The far Left has found a new ultimate villain: homeschooling moms.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has added parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education to its “hate map,” plotting them alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC has long smeared conservative groups in this manner, but this move represented an attack on the parental rights movement on a grand scale.
The SPLC claims schools have been on the “receiving end” of “ramped up and coordinated right-wing attacks,” completely ignoring the recent sickening leftward lurch in education. From “Drag Queen Story Hour” to pornographic books in school libraries to schools encouraging kids to hide gender transition from their parents, left-leaning school officials are the real aggressors here, and parents are struggling to keep up.
Yet the SPLC demonized concerned parents as an “anti-student inclusion movement” and put them on the map with the Klan. The SPLC drew a connection between parental rights groups and the “uptown klans” of the 1950s, which opposed Brown v. Board of Education. Susan Corke, director of the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project” said groups like Moms for Liberty are “rooted in age-old white supremacy.”
>>> Southern Poverty Law Center’s Despicable Attack on Parental Rights Is a Sign of Leftist Panic
The attack would be laughable coming from somewhere else, but coming from the SPLC, it is both sinister and foreboding.
In fact, the SPLC’s attack seems eerily similar to the Department of Justice’s crackdown on parental rights protesters in 2021. Days after the National School Boards Association sent a letter comparing concerned parents to domestic terrorists back in 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo announcing the DOJ would direct resources to the “rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
An internal memo revealed that the Biden White House had collaborated with NSBA to draft the language of the letter, which urged the use of federal law enforcement and counterterrorism tools, including the Patriot Act, against parents.
That effort blew up in their faces. The FBI rescinded the memo and NSBA withdrew the letter, issuing an apology.
Yet the attacks on the parental rights movement have not stopped, and now the SPLC has gotten involved.
As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC began as a civil-rights nonprofit representing poor people in the South. It later began to target the Ku Klux Klan, suing many Klan groups into bankruptcy. All well and good, but after bankrupting many Klan groups, it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it against conservative organizations, branding them “hate groups” and placing them on the map with Klan chapters.
The SPLC uses the “hate group” accusation to shame conservatives into silence. Former SPLC spokesman Mark Potok said the organization’s “aim in life” is to “destroy these groups.” In 2012, a deranged man targeted the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting, using the “hate map.”
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former employee called the SPLC’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” Even left-leaning litigators like former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and Military Religious Freedom Foundation President Mikey Weinstein have defended the mainstream religious freedom nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom from the SPLC’s attacks.
Yet many on the Left and in the legacy media still uncritically cite the SPLC, and the Biden administration has also engaged with this discredited smear factory.
President Biden nominated an SPLC attorney by the name of Nancy Abudu to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Democrat-majority Senate confirmed her, even though 18 state attorneys general raised the alarm about her nomination.
Biden’s FBI also cited the SPLC in a memo targeting “radical-traditional Catholic hate groups.” While the FBI rushed to rescind the memo after a whistleblower published it, the fact that the FBI even considered such a memo speaks volumes.
Now that the SPLC has followed the DOJ’s lead in targeting concerned parents, it seems likely that the Biden administration may use the SPLC to relaunch the witch hunt it started in 2021.
This piece originally appeared in MSN
