We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. You can
subscribe to the premium version of our website at that website too. It's a
it's a fun little glimpse into a little comment section we got going on at
The Federalist, So check that out if you get a chance. We are
joined today by Tyler O'Neill. He is the managing editor over at The Daily
Signal and the author of Making Hate Pay The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law
Center. Tyler, thanks for joining us. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks
so much for having me. Emily. Yeah, of course. And I'll
just preface this whole conversation by saying, what you did, your work on
the Southern Poverty Law Center is so important, and it's so important to everything
we talk about when we talk about things like ESG, when we talk about
things like d EI, like IBRAMEX Kendy, all of these things. You
saw what was going to happen what was going to become of the country in
the Southern Poverty Law Center for years because they were operating off of these expanded
and weaponized definitions of terms like racism and bigotry and Islamophobia that implicated average conservatives
in horrible ideologies. And so Tyler, by digging into the history of the
SPLC and really tracing their influence in our culture, that was just, I
think such an important task that you took upon yourself a couple of years ago.
Now. But the SPLC is still out there doing their thing, aren't
they. Yes, Yeah, No, recently, there's actually been quite a
few, um, you know developments. The probably primary at the top of
my mind is the FBI's Richmond office using the SPLC's radical Traditional Catholic hate group
accusation to target Catholics essentially for surveillance. Uh. This this memo that got
released earlier this year, where you know, the FBI is saying we need
to have sources in these Catholic churches because they might be tied to white nationalist
extremism. Um, you know this, And it's it's interesting because the SPLC
has this radical traditional Catholic hate group area, but they don't limit their tax
to traditional Catholics. They have you know, mainstream conservative religious freedom nonprofits and
Christian groups across the spectrum on their on their hate map and on their hate
group list. So it's uh, you know, the fact that the FBI
would even would even countenance publishing a document citing the SPLC to target churches like
this as flabbergasting, and nobody talks about it. And the of course nobody
talks about it in the legacy media because they buy into the SPLC's stick.
They've promoted it uncritically for years, even leading to some violence ironically. Of
course, Tyler, how much is still how many institutions do we have an
idea of how many institutions are still relying on the SPLC's guidance in terms of
hate groups. Um. You know, of course they've they've named any number
of conservative groups as hate groups that are just Christian or just completely main dream
conservative. Um. But to what degree are they still you know outside the
FBI, you know, are they involved in ESG? Are people using them
for those types of decisions when it comes to banking and finance and all of
that. Are they still being used at school systems? Where can people look
to see their influence today? Yeah, school systems are particularly shocking. Uh.
The their program called Teaching Tolerance, which now tolerance isn't isn't far enough
for them, isn't woke enough, So they changed the title to Learning for
Justice. But it used to tout you know, thousands of school districts across
the country. It's interesting the program took took those numbers off of its website
after it after rebranded, and so it's not it's not entirely clear how big
their influence still is, but you see it cropping up here and there,
like in genuine where a Blake Masters slammed the Tucson School district for using the
SPLC curriculum. And you know, the SPLC has partnered most recently with the
National Urban League on this State of Black America report where they're demonizing the parental
rights movement as some sort of racist attacks. It's interesting they say, tracking
a parental rights movement rooted in racism, and claim that Ray Ray Bradberry's Fahrenheit
four fifty one, which of course is about book burning, is becoming you
know, this cautionary tale is becoming a reality, they say, because some
parents don't want pornographic materials and school libraries. I mean, it's just I
don't want to use the word perfect because it's not really perfect in any sense.
