Prairie State Wire

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), known for its civil rights advocacy and tracking of extremist groups, has included conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in its latest “Year in Hate and Extremism” report. The designation has drawn responses from public figures and organizations who say the SPLC is using its influence to marginalize political opponents.

TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, an Arlington Heights native, and Elon Musk responded after TPUSA was listed alongside violent white nationalist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, in the SPLC’s report.

Kirk called the SPLC’s designation a “cheap smear” and accused the group of running a “scam” to raise money. He claimed the SPLC pressures banks and schools to cut ties with TPUSA and that its “hate map” incites violence against conservative groups.

Elon Musk agreed, calling the SPLC a "scam organization."

TPUSA has active chapters at several universities across Illinois, including Illinois State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), and the University of Chicago. 

These chapters are involved in promoting TPUSA’s mission of advocating for free markets, limited government and traditional American values.

However, the SPLC described TPUSA as part of the political right promoting white supremacy through aggressive state power.  

Some organizations have highlighted their own inclusion on the SPLC’s Hatewatch list. Awake Illinois, for example, refers to itself in its X biography as a “SPLC ‘hate list’ ‘23 winner.”

Despite agreeing with the SPLC’s original goal to combat white supremacy, Mark Herr, president and co-founder of the Center for Self-Governance, said the organization’s hidden agenda is far more radical. 

“Their motive is not actually stopping white supremacy,” Herr told Prairie State Wire. “Their motive is collapsing the system they believe promotes white supremacy, and those are two different things.”

Herr said he was also targeted by the SPLC, which he said affected his group’s funding.

“I have a website called rejectallracialsupremacy.com and I sent a personal letter to SPLC,” he said. “They put us up—they put my organization on their list. We were canceled by Amazon Smile.”

AmazonSmile was a website where shoppers could support a charity of their choice by making their online purchases through the platform.

“It’s actual corporations like Amazon that were—but that are no longer—using SPLC’s list. Currently, NextDoor, Meetup.com, and others have policies that, based on SPLC’s list, were then censoring and then terminating their account,” Herr said.

Herr said the SPLC’s influence extends into law enforcement and government. He cited examples including Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s reported use of SPLC intelligence in the case involving the alleged 2020 plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He said SPLC data was used by the FBI in operations that included informants and undercover tactics.

“SPLC is not just at the federal level of government law enforcement,” he said. “They're embedded in state governments—as like the secretary of state for Michigan (Jocelyn Benson). She's a former SPLC employee. (Michigan Attorney General) Dana Nessel using the list for the Michigan Gov. Whitmer stuff.”

Defense attorneys argue that the FBI lured the four men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 by targeting their anti-government views and encouraging their involvement. The men were allegedly swayed by informants and federal agents who organized militia meetings and training sessions. 

Herr, who lives in Washington, expanded on how political leaders are using the threat of white supremacy to push broader agendas. 

“Literally the governor came out in Washington just a couple of days ago saying that white supremacy is the number one threat to Washington State, and most of us are looking at each other going, ‘what?’” he said. 

He referenced politically motivated killings by individuals such as Luigi Mangione and Elias Rodriguez, and pointed to Democratic support for the 2020 George Floyd protests, which resulted in over $2 billion in damages in cities such as Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and at least 25 deaths.

“Again, I want to come back to this point—I believe they're using the white supremacy to hide their modern abolition of the U.S. system because they think that it is structurally defective and the source of any type of oppression,” Herr said. 

In 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center president revealed that multiple Biden administration agencies sought the SPLC’s guidance to shape domestic terrorism policies, which have since targeted parents’ groups, churches, military personnel and pro-life organizations.

Congressional scrutiny has recently intensified over the SPLC’s nonprofit status and its relationship with federal law enforcement, with lawmakers probing its role in defining and targeting domestic threats.  

Herr emphasized the political nature of these activities and SPLC’s ambiguous definitions of extremism. 

“I would argue that they are not politically unbiased. That’s the critical thing here — they’re controlling an ambiguous definition of extreme,” Herr said. 

He also described what he sees as the SPLC’s broader ideological perspective.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center believes that our system of government is structurally defective and needs to be either dismantled or completely changed,” he said. “Their strategy for doing that includes labeling their political opponents, whom they think are living in illusion and deserve to be treated this way.”

He compared SPLC’s tactics to historic religious conflicts.

“How is that any different than the Catholics' view of the Protestants and the Protestants' view of Puritans and so on and so forth? It's the same pig, different lipstick in my opinion,” Herr said. 

Herr said his critique is not of the SPLC’s stated goals, but rather what he sees as the group’s deeper ideological motivations.

“I would question not SPLC's fight against white supremacy. I would question their underlying ideology by which they're hiding behind,” he said. 

He also argued that the SPLC focuses narrowly on white supremacy while disregarding or even endorsing other extremist ideologies.

“It does seem hypocritical to me that they can easily hide behind white supremacy, yet literally their employees support a foreign terrorist organization legally designated by the Department of State called Hamas in October of 1997,” he said. “Even in their curriculum, Learning for Justice, which is a subsidiary of SPLC, they teach that Israel, quote, is more terroristic than Hamas.”

Herr also traced the SPLC’s evolution since its founding in the 1970s, describing its transition from fighting the Ku Klux Klan to embracing broad, ambiguous definitions of extremism that target a wide swath of conservatives in the mid 1990s.

“Where SPLC starts embedding themselves in what I’m going to refer to as a honeypot gaslight doctrine,” he said. 

He argued that the SPLC’s intelligence and training to law enforcement have created a system where peaceful conservatives are labeled dangerous extremists and monitored aggressively.  

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reportedly paid over a million dollars to PlanetRisk to trace the movements of cellphones at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This contractor was also linked to a government surveillance project called VISR (Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), underscoring SPLC’s use of advanced tracking technology to monitor rally participants.

“Case in point, recently the evidence of SPLC providing intelligence to an FBI department in Richmond, Virginia on Catholics. Then the FBI using that as a means of sourcing it as credible information that they need to produce a confidential human source to insert into the Catholic Church,” he said. 

Herr said he is concerned about the SPLC’s increasing presence in law enforcement training programs.

“SPLC is now entering in the world of providing intelligence and training to many of our local, state, and federal law enforcements across the United States,” he said.