History of violence: How the SPLC's demonization racket helped set the stage for at least 1 shooting

The Southern Poverty Law Center was formally incorporated in 1971 by a pair of Alabama lawyers keen on handling anti-discrimination cases and advancing the cause of civil rights in the United States.The SPLC morphed over time into a smear- and fear-mongering racket, raking in millions of dollars in contributions — over $106.47 million in fiscal year 2024 alone — and paying its executives gargantuan salaries while both attacking law-abiding conservatives and allegedly funding the very extremism it purportedly seeks to curb.On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury in Alabama returned an indictment charging the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The organization is accused of secretly dumping over $3 million in donated funds to individuals linked to various extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America — groups the SPLC was supposedly fighting against.'The SPLC hate group label will almost undoubtedly make it into press reports about future events.'While liberal donors might now be waking up to the fact that the SPLC is a radical and rotten organization, conservatives have long recognized it as a menace and for good reason: The SPLC's mischaracterizations and alarmist rhetoric helped set the stage for at least one shooting.The Family Research Council is a conservative think tank that promotes family, marriage, and the rights of the unborn and speaks forcefully against divorce, pornography, and sexual deviancy. By maintaining orthodox and principled biblical stances on various social issues, the FRC found itself on the SPLC's radar.The liberal hate racket listed the Family Research Council as an "anti-gay group" in a winter 2010 report and put it on the same list of extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations — groups that allegedly "have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."RELATED: SPLC indictment BOMBSHELL: Charlottesville violence allegedly was a leftist-funded 'false flag' Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesHeidi Beirich, then-research director at the SPLC, said there was no difference between the FRC and the KKK in the eyes of the SPLC; that "what we're saying is these [anti-gay] groups perpetrate hate — just like those [racist] organizations do."The SPLC's hate-mongering ultimately set the stage for a terrorist attack against the Family Research Council.Floyd Lee Corkins II stormed into the office of the FRC in Washington, D.C., armed with a gun on Aug. 15, 2012. Corkins later told investigators that he got the name of the conservative organization from the SPLC's list of alleged anti-gay groups and that he intended to kill as many FRC employees as he could.'They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.'The terrorist proved unable to execute his massacre thanks to the bravery of Leonardo Reno Johnson, the unarmed security guard on duty that day.Despite catching a bullet to the arm, Johnson managed to disarm and subdue the shooter."Floyd Corkins was responsible for firing the shot yesterday that wounded one of our colleagues and our friend Leo Johnson," said Tony Perkins, president of the FRC, "but Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center."The SPLC displaced any and all blame for the attack, stating the day after the shooting that "Perkins' accusation is outrageous" and that the FRC "should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people."As evidenced by its serial demonization of other conservatives and conservative groups, including Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk, the hate racket clearly did not learn anything from the incident.The SPLC's "Year in Hate and Extremism 2024" report contained a lengthy section titled "Turing Point USA: A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024."This section stated that:"Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists and a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics";TPUSA under Kirk was "emblematic" of the American political right's supposed embrace of "aggressive state and federal power to enforce a social order rooted in white supremacy" against a backdrop of "patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions";TPUSA was advancing a "narrow vision" that fights for "white, male, Christian dominance in America" and results in the demonization of nonconforming men, women, and "nonbinary people"; andKirk framed Christianity as superior and Christians as persecuted to justify TPUSA's "extreme, authoritarian vision for the country that threatens the foundation of our democracy."Kirk knew full-well what the hate racket was up to, stating on...