But it's just like I remember, for years, people used to talk
about them, the intolerant left that you know, treated itself or purported to
be, you know, the paragon of tolerance in a liberal society. And
I don't think people realize how quickly that would snowball into the weaponization that it
has now. You know, for a while, it was just the SPLC
labeling groups and making it hard for people to go out and speak or fund
raise because you know, when you google them, the SPLC hate designation comes
up. But it has become so quickly weaponized in ways that I don't know
that people anticipated seeing in their lifetimes. Yeah, it's it's truly shocking,
and it's also interesting to see that the SPLC is still cited uncritically by so
much of the legacy media after you know, in twenty nineteen they had a
racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led them to fire their co founder,
and of course it was all it was all essentially shoved under the rug when
they brought in Tina Chen, who later was fired from Times Up for scandals
of their own. But Tina Chen Michelle Obama's former chief of staff to do
their internal review, which still has not been published to this day. So
the SPLC thinks they can just move on, and so much of the legacy
media acts as though that's true. And you know, just the fact that
the Family Research Council, which is a nonprofit organization, a Christian nonprofit group
in Washington, d C, had an actual, like a bona fide terrorist
attack against it because of the SPLC's hay group accusation. I mean, a
guy came in there with a bag of Chick fil A Chicken sandwiches and a
semi automatic pistol, planning to kill everyone in the building and smear Chick fil
A sandwich in their faces. I thank god the security guard prevented it from
becoming the mass slaughter that he intended it to be. But you know,
the SPLC condemned the attack but kept FRC on the hate map ever since.
And now it's been over ten years and there's no suggestion that they'll they'll reconsider
after this. Yeah, I guess that raises a really big and difficult question,
and there's a lot of bagage wrapped up in it when it comes to
American culture right now, Why is it that when confronted with facts, when
confronted with reason, when confronted with logic, so many institutions, including and
especially the American legacy media, still rely so heavily on the SPLC. I
mean, can anything separate them from the SPLC. Yeah? Well, SPLC
is just such a useful tool. I mean, it's it was interesting going
through the history seeing how More'sts, the co founder, took an organization that
was started to help poor people in the South. I mean, that's what
Southern Poverty Law Center means, and he turned it into an organization focused on
bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan. But then, you know, you ran out
of grand dragons to conquer and started looking at more and more mainstream conservative organizations
to gin up more money from donors to go and say like, look,
this is hate, and also to silence his ideological opponents. And I think
that's where the legacy media finds the SPLC so useful, is here's an organization
they can claim as as a clearinghouse for hate where they can essentially use it
to demonize people they already disagree with, and you get conservative Christians who have
long been viewed, you know, negatively by the LGBT activists and you've seen
I mean, it's it was funny. There was even a TV show that
cited the SPLC's hate group accusation against Family Research Council a few years back.
But you know, we conservative Christians have been viewed as hateful to this community
when you know, it's it's an entirely there there are two different things you
can and should as a conservative Christian love and and treat you know, humbly
people with whom we disagree and those who violate the laws that Christianity supports when
it comes to sexual morality. Um. But they look at conservative Christians in
general as as hateful and the SPLC is super useful for that branding for uh,
you know, and for saying that political leaders like President Trump, like
many many others, are hateful just because they support religious freedom measures that would
enable you know, doctors to not to not mutilate people in the name of
healthcare, and to not kill the unborn in the name of healthcare, and
these these things where the left has gone so aggressive that they're trying to silence
anybody who complains. You know, I remember when it was Live and Let
Live. You know, everybody said, oh, if if we have gay
marriage, you know, it'll just be gay marriage on the one side,
and you'll be able to live your lives normally on the other side. But
we've seen with Jack Phillips, we've seen with a lot of a lot of
conservative Christians who want to even just abide by their faith in the public square
or in or in the marketplace being attacked in the name of anti discrimination and
silenced. It's and I think the SPLC is almost the tip of the spear
in this movement against conservative Christians. Yeah, looking back, I mean it
seems like that completely and they really showed, um, you know, if
you look back fifteen years, twenty years, how these expanded definitions of what
constitutes real bigotry, what constitutes real hatred, we were slowly being conditioned in
no small part thanks to the SPLC. And I think your observation that there's
no alternative, there was nobody like genuinely keeping track of real domestic terrorists,
real hate groups other than the f PLC in a way that was as media
accessible gave them this insane outsize influence, and with that influence they were able
to launder this politically weaponized definitions into the public square and into the mainstream.
