Southern Poverty Law Center weaponized hate and hurt the innocent

In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center slapped a target on ordinary parents’ backs.That’s when it added Moms for Liberty, Defending Education, and 10 other parents’ rights groups to its list of “anti-government extremists” — feeding them directly into the SPLC’s widely circulated “Hate Map,” alongside neo-Nazi organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.Those designations deserve another look in light of Tuesday’s bombshell Department of Justice announcement.An Alabama grand jury has indicted the SPLC for wire fraud, false statements and conspiracy to commit money laundering — based on shocking allegations that the left-wing nonprofit directed over $3 million in donor funds to the KKK, the American Nazi Party,  Aryan Nation and other violent extremists. The SPLC was thereby manufacturing the hate it claimed to be fighting — and the alleged payoffs were just one element of its two-part strategy.Broadening its “extremist” designations to include any idea not in keeping with the far left was the other tool in its toolbox.Parent groups could fall afoul of the SPLC’s hate label for something as basic as standing up for merit-based admissions policies in specialized education programs.The SPLC maligned them for opposing critical race theory and racist practices like “affinity groups” that divide students by race in their schools.They were attacked for objecting to radical gender-affirmation practices and ideologies in the classroom.Merely asserting that girls’ sports should be exclusively reserved for biological girls is both “pseudoscience” and “demonizing trans people,” according to the SPLC, and therefore evil.And New York City politicians like Comptroller Mark Levine, then Manhattan borough president, gleefully latched on to the SPLC’s label to defame parents like me for merely associating with any of the named groups.When Moms for Liberty held a town hall in Manhattan in January 2024, those of us inside talked about curriculu...