One Thing the Left Can Do If It Wants to Prove It Actually Opposes Political Violence

The Southern Poverty Law Center rightly condemned the horrific assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk Wednesday, but if the SPLC is serious in opposing political violence, it should do one better: It should remove Turning Point USA from its “hate map,” which plots Kirk’s organization alongside Ku Klux Klan chapters.

The FBI is currently searching for the suspect who shot and killed Kirk, and Americans do not know this person’s identity, much less his motive. There is no evidence that the SPLC inspired this assassination.

That said, this isn’t the first time a shooter has targeted an organization on the “hate map,” and that map clearly contributes to the political hatred that makes events like the Kirk assassination thinkable.

In 2012, a terrorist opened fire at the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He carried a semiautomatic pistol and a bag of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. He told the FBI he targeted the Family Research Council using the SPLC “hate map” and that he intended to kill everyone in the building and smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich in their faces. He did so at a time when LGBTQ activists condemned Chick-fil-A for funding socially conservative causes.

The SPLC condemned this act of terrorism, but it has kept the Family Research Council on its “hate map” ever since.

In 2017, 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson opened fire at a Republican practice for the Congressional Baseball Game, nearly killing then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and wounding four others. Hodgkinson targeted Republicans in the shooting and had “liked” on Facebook the SPLC, which had repeatedly attacked Scalise. Then-SPLC CEO Richard Cohen condemned the attack as a “sickening and cowardly act of terror that must be condemned by everyone across the political spectrum.”

The SPLC’s ‘Hate Map’

The SPLC knows what it is doing with the “hate map.” The center gained its reputation for suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy in the 1980s, and it developed the Klanwatch project to monitor Klan groups. “Klanwatch” morphed into “Hatewatch” and the “Intelligence Project,” which publishes an annual map of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” across the country.

Yet the map includes far more than just truly racist and hateful organizations like the Klan. Starting in the early 2000s, the SPLC added organizations that oppose illegal immigration to the map. In 2010, it added a host of “anti-LGBT hate groups” to the map, including the Family Research Council. It added organizations that oppose radical Islamist terrorism, such as the Center for Security Policy, as “anti-Muslim hate groups.”

In recent years, the “hate map” has grown even more expansive. The SPLC put Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups on the map in 2023, just two years after the National School Boards Association compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists in a since-retracted memo. This year, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map.”

The SPLC does not call for violence against organizations on the map, but it has repeatedly stated that the map reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

The comparison between mainstream conservative organizations and the Ku Klux Klan is arguably defamatory, and the SPLC is currently defending itself in court after calling the Dustin Inman Society, which opposes illegal immigration, an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

The SPLC’s Influence

While the SPLC adopts a slimy legal argument in the courtroom, claiming that its “hate” accusations are a matter of opinion and not a statement of fact, its cultural cachet belies this fatuous defense. Big Tech companies like Amazon have used the “hate map” to screen program recipients. Companies like Eventbrite, PayPal, and Hyatt Hotels have relied on the SPLC’s “hate” accusations. Donor networks worth billions have pledged to keep charitable funds out of the hands of SPLC-accused “hate groups.”

Then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a 2021 donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” reached out to “solicit our expertise” to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” That wasn’t hyperbole. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023. The FBI cited the SPLC in its notorious memo on “radical-traditional Catholics.”

Law enforcement agencies do not take briefings on mere matters of opinion. Companies do not blacklist charities based on matters of opinion.

SPLC Must Remove Turning Point USA

The SPLC’s “hate map” encourages Americans to look on well-meaning law-abiding conservatives with suspicion and contempt. It advocates removing people from polite society because they disagree with the Left’s agenda on LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, parental rights, and more.

This deluge of vitriol the SPLC systematically publishes far outweighs its pitiful statements condemning political violence against the Right after violence has already taken place.

If the SPLC is serious about bringing down the temperature, cooling our passions, and actually resolving our political divisions, it can take one small proactive step in the direction of proving it: remove Turning Point USA from the “hate map” immediately.

This will not undo the damage the SPLC has already done, and it will not restore the reputations of so many good conservatives the SPLC has systematically smeared, but it will prove that the SPLC’s commitment to fighting political violence is more real than a couple of words on a page.

This is one concrete step an influential leftist group can take to combat the worsening polarization that seems to be driving us toward civil war. I pray that the SPLC takes this opportunity.

This article originally appeared at The Daily Signal.