So could you take us through a little bit of that history. You know,
you mentioned Morris D's and how they were originally founded, but but what
you know, what what is the history of the SPLC. Where did they
come from and how did they end up where they are? Yeah? Yeah,
So, as I mentioned, it was founded as a public interest legal
nonprofit to help poor people in the South, and they actually represented They got
innocent people who had been falsely convicted off of death row. They even represented
a reverse racism case. They did a lot of really good work in the
early years. But Morris D's, you know, it's interesting Mornsty's had personal
family history with the Ku Klux Klan and he started moving the direct moving the
organization in that direction. And it's it's an odd thing to talk about because
a lot of the lawyers who had signed up for the SPLC quit and mass
when he started turning it into a weapon against the clan, not because they
supported the clan, but because the clan was largely a paper tiger in the
nineteen eighties. So you would have these lawyers talk about, you know,
convicting these clan members is like shooting fish in a barrel, and they would
just they would bankrupt them very easily. And meanwhile, you know, going
after the clan was a huge fundraising victory for the SPLC. In one case,
a woman horrifically lost her son in a lynching. Her name was Bulah
Maydonald and she, you know, the SPLC stepped in and represented her and
got the clan organization responsible for the for the lynching, got them to go
bankrupt, got them to they got a seven million dollars settlement. So it's
interesting the organization had effectively no money to its name. It had about fifty
grand total. So Bulah Maydonald got fifty grand, whereas the SPLC went to
its donors and said, hey, we won a seven million dollars settlement,
and this proves how effective we are give us money. The SPLC rakes in,
you know, about two million in a year a year and a half
after that that case, and Bulah Maydonald gets this fifty grand. She takes
the fifty grand and she actually pays it to the SPLC because the SPLC had
given her a loan on a house, and so the SPLC gets millions of
dollars from its donors. The SPLC gets, you know, the fifty grand
that she got, she pays to them, and then later Morris d's goes
and wants to get a movie made about the case, and Boola MacDonald tries
to make a movie about the case and she gets shut out of making her
own film because Morris d's is making his own film. So that that kind
of shows, I think the corruption that was building even back then. But
so there's this money making machine that they have, and they run out of
clans, so they go after these skinheads, racist groups, and then and
then they start expanding more and more, and you end up finding the Family
Research Council, you end up finding the Center for Immigration Studies, many many
different conservative and Christian organizations on the hate group list and the hate map,
because it seems as though they're continually finding reasons to get their donors to give
and it becomes clear that they're using this. You know, there was a
spokesman called Mark Potok who in two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine
was giving these speeches to people and he said, our aim in life is
to destroy these groups, to utterly destroy them. And he said, you
know, the press will say that we're monitoring these groups, but our purpose
is actually to get rid of them. And he said, to so mortally
embarrass them that they're destroyed. And I think that that encapsulates what the strategy
he is. And there there are some organizations on the hate map that are
you know, horrific. I mean, you have, you have legitimately anti
Semitic organizations out there. They they do include the what's it called the of
Islam, the Nation of Islam, Nation of Islam, yes, and a
few others. And I mean I would I would never. I mean I
was. I was very proud when I got attacked by the Westboro Baptist Church,
UM, because you know, I don't stand for the kind of crap
that they do. UM. But I mean, even even the Nation of
Islam and the Westboro Baptist Church are not the KKK. And there are KKK
groups. I mean, I don't know how alive these KKK groups are on
the hate map, but I think given the SPLC's history and what the SPLC
is trying to achieve with this hate map, when you're on this map,
You're put on it with Ku Klux Klan chapters like this. Well, let's
make no bones about this. This is utterly defamatory if you are not something
like the Ku Klux Klan, because this is the organization that this is the
part of the SPLC that they started to monitor the clan and now it's monitoring
these groups. I think they're clearly they're trying to draw a line there,
and they like to weasel out of their defamation. But it's it's interesting because
recently there was a case anyway I can, I could go on and on,
but yeah, you asked about the history, and I think that's that's
largely that largely covers it. There was also a on the history in that
twenty nineteen scandal. A former staff effort came forward and said that that the
hate accusations of the SPLC are a highly profitable scam. He wrote, and
I mean this, this is the kind of thing that you can see from
the outside, but to hear somebody from the inside say that, to say
that we were trying to builk northern donor you know, northern liberals by exaggerating
