Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
A new nonprofit organization has released a map revealing leftist groups spewing hate and inspiring violence, countering the narrative that all animus and political violence comes from the Right.
The map aims to balance the notorious far-left bias of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy and creating a map to monitor Klan groups and others it claimed were fellow travelers.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has since grown to include many mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits that have nothing to do with hate, much less white supremacy, yet the SPLC continues to claim the map shows the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”
The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit dedicated to applying equal standards of tolerance to balance the Left’s cancel culture, launched its own hate map to counter that narrative.
“I can forgive the general public for thinking that hate and violence are exclusively the domain of the far Right—that’s the message they’ve been receiving for years from much of the mass media and the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Gregory Angelo, president of the New Tolerance Campaign, told The Daily Signal. “The NTC Hate Map is designed to counter that narrative by showing the volume of hate promoted and perpetuated on the American Left. If we’re truly going to address all hate in the United States, we need to be honest about it.”
The NTC Hate Map includes 184 organizations, as of Friday.
“All of the organizations and individuals listed have promoted, inspired, or directly engaged in physical violence against those with whom they disagree,” the campaign’s webpage states. “This list was compiled through an extensive review of extremist group publications and materials, and reports by the public, law enforcement, field sources and the news media.”
Angelo said he intends to build up the list, but the New Tolerance Campaign also maintains far more stringent rules than the SPLC.
The SPLC’s 2023 “hate map” includes 1,430 organizations branded “hate groups” or “antigovernment groups.” The SPLC has faced criticism for employing a sticky definition of hate:
The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization or collection of individuals that —based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities—has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. An organization does not need to have engaged in criminal conduct or have followed their speech with actual unlawful action to be labeled a hate group. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC applies this definition overly broadly against conservatives and far too narrowly for any group on the Left. Among other things, the SPLC has cited as “hate” a Roman Catholic leader’s decision to cite the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This suggests the SPLC should brand the entire Catholic Church a “hate group” if it were to be consistent. The SPLC branded an openly gay group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” earlier this year because the gay group opposes the sexualization of children.
Although the SPLC does include the antisemitic Nation of Islam on its “hate map,” the rioters with Antifa and Black Lives Matter or pro-abortion agitators with Jane’s Revenge don’t make an appearance. Students for Justice in Palestine, a notorious anti-Israel group that often engages in harassment of Jewish students on college campuses, is also conspicuously absent from the SPLC map.
The NTC Hate Map may include less than a fifth of the number of groups as the SPLC’s map, but it manages to correct SPLC’s most egregious oversights. The map includes Black Lives Matter and Jane’s Revenge, along with 12 chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and 12 Antifa groups (including Portland’s infamous “Rose City Antifa”). Students for Justice in Palestine has over 250 chapters, so NTC chose which chapters to include by examining evidence of direct antisemitic attacks and violence.
The campaign’s map also includes Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the organizations behind the anti-Israel riots on college campuses earlier this year, and the John Brown Gun Club, a leftist pro-gun group that frequently associates with Antifa, the anti-police movement, and other leftist causes.
Perhaps most notably, the NTC Hate Map includes the Southern Poverty Law Center itself. A terrorist used the SPLC’s “hate map” to target a conservative Christian nonprofit for an attempted mass shooting in 2012. The man, convicted on terrorism charges, confessed to using SPLC’s map to target the Family Research Council.
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former SPLC employee said the organization’s “hate” accusations were a “highly profitable scam” to bilk donors. The SPLC has faced many defamation lawsuits over its accusations, and one of those lawsuits—brought by the Dustin Inman Society—has made it to the discovery process, heading toward trial.
The NTC Hate Map may be new, but it already shows signs of beating the SPLC at its own game.
