it. President Biden nominated Nancy Abudu, an SPLC attorney, to a federal judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The White House also touted the SPLC’s role in its strategy to combat antisemitism.”
“Documents also show that Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights who oversaw the Civil Rights Division, solicited advice from then-SPLC President Huang, and visited the SPLC on March 6, 2023,” he added. “Documents also show that SPLC research manager R.G. Cravens spoke at a symposium for DOJ prosecutors on Nov. 7, 2023. He gave ‘an overview of the disturbing trends and developments within the anti-LGBTQ movement, including the surge in threats and violence against transgender people, children, and their caregivers.’”
Finally, Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, testified in defense of organizations like SPLC, albeit without delving into specifics. “Civil rights organizations — Southern Poverty Law Center included — are part of the essential infrastructure of American civil society,” she claimed. “This hearing fits squarely within a broader pattern of government retaliation against civil society. The Administration and its allies are increasingly directing government resources to single out organizations that defend civil rights, protect vulnerable communities, and support participation in our constitutional democracy. Such retaliation can chill advocacy, undermine constitutional norms, and threaten the independence of the nonprofit sector.”
SPLC has long been notorious for labeling mainstream Christian and/or conservative organizations – such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Jihad Watch – “hate groups” to be distrusted by the public and blacklisted from various online platforms and services.
Over the past few years, SPLC was forced to make a public apology and pay $3.4 million in defamation damages to Maajid Nawaz’s Quilliam Foundation, ousted co-founder Morris Dees for alleged “inappropriate conduct,” and has endured testimony from insiders that the organization is a “highly profitable scam” and that Dees saw “civil rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”