claims of hate in the South I think it just speaks volumes to how how
true and how clear it is. M Yeah, that is I had actually
forgotten about that, but that's so important. And on that note, how
successful has their bilking been in recent years, because you know, they have
gotten massive corporate donations over the years, and you know this is all generally
highly publicized because corporations like to brag about giving to the SPLC. But who's
bankrolling them these days? Yeah, they have a very large donor base,
you know, I have, I've seen well, I think the big the
big answer to that question is big companies gave a lot of money, you
know, Apple and JP Morgan and gave I believe it was about a million
dollars each to the Southern Poverty Law Center after the Charlottesville riots. And and
it's interesting in that case, the SPLC adam map and still has a map
of Confederate monuments warning of turmoil and bloodshed because these monuments exist. And of
course on the map of monuments you not only have statues to generals, but
you also have schools like elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. And
so this was at the time when rioters, you know, Antifa were coming
and knocking down these statues and rallying, and I thought it was it was
rather imprudent. Shell we say, of the SPLC to put schools where kids
you know, sure, maybe the school shouldn't be named after one of these
people. I don't know, does that really matter, but you know,
putting these schools because they're named after Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson on
a map with these with these statues and essentially encouraging people to to go and
protest and anyway, it's so, yeah, they have a very big donor
base. They have a an endowment of seven hundred and thirty million dollars now
over over half a billion dollars, and of course they have they have accounts
in the Cayman Islands, which is ironic for a nonprofit, like why are
you hiding money in offshore accounts when you have an endowment this big um.
But yeah, they're very entrenched. So they have a lot of small dollar
donors. But of course they also get grants from George Soros funded organizations like
the Open Society Foundation. They're part of that whole Soros network. And and
I mean Morstis was always a great fundraiser. He was a pioneer of direct
mail. So he built up this fun this donor base, and it's it's
been the same ever since. You know, donor base plus Soros money plus
the occasional million dollar grant from Apple kind of explains where they are. And
I'm curious about your experience as someone who's really become an expert on all of
this, if you've had a situation where explaining these things kind of calmly,
rationally factually to people changes their mind on the Southern Barbary Law Center, Or
are people you know not even willing to have that conversation. This is just
one of those is one of those things that is so I think completely irrational
and ridiculous and absurd and dangerous on paper that if you sit down with you
know, an old ACLU type liberal, they would look at it and say,
this is outrageous. This has you know, had such a delatarious impact
on discourse. But in your experience, have you found that to be the
case that you can win people over with facts and logic when it comes to
SPLC Or is it just that people don't even think they don't know what they
don't know because the media doesn't tell them. Well, I've found that when
I can discuss it with rational liberals, they'll they'll agree that the SPLC is
not a reliable source of information. But I think it's most people don't have
the SPLC on the on the front of their minds. So if they're googling
an organization, and for some of these organizations, you know, the SPLC
is the number one Google search result, So you'll search for a group like
the Dustin Inman Society, which is an immigration organization. It's it's focused on
making sure that immigration law is followed and you know, making sure that we
have the protections for citizens so the illegal immigrants don't come into this country and
abuse the rights that citizens and that legal immigrants have. But this organization is
branded and anti immigrant hate group by the SPLC, and if you google it,
that's the first thing that comes up. So there's a big chilling effect.
Even even though I don't think a lot of people are going around saying,
oh, the SPLC says this, therefore, you know, therefore we
should hate these people. It's more, it's more subtle than that. And
I had a friend, you know, I used to go to these board
gaming and still do, but I like playing board games. And we had
a game night and I mentioned that I had friends at the Family Research Council
and this guy who was not like a big devotee of the SPLC or anything,
but he turns to me and says, Oh, they're a horrible group.
They're they're promoting hate and violence and you should you should be careful and
stay away from them. And at the time I just thought that was you
know, that was absurd. I mean, I knew these people, and
I responded a little bit. And the guy, you know, he didn't
he didn't go into we didn't go into a debate about the SPLC, but
it was sort of that background knowledge that people have. UM. So when
you actually discuss these issues head on, UM, they'll they'll listen. But
it's interesting to see how many Democratic politicians will not just you know, support
the SPLC or cite it, but actively, you know, celebrate it.
