The Left eats its own, and it seems the Southern Poverty Law Center is no exception.
The SPLC—a far-left smear factory notorious for demonizing conservatives and Christians as being as hateful as the KKK and for spreading woke dogma in schools—has its own labor union, and members of that union overwhelmingly cast a vote of “no confidence” in SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang.
The vast majority of the SPLC Union’s voting members (141 of 156, or 90.4%) cast ballots urging the SPLC to find a new CEO. The union presented this demand to the SPLC Board of Directors on Aug. 30, and one week later, SPLC Board Chair Karen Baynes-Dunning denied the request.
According to a union press release, its members expressed a “lack of confidence in Margaret Huang and want SPLC to find a new CEO.”
The move comes two months after the SPLC Union broke the news of mass layoffs at the SPLC in June. The SPLC “gutted its staff by a quarter,” laying off more than 60 union members, including five union stewards and the union’s chair.
The union also claimed the layoffs will substantially affect various departments, including Learning for Justice (SPLC’s education arm); support staff in the fundraising, media, and legal departments; and “immigrant justice legal teams.”
What the Union Says
“From the start, the board’s lack of engagement with our union has made them complacent and complicit in all harm Huang and her leadership team create,” Lisa Wright, the SPLC Union chair who was laid off after more than 23 years at the organization, said in the news release Monday. “We believe Baynes-Dunning hired Huang in 2020 to bust our union. Huang has a proven track record of hostility toward unionization.”
“The layoffs have been riddled with inconsistencies, errors, and confusion,” Wright added. “We’ve filed multiple grievances regarding contract violations, some of which we expect to progress to arbitration and possibly litigation.”
Wright claimed that the SPLC failed to present a plan for transitioning the casework of laid-off lawyers, and that Huang gave conflicting messages about the reasons for the layoffs.
The SPLC consists of two entities: a nonprofit under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code that can’t lobby for bills or political candidates and another nonprofit under Section 501(c)(4) of the code that can engage in lobbying. Huang reportedly told the (c)(4) board that SPLC made the layoffs due to a “$13 million deficit” in the (c)(3) organization’s budget, while she told the (c)(3) board and the union that SPLC made the layoffs for strategic reasons, not financial ones.
Baynes-Dunning told the union that board members “unanimously reaffirm our approval of this strategic direction and unanimously support Margaret Huang’s ongoing leadership as president & CEO.”
According to the union, SPLC staff had expressed “alarmingly low confidence and trust in SPLC leadership in multiple organization-wide surveys.” In 2022, only 49% of staff expressed confidence in leadership; that number had fallen to 44% shortly before the layoffs.
The SPLC’s Response
“We respect the bargaining unit’s right to oppose the changes to the SPLC programs and activities, and we empathize with all employees who were impacted by the staff restructure,” the SPLC told The Alabama Reflector, an independent news website.
“These decisions are never easy, but necessary to strengthen our strategic framework and focus so that we can meet the challenges of this decade and beyond,” the organization said.
The News Guild, the umbrella union organization of which the SPLC Union is a part, urged members of other unions to sign a letter demanding that SPLC’s board remove Huang, bargain with the union to reverse layoffs, and “meaningfully involve the SPLC Union in finding, interviewing, and hiring a new CEO.”
As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 people had signed the letter.
A More Likely Culprit?
After Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,139 people in Israel in gruesome terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center remained silent on the issue for nearly a month. Meanwhile, the SPLC Union released a statement condemning Israel’s military response to Hamas in the adjoining Gaza Strip.
When the SPLC finally released its own statement, it condemned Hamas but also accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian civilians.” The SPLC then stealth-edited the statement after The Daily Signal drew attention to it.
The SPLC’s reticence to take a stand on Israel likely revealed the Left’s fissures—a generational divide between young activists who oppose Israel and an older, pro-Israel donor class. This divide also separates the SPLC Union—which organizes alongside the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace—and the organization’s management.
Layoffs and accusations of union busting do explain the SPLC Union’s move against Huang, but the issue of Israel may also play a role. The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the real reasons behind the layoffs.
What Is the SPLC?
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC routinely smears mainstream conservative and Christian organizations by placing them on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
The SPLC uses the “hate map” as a reputational weapon to silence those who dissent from its woke agenda. While the SPLC’s education arm Learning for Justice pushes critical race theory (a lens teaching kids that white people are oppressors and blacks oppressed) and gender ideology, the “hate map” smears parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education as “extremists.”
Conservative Christian groups that advocate religious freedom and define marriage as between one man and one woman appear on the SPLC map as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups.” National security experts who warn against radical Islamist terrorism find themselves branded “anti-Muslim hate groups.” Advocacy groups that call for the enforcement of immigration law and oppose open borders appear on the map as “anti-immigrant hate groups.”
This year, the SPLC even added an openly homosexual group—Gays Against Groomers—to its list of “anti-LGBTQ hate groups.”
Critics on both the Right and the Left have defended law firms such as Alliance Defending Freedom from the SPLC’s smears.
In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder and saw its president resign amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. At that time, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
The SPLC currently faces a defamation lawsuit that crossed a major legal hurdle last year.
Why Should Americans Care?
Many conservatives know the Southern Poverty Law Center has no credibility on hate, and many conservative groups expressed mock outrage at being left off the “hate map” earlier this year. Yet the federal government under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have missed the memo.
Earlier this year, the FBI’s Richmond office notoriously wrote an internal memo calling for surveillance at Catholic churches. That memo cited the SPLC’s list of “radical traditional Catholic hate groups.” One day after a brave whistleblower exposed the memo, the FBI issued a rare public retraction, saying the memo “does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.”
This one memo was the tip of the iceberg.
In the fall of 2021, Huang bragged that the incoming administration had reached out to the SPLC earlier in the year for help in fighting “domestic terrorism.”
“I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang said in a fundraising video.
The SPLC briefed the Justice Department after it released a new version of its “hate map” in 2023.
Leaders of the Southern Poverty Law Center met with a high-ranking official of the Department of Education a few months before it added the parental rights group Moms for Liberty to the “hate map.”
SPLC leaders and staff have attended White House meetings at least 18 times since January 2021, and Biden appointed an SPLC attorney, Nancy Abudu, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
The SPLC has long called for charitable institutions to blacklist conservatives on the “hate map,” and companies such as Eventbrite exclude SPLC-accused “hate groups” from their services.
