Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy
2025-12-16
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Source: Congress.gov
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Subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on the Southern Property Law Center and federal civil rights policy. I'll now recognize myself for an opening statement. And before I began, I just want to apologize to the witnesses and for the folks in the crowd and to my colleagues that we got started a little bit late. We were dealing with some votes on the House floor that ran long. And I apologize to the witnesses and appreciate your patience. I appreciate you all being here. Today the subcommittee meets to examine a troubling reality, that one of the most politically motivated, financially lucrative, and ideologically extreme nonprofits in America, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been permitted to wield extraordinary influence over federal civil rights policy, federal law enforcement training, and the private sector mechanisms that increasingly dictate who is permitted to participate in civic life. This is a far cry from the Southern Poverty Law Center's early reputation as a group engaged in concrete litigation against civil violence and the KKK. But the SPLC has reinvented itself as a political fundraising machine built on an ever expanding ideologically defined hate mission. Since 2000, the SPLC has published what it calls a hate map, a physical nationwide map that places bright red markers over the approximate location of designated hate groups across America. The map is updated annually, amplified to the media, and used by activists and even federal agencies as if it were a neutral intelligence product. How did we arrive at a point where a tax-exempt political organization can smear mainstream faith-based groups, parental rights advocates, even Muslims who reject terrorism, or student groups like Turning Point USA, and virtually anyone else who disagrees with its far-left ideology as extremists? feeding these designations directly into federal agencies, watching as violence follows, and then continuing to profit from the very fear it helps create. This is not neutral monitoring. It is a political weapon masquerading as a public interest watchdog.
SPLC leadership openly admits as such, with a spokesman stating plainly, quote, our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them, end quote. This is despite explaining that their designations are strictly ideological, not based on criminality, violence, or danger. Conceding that their hate group labels are based on opinion, not objective standards. And to illustrate just how far this mission creep has gone, The Center for Immigration and Federation for American Immigration Reform, which are groups dedicated to evaluating the effects of mass illegal and illegal immigration, are labeled as hate groups by the SPLC. The SPLC's November 2025 extremism tracking bulletin even flagged me personally, not for violence or lawlessness or any actual threat, but for legislative work on issues like border security and concerns about radical Islamism. A mere difference of policy opinion may land you on SPLC's hate map that has countless groups listed over mere disagreements. Moreover, these labels have real-world consequences, including the 2012 armed attack on the Family Research Council, an attack in which the shooter admitted he selected his target directly from the SPLC hate list and used the hate map to determine FRC's location. He then entered with 50 rounds of ammo and a bag of Chick-fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear on his victims' faces as a political message. And even after this attack, federal agencies continued relying on SPLC materials, with the FBI citing SPLC classifications in at least 13 intelligence products on so-called radical traditionalist Catholics. We see this same pattern again more than a decade later, when on September 9, 2025, One day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the SPLC's Hate Watch newsletter singled out Charlie and Turning Point USA by name, labeling them dangerous extremists. And as with F.R.C., in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination, there have been no retractions, no accountability, and no acknowledgement of the risks inherent in branding mainstream political figures as existential threats.
These incidents, separated by 13 years, but linked by the same targeting architecture, underscore a sobering reality. The SPLC's designations don't merely stigmatize. They can serve as ideological permission slips for individuals already willing to commit political violence. We must examine how federal agencies from the Department of Justice and FBI to the Department of Education to even elements of the Department of War have relied upon or incorporated SPLC's briefings, training materials, or lists of so-called extremist groups. How did we allow a private organization with no objective standards and no accountability and a long history of internal corruption and bias to become embedded in federal civil rights enforcement? Determining whose speech gets chilled, whose religious exercise is punished, whose organizations are suddenly surveilled, debanked, deplatformed, or targeted because a multimillion-dollar activist nonprofit decided they were politically inconvenient. And the SPLC is just one in a sprawling ecosystem of left-wing foundations, foreign funding streams, donor-advised networks, legacy media partners, and activist legal groups. This network deploys billions of dollars annually to shape public-facing extremism narratives, pressure corporations into policing speech, and lobby federal agencies behind closed doors, encouraging the federal government to treat ideological dissent as a threat to civil rights law or domestic security. This is a broader ideological campaign designed to narrow the boundaries of acceptable speech, to define traditional religious beliefs as dangerous, to collapse the distinction between advocacy and violence, and to shift the federal civil rights apparatus from its original purpose of protecting equal treatment under law toward policing political dissent. That is why this hearing is so important, because we must recognize that only a select committee equipped with subpoena authority, forensic tools, and investigative staff can follow the money, map the coordination, and expose how partisan nonprofits embedded themselves into federal civil rights enforcement to intentionally undermine constitutional liberties.
As the so-called targets of these systems are not violent extremists, they are ordinary Americans, parents, pastors, students, and community leaders expressing their values and exercising their constitutional rights. Civil rights law was not designed to punish people for holding biblical beliefs or advocating for secure borders. But the incentives for expanding these extremist categories are enormous. SPLC now holds over $829 million in assets, with an endowment exceeding $738 million and tens of millions stored in offshore investment vehicles. Fear is profitable. And these organizations have built a financial model around it. Today's hearing is a critical step to affirming a basic truth. The Constitution, not the SPLC, not wealthy donors, not activist bureaucrats, and certainly not political violence sets the bounds of our liberty and it is our duty to defend it.
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