And the SPLC recently had a fifty year anniversary celebration and a bunch of Democrats
came on to celebrate the SPLC and praise it. And I reached out to
their offices and said, hey, do you have any comment about you know,
the racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, or the fact that former employees
say that this is a this is a highly profitable scam, and of course
they never responded. And Joe Biden right now has multiple has nominated for a
judicial appointment woman, a woman named Nancy A. Boodoo who is an SPLC
attorney, and she her nomination has been stalled in the Senate for a while,
but Biden is still standing by her, and many Republicans have rightly raised
cerns saying, look, we should not be elevating someone from this activist,
you know, weaponized organization to a federal judge ship. This is absurd,
but Biden has yet to back down and A. Boodoo's name is still up
for the nomination. Wow. I hadn't even followed that, but it's a
perfect segue into one thing I wanted to ask, which is just basically,
is the SPLC getting more powerful or less powerful? And maybe the answer is
it's all staying the same. But I also wonder that with the democratization of
media in general, you know, where you have the Daily Signal, you
have the federalist places that exist and are able to reach big audiences because the
sort of barriers to entry. Aren't the same as when you had to have
a literal printing press and people to hand out papers. Is that eroding their
power because there are books like yours, because there are people questioning their methods.
Is their base so strong in terms of donors and media that it'll just
always kind of be the same, seemingly, Or are they, you know,
in some ways getting stronger in the kind of post George Floyd post twenty
twenty version of America where everyone is just sort of calling every little thing racist.
Um, you know, what's are they getting more powerful? Less powerful?
They staying the same? What's your read on the situation? Yeah?
I think I think they're largely staying the same. I you know, I
do hope that my book has made has made some impact. I have been
seeing a lot less direct celebration of the SPLC in the legacy media than I
used to. Back after Charlottesville, CNN decided to run the hate map on
its website and I believe on television where they essentially, you know, uncritically
said look, these are these are the hate groups and didn't have any any
balancing opinion, which I found extremely shocking and still do but after the racial
discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, after, you know, and and right now
with Biden in the White House, the SPLC has taken a little bit of
a step back. But they're also engaged in local situations. So I mean,
it's kind of absurd to even talk about, but an SPLC attorney was
charged with domestic terrorism recently because he was personally involved in the stop Cop City
riots in Atlanta, And you can see footage of the these rioters marching in
lockstep to try to stop construction, throwing molotov cocktails at police and at construction
vehicles, um, you know, essentially engaging in a mini war, a
small scale war. And the SPLC at first didn't even say, oh,
our guy wasn't involved in violence. All they said was, oh, he
was there as an observer, as a legal observer with the National Lawyer's Guild,
which is also a very left left leaning organization. And so when when
that happened, there was a lot of a lot of focus on the fact
that he was an SPLC attorney charged with domestic terrorism. But many of the
legacy media outlets will wait until there's a favorable narrative for their side before they
cover news like that, and most recently with the Dustin Inman Society, there's
there's a lawsuit. Most of the time, defamation lawsuits against the SPLC don't
see the light of day, but this organization called the Dustin Imman Society recently
got a major cleared to major legal hurdle in a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC
on its hate group accusation. And that represents a huge win because it means
this organization can go to discovery and actually see how the SPLC internally debates and
decides who is and is not a hate group. Because in twenty eleven,
the SPLC said that this group was not a hate group, and then in
twenty eighteen they turned around and did one eighty saying it is a hate group.
