Editor’s note: The Babylon Bee is considering legal action after the Southern Poverty Law Center published the names of writers who wished to be anonymous. The commentary below predates that news.
Still smarting from the loss of its access to Washington as President-elect Donald Trump gears up to reenter the White House, the Left’s cancel culture enforcer has trained its sights on Not the Bee, the real-news partner of the Christian satire site The Babylon Bee.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left smear factory that gaslights its donors and engages in routine defamation against mainstream conservatives and Christians, targeted Not the Bee after Tesla Founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022. One of Musk’s first directives at Twitter was restoring The Babylon Bee’s speech on the platform, and it seems likely he bought the social media platform in part for this reason. Twitter had silenced the Bee for the crime of disagreeing with transgender orthodoxy, one of the key issues on which the SPLC will brook no dissent.
In fact, this connection may explain a secondary motive behind the SPLC’s attack.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon revealed the SPLC’s forthcoming attack in a post on X Tuesday.
“The discredited, scandal-ridden smear factory known as the SPLC is about to publish a hit piece doxxing several of our ‘Not the Bee’ writers who wished to remain anonymous so they could speak freely, without fear,” he wrote. “The SPLC extracted sensitive information from our site, then used that information to contact our writers directly.”
Dillon said the SPLC went digging for the information “because they’re left-wing activists masquerading as journalists.”
“They did it because they lack principles,” he added. “They did it because they’re vindictive bullies who’ve admitted their aim is to ‘completely destroy’ individuals and organizations they disagree with by making them pay a steep price for speaking freely.”
Dillon admitted that since he’s a public figure, he accepts that getting attacked “comes with the territory.”
“What I won’t accept is the doxxing and smearing of our staff because they said some things the SPLC doesn’t like,” he added.
The SPLC published its attack on Not the Bee Tuesday, naming 14 pseudonymous writers.
Why Is It Called the SPLC?
The Babylon Bee CEO is exactly right. In fact, he arguably understates his case.
As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC began as a noble civil rights nonprofit, providing legal representation to poor people in the South. It won some major cases, getting black men who had been falsely convicted of rape off of death row and even representing white people who faced reverse racism (yes, even some on the Left used to care about that).
Beginning in the 1980s, however, the SPLC began a massive—and quite lucrative—rebrand. The organization’s co-founder, Morris Dees, had an uncle in the Ku Klux Klan, and his familiarity with the Klan naturally bred a rather just contempt. Dees began targeting Klan groups to sue them into bankruptcy, and since he was doing this in the 1980s—and not in the Klan’s heyday of the 1920s or the 1950s—he found it rather easy. In fact, SPLC staff compared taking the Klan to court to “shooting fish in a barrel.”
Suing the Klan paid dividends. Dees cast a grand narrative of himself as a noble knight, slaying grand dragons in the courtroom. Northern liberals, who saw the South as a den of hateful white rednecks, sent massive checks.
SPLC’s do-gooder attorneys weren’t happy with the work. Many of the left-leaning attorneys didn’t appreciate SPLC’s work with law enforcement, and they wanted to help people who actually needed it, not find every excuse imaginable to sue Klan groups that had barely a cent to their name.
They quit en masse in 1986, while Dees doubled down on the strategy.
The Hate Map
Eventually, Dees ran out of grand dragons to slay, so rather than abandoning the strategy, he started casting a wider net. In a stroke of fundraising genius, the SPLC expanded its “Klanwatch” project into “Hatewatch,” and started publishing a map plotting small and ineffectual “hate groups” alongside Klan chapters. Gradually, the SPLC added more and more mainstream organizations to the “hate map.”
Today, the SPLC’s “hate map” is a political and ideological enemies list that the SPLC uses to scare donors into ponying up cash and to “mortally embarrass” those who dare disagree with its leftist agenda.
If you disagree with the SPLC’s open-borders approach on immigration, you’re an “anti-immigrant hate group.” If you don’t think kids should be told that a boy can become a girl and vice versa, you’re an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” If you condemn the ideology of radical Islam, you’re an “anti-Muslim extremist.” If you support parental rights in education, you’re an “antigovernment extremist group.”
This isn’t hyperbole. The SPLC does actually put conservative groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Moms for Liberty on the “hate map” alongside Klan chapters. The SPLC’s Year in Hate and Extremism 2023 report, released in June, describes the groups on the map as “organizational infrastructure… upholding white supremacy.”
As for the idea that the SPLC aims to “completely destroy” those they disagree with? Dillon is exactly right.
SPLC spokesman Mark Potok said so at the annual conference of the Michigan Alliance Against Hate Crimes in Lansing, Mich., in 2007.
“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them,” he said.
Potok reiterated this point at a Vermont school group in 2008. “You are able to destroy these groups sometimes by the things you publish,” he declared. “It’s not so much that they will bring down the police or the federal agents on their head, it’s that you can sometimes so mortally embarrass these groups that they will be destroyed.”
The Results
In 2012, an LGBTQ activist targeted the conservative Christian nonprofit the Family Research Council for an attempted mass shooting. The building manager, Leo Johnson, prevented the attack, but the terrorist later confessed to the FBI that he intended to kill everyone in the building. He pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is serving a 25-year sentence.
The SPLC rightly condemned the attack, but it has kept FRC on the “hate map” ever since.
Companies like Amazon, Eventbrite, and NextDoor have used the SPLC to exclude people they brand “extremists.”
Legacy media outlets, Democrats, and others consider the SPLC a reliable arbiter of “hate,” despite the group’s many scandals.
The Scandals
In 2019, a reckoning came for the SPLC. The group fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, and saw its president, Richard Cohen, resign. This took place amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. Amid the scandal, a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Yet the SPLC brought in Tina Tchen, former first lady Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, to run an internal review, and the results of that review have never seen the light of day. It seems Tchen’s job was to brush the scandal under the rug.
Employees weren’t happy, so they unionized. Earlier this year, the SPLC restructured in what union leaders are calling “classic union-busting behavior.”
The SPLC also faces multiple defamation lawsuits. It paid more than $3 million to settle a lawsuit after branding a Muslim reformer an “anti-Islamic extremist.” Last year, a judge allowed the Dustin Inman Society’s defamation lawsuit against the SPLC to move forward.
Why Attack Not the Bee?
Despite all these scandals, the SPLC has enjoyed undeserved clout. Many on the Left prop up this corrupt organization because it is politically useful—an attack dog they can cite to demonize conservatives.
As I wrote in my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the SPLC has had tremendous access to the federal bureaucracy under President Joe Biden.
SPLC leaders and staff have visited the White House at least 18 times. Biden nominated an SPLC attorney, Nancy Abudu, to a top federal judgeship, and she was confirmed in 2023. SPLC leaders have briefed leaders at the Justice Department and the Department of Education about “hate” and “extremism,” and the FBI’s Richmond office notoriously cited the SPLC in its 2023 memo on “radical traditional Catholics.”
The SPLC will likely lose this access in January, as President-elect Trump takes office. The far-left group may harbor some resentment at The Babylon Bee for this development, because Elon Musk appears to have bought Twitter in part to liberate The Babylon Bee, and Musk’s purchase of Twitter loosened the Left’s stranglehold on information. Musk’s new platform, X, has circumvented the Left’s ability to censor information that conflicts with its narrative in the name of suppressing “misinformation,” and this development likely helped Trump prevail in the 2024 presidential election.
Not only does the SPLC want to silence Not the Bee’s reporting on cultural issues, but it also likely harbors resentment against the entire Bee enterprise.
