Southern Poverty Law Center Smears Turning Point USA, PragerU with Inclusion on ‘Hate Map’
The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is attacking Turning Point USA (TPUSA) — America’s largest conservative grassroots youth organization — by placing the group on a so-called “hate map” alongside Ku Klux Klan (KKK) chapters, for having an “anti-government” stance.
The SPLC, which frequently lists mainstream conservatives alongside hate groups like the KKK, is also going after the conservative nonprofit PragerU by placing it in the same “anti-government” category as TPUSA, according to the left-wing organization’s updated version of its “hate map,” released Thursday.
“My question to everyone is this: Why does the SPLC feel the need to publicly identify the locations of organizations it disagrees with? What is the real purpose behind maintaining a so-called ‘Hate Map’?” PragerU CEO Marissa Streit told Breitbart News.
“Given the violent attack at the Family Research Council’s building — an incident clearly influenced by their ‘Hate Watch List’ — one would hope the SPLC would reconsider tactics that risk inciting violence and putting a physical target on groups whose views simply differ from theirs,” Streit added.
Strikingly, a domestic terrorist armed with a gun targeted the nonprofit evangelical organization Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., in 2012, after reviewing the SPLC’s “hate map,” which labeled the council as a hate group in an “anti-LGBTQ” category.
While the SPLC responded to the attack by claiming it “deplores all violence,” adding, “our thoughts are with the wounded victim,” the left-wing organization went on to double down on its stance against the Family Research Council by lambasting the council again.
In its “Turning Point USA: A case study of the hard right in 2024” report, the SPLC says TPUSA’s sister 501(c)(4) organization Turning Point Action “led Trump’s 2024 campaign efforts in key battleground states and played a vital role in the election of far-right candidates in Arizona.”
“Turning Point USA’s primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and civil rights activists,” the SPLC claimed.
The left-wing group goes on to accuse TPUSA of “warn[ing] their audience that their children, wives, religion, way of life, and they themselves are under attack by various constructed enemies” in an effort to “revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”
In a Sunday X post Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk reacted to his organization being added to the accusatory map, calling it “a cheap smear from a washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades.”
“They somehow still rake in over $100 million a year peddling their ‘hate map’ nonsense, sitting pretty in their Montgomery ‘Poverty Palace’ while crying about ‘hate’ to line their pockets. Even former staffers called their racket a ‘con,’” Kirk continued.
Kirk went on to say that the SPLC’s “game plan” is to “scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us.”
The Turning Point USA founder also cited the gunman’s 2012 attack on the Family Research Council, adding that the SPLC would “love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.”
“But it’s 2025, and nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore,” Kirk asserted. “The SPLC is a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again.”
“They’re not just irrelevant — they’re a cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility,” the TPUSA founder added. “Maybe someone should take a hard look at where all that ‘nonprofit’ money’s really going?”
In 2017, Karl Zinsmeister, writer and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, asserted in a video from PragerU’s Five-Minute Videos series, “Free thinking and speech are threatened” by the SPLC, “a group with a sweet-sounding name that conceals a nefarious purpose.”
Watch below:
While the SPLC started out as a civil rights law firm in 1971, the organization “reinvented itself in the mid-80s as a political attack group,” Zinsmeister explained, adding that “every year,” the SPLC “produces a new list of people and charities it claims are extremists and haters.”
“Aided by glowing coverage from the establishment media, the SPLC’s hate list has become a weapon for taking individuals and groups they disagree with and tarring them with ugly associations,” Zinsmeister said.
That same year, D. James Kennedy Ministries filed a federal religious discrimination lawsuit against the SPLC for labeling the Christian organization a hate group due to its stance on LGBT issues.
A tactic used by the SPLC “to trigger fearful reactions toward its political opponents is to dramatically exaggerate the number of ‘hate groups’ in America,” a writ of certiorari read.
“A review of SPLC’s extensive hate map can be terrifying to the uninformed reader. The map, however, is largely a political attack on peaceful organizations,” the petition added.
The petition goes on to explain that the SPLC exaggerates the number of “hate groups” by “naming peaceful, respected, mainstream organizations to its list, not because they are hateful, but simply as punishment for their social and political views.”
“What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there’s a logical relationship,” syndicated columnist Don Feder wrote in 2007.
Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet told Breitbart News, “The SPLC is a case study in how to destroy your own credibility.”
Kolvet elaborated:
At this point, if you’re a real conservative, adhere to real Christian teachings, or simply support President Trump, you end up on the SPLC’s ridiculous Hate Map. The SPLC is a grift, and a destructive one. You have to hate over half of America to buy into it, and sadly, there’s still a minority of institutional power centers that take it seriously.
That’s changing, thankfully, but ultimately it’s a compliment when the SPLC thinks you’re having too big of an impact and adds you to their list. From campus outreach and engagement to ballot chasing and voter registration efforts, Turning Point, with its constellation of sister organizations and projects, has proven to be one of the most consequential grassroots efforts in the country, and it’s clear the SPLC agrees.
Last year, the SPLC placed Gays Against Groomers — a group run by gays — on its “hate map” for opposing sex changes for children, a stance that the majority of Americans agree with.
In 2023, the left-wing organization placed Moms for Liberty and other parental rights group on its “hate map” for being what it referred to as “anti-government extremist groups.”
The SPLC has even labeled the conservative Christian legal advocacy firm Alliance Defending Freedom an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” citing its work in developing religious liberty legislation and case law.
Breitbart News has also been a target of the SPLC’s false smears.
While the SPLC does not list its donors, the accusatory group is known to be funded by the elite.
In 2020, a startling investigation found that Amazon provided charitable funding to the hyper-liberal group through the AmazonSmile customer giving program.
As Breitbart News reported in 2016, SPLC’s founder, Morris Dees, who is known for his fundraising ability, raised over $24 million for the George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972, for which he was given the donor list, the gold mine that provided much of SPLC’s later funding. Dees also worked on the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976, adding to SPLC’s donor list.
The SPLC’s top ten contributors from 2000 to 2014 include:
Picower Foundation — $3,793,112 from 2001 to 2008
JBP Foundation — $1,918,589 from 2011 to 2013
Cisco Systems Foundation — $1,620,000 from 2001 to 2004
Grove Foundation — $1,200,000 from 2003 to 2004
Public Welfare Foundation — $1,050,000 from 2008 to 2012
Unbound Philanthropy — $850,000 from 2006 to 2013
Schwab Charitable Fund — $758,540 from 2009 to 2014
Vanguard Charitable Endowment — $747,980 from 2006 to 2014
W.K. Kellogg Foundation — $650,000 from 2010 to 2014
Rice Family Foundation — $635,000 from 2000 to 2013
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