And most of the quote unquote evidence they cited for this hate came from
before twenty eleven, which means, wait, what defines a hate group and
what doesn't, So that lawsuit is forthcoming. So there are ways that the
SPLC has lost its impact, but it still has a big impact. And
I expect as the twenty twenty four cycle years more people on the left are
going to be citing the SPLC and I really wonder if the SPLC has decided
it's going to add some parental rights groups to the hate the hate map,
and the hate group list, because they reported last week on this report where
an SPLC researcher is going after these parental rights groups and essentially saying that opposing
porn in school makes you part of the new quote unquote uptown clan. So
and it's ironic because it seems so absurd that they would claim this when you
look at the actual facts of why parents are, you know, standing up
and demanding a say in their children's education, and yet people on the left
seem utterly intent on demonizing and preventing that and driving a wedge between parents and
children, hiding, you know, if a child has has any sort of
gender confusion, they're they're acting as though it's the school's job to hide a
gender transition from parents, even though we know that many of these transition you
know, procedures can be extremely dangerous. And in one case, there's that
story of the the boy who was undergoing and you know the creation of a
vagina, of a vaginal plasti and they took part of his his guts to
create into a facsimile of a female reproductive organ, and that led to his
death on the operating table, because that's a very dangerous procedure and all all
of that kind of stuff is anyway, it's if parents can't know what their
children are identifying as in school, they can't protect their children, and they
can't parents are the ones who can make the best decisions for their children.
And if we have a wedge between schools, between children and parents, that
is I mean, that's the kind of thing that the Soviet Union pushed.
I mean, this is this is the the sort of pitting people against one
another, the breaking up of families that undermines our freedoms and really turns America
into something we never could have imagined. You know, that's a really good
point, and it makes me wonder how the SPLC handles the current moment because
expanding you know, the definition of hate into potentially some of their donors who
are not even you know, people who are see the reason in getting actual
pornographic books out of elementary school libraries or middle school libraries, or who see
the reason in pausing some of these extreme medical experiments on children. You know,
if you're getting into that space where the average person who watches CNN or
pays attention to in New York Times maybe has a different opinion on it or
doesn't have any opinion on it. But being called the bigot or hateful for
that doesn't seem like it would be doing the SPLC any favors. But to
your point, Tyler, and you make this in your book, they have
such a robust base of support among the far left that maybe it doesn't chip
away at their power at all, even if they end up implicating like almost
all of the country incomplete like hate and bigotry. They're very powerful. I
mean, when you have an endowment at seven hundred and thirty million dollars,
they could I mean, they could stop fundraising tomorrow and keep their organization going
for ten years like and they're not. I mean, I see these these
obituaries and I can't I can't help but be very sad when I see this.
But in an obituary that says, in lieu of Flowers, please donate
money to the Southern Poverty Law Citor, Like, uh, that's anyway.
I understand where people are coming from when they when they say that kind of
thing. But if they knew you know, and that's that's part of what's
so sad about it. You know, I think it's important to push back
against the SPLC's lies in the public square and defend the people whose whose reputations
are being dragged through the mud because they're you know, somewhat to the right
of Karl Marx m But but you know, you have these donors who are
giving money to an organization that seems to have no respect for what they would
want. Um. But that's I mean that that's another aspect of it that
it's yeah, and that's that's more of just a just a tragedy when as
you noted, I mean some of some of the SPLC's donors must you know,
must see reason on some of these things that are getting people demonized.
But right, and especially as the left goes further and it keeps pushing the
envelope further and further. It's the kind of thing that's made people, you
know, think of like a David Sachs, like some people just pause and
look around and think what in the world is going on? Um? But
yeah, that endowment, it's formidable to say the least, Tyler O'Neill.
People can follow your work over at the Daily Signal. They can get your
book on Amazon, so long as Amazon keeps it up, of course,
making hate pay the corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is out
and you can read it. Tyler. Where can people follow you? On
Twitter? Yeah? So I'm at Tyler to the number two O'Neill o n
ei oulets because my initials are two. I particularly love that, and also
on you know, Facebook LinkedIn. Twitter is where I'm the most active,
especially now that Elon Musk has I don't think I ever actually dead named people,
but it's it's good to see Twitter, you know, not banning people
for disagreeing with gender ideology right right well, and also not being compliant with
like the SPLC in particular. You know, Elon Musk isn't going to take
the SPLC's word as gospel when they call someone a hate groups. So that's
definitely a big deal in and of itself. Yes, all right, Well
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm em La
Jasinski, culture editor here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with Moore.
Until then, people, lovers of freedom and anxious, I heard a
fame by the reason, and then it faded away