In “The Kevin Roberts Show” on May 13, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and co-host Larry O’Connor said that the Southern Poverty Law Center has gone from promoting civil rights to encouraging left-wing extremism.
“It’s an organization that didn’t monitor violent extremists like they said they did,” O’Connor said. “Over time, it helped redefine ordinary political disagreement as some sort of moral disqualification and, frankly, divided our country even further.”
The SPLC is scheduled for a trial before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on May 20 for charges of committing wire fraud, manufacturing false statements, and conspiracy to send $3 million to the Ku Klux Klan—one of the entities the SPLC targeted in the past. The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil will testify against the SPLC with evidence he has gathered in his reporting over the last several years.
“What happened was each successive generation of leaders, of board members, of scholars at the SPLC were more radical. Such that, by the time I was in college in the early 1990s, and in the deep South at that time, to deny anything that the SPLC said in a political science or history class would be tantamount to self-identifying as a racist,” Roberts said. “And that obviously was very different from the early origins of the SPLC, which was not founded to eliminate free speech.”
Roberts said when he founded John Paul the Great Academy, a K-12 private Catholic school in Lafayette, Louisiana, he received backlash from the SPLC for participating in school choice, even though educational choice benefits impoverished families.
“We wanted to participate in Gov. Jindal’s school choice program for the benefit of poor students, most of whom, because we were in a deep South city of African Americans, were very happy to have any student of any background at our school. But because we were religious, and because the SPLC had labeled school choice as being racist, therefore we were double offenders,” Roberts said.
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Roberts added that the SPLC not only manufactured stories of racism but also exaggerated the amount of racism present in America.
“What they did was cause millions of Americans—their supporters—to believe that racism continued to exist on a scale and scope that it simply didn’t. That led those millions of Americans with different politics than yours and mine to conclude that all of us—not some of us—all of us on the political Right were fascists, racists, and Nazis by definition,” Roberts said to O’Connor.
With the trial scheduled for Wednesday, the SPLC will have to answer the accusations of Roberts and others.
“I have confidence that the SPLC will have some serious repercussions from their actions,” Roberts said.
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