PBS, backed by your tax dollars, hosted the leader of a group that compares conservatives to the KKK, and she used the opportunity to demonize President-elect Donald Trump. Then PBS hosted one of her close allies who suggested that America failing to elect Vice President Kamala Harris emboldens misogyny.
The two segments make a rather eloquent case against continued public funding for PBS.
In late November, PBS reporter Stephanie Sy interviewed Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, about a series of racist text messages under investigation by the FBI. Sy noted that “we have no clearer sense of who sent” the text messages, but Huang—whose organization keeps mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—immediately connected the text messages to “hate groups” and Trump’s election victory.
“It’s really clear to us that hate and extremist groups are using the election of Donald Trump as an encouragement to cause fear and anxiety in communities of color, in religious communities, and in the LGBTQ community,” Huang said. “Because of his use of racist, sexist, and other discriminatory rhetoric on the campaign trail, he has essentially encouraged his followers to spew hateful rhetoric and he’s emboldened them to embrace this hateful ideology.”
Huang’s attack on Trump should surprise no one. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC weaponized its history in bankrupting Ku Klux Klan groups to demonize conservatives.
Its “hate map” plots chapters of the KKK alongside parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty, immigration groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, groups of doctors who dissent from gender ideology like Do No Harm, and conservative Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. Some of these groups advised Trump during his first term.
The Family Research Council, a policy nonprofit in Washington, D.C., faced a terrorist attack in 2012 inspired by the SPLC “hate map.”
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal at SPLC in 2019, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” After that scandal, SPLC staff formed their own union. Earlier this year, the union accused SPLC leadership of union-busting amid a restructure.
The Dustin Inman Society, a Georgia-based group that supports the enforcement of immigration law, sued the SPLC for defamation after the SPLC branded the society an “anti-immigrant hate group.” While a few of SPLC’s targets have sued for defamation, the SPLC often weasels out of being held accountable. The Dustin Inman Society’s lawsuit made it past SPLC’s motion to dismiss last year, marking a key step forward in holding the smear group accountable.
Despite all this, PBS decided to invite Huang on “PBS News Hour” to lecture viewers on “hate.”
To her credit, Sy briefly pressed Huang about Trump’s gains among Latinos and blacks in the 2024 presidential election.
Huang didn’t budge on her suggestion that Trump inspired racism, but she did acknowledge that some voters might have wanted a change “for economic reasons.”
“I think that many people who supported the president-elect did so because they share his rhetoric and ideology, but many other people did not,” she said. “Many people voted for him for economic reasons.”
She warned that Trump may treat his victory as “a mandate to embrace racial hatred or misogyny.”
Later in the interview, Huang attributed a reported rise in white supremacist incidents to Trump’s rhetoric.
“I think, again, so much of that was heard on the campaign trail from candidate Trump himself,” she said. “I think that’s what spurs so many other people to feel emboldened to embrace that rhetoric, and I think we’re going to see more of it for a time, particularly as Trump nominates people for senior-level positions in his administration who also echo that hateful rhetoric. We’re going to see more and more people openly embracing it.”
Huang mentioned that violence took place “on the campaign trail” and attributed the violence to organizations that support Trump.
“I think that is in fact the intention of these organizations,” she said. “They hope that this rhetoric and these hateful acts will actually encourage individuals to take action.”
Huang did not mention what “violence” took place on the campaign trail. Two particular moments of violence stand out—the two assassination attempts against Trump—and it seems rather peculiar for Huang to blame Trump supporters for inspiring these attacks on their candidate.
“PBS News Hour” ended the segment with this message: “The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 1,430 hate and antigovernment extremist groups in 2023.” PBS did not bother to note the loud criticisms SPLC has faced over the years—including from its own former employees—that these hate tallies are biased and inflated.
Two weeks after the segment, PBS featured a key SPLC ally and mentioned her work with the SPLC.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs and director of the school’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, spoke about a reported increase in misogynistic attacks online after the 2024 election. PBS also asked her about a report the Innovation Lab produced with the SPLC.
“PBS News Hour’s” White House correspondent, Laura Barrón-López, asked Miller-Idriss to “unpack” the “rise in misogynistic attacks online after the election.” Miller-Idriss mentioned posts with the terms “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen.”
“First, we have been seeing that increasing trend for probably something like 18 months to two years over the last period of time on many social media platforms,” Miller-Idriss said. “And what we saw right around the election, leading up to the election with a candidate who was a woman, a woman of color, and then the reproductive rights that were also sort of at the heart of the election in many ways, was a celebration … by some young men … of this reclaiming of power over women and power over women‘s bodies.”
Miller-Idriss did not mention that many Americans opposed Harris for reasons that have nothing to do with her sex or her skin color. She also declined to note that Trump and others who oppose gender ideology fight for the protection of women from men in sex-segregated spaces like restrooms, locker rooms, and prisons.
Barrón-López went on to ask Miller-Idriss about a report the Innovation Lab released alongside the SPLC titled, “Not Just a Joke: Understanding and Preventing Gender and Sexuality Based Bigotry.” While most Americans oppose bigotry, that report demonizes any dissent from gender ideology and lumps it in with “male supremacy.”
“Further, at the crossroads of pseudoscience and male supremacy, anti-LGBTQ+ adherents seeking to maintain rigid gender expectations allege that gender-affirming health care is dangerous,” the report states. This echoes the SPLC’s previous rhetoric attempting to demonize any dissent from experimental transgender medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile.
The SPLC is far outside the mainstream when it suggests that Americans who back the deportation of illegal aliens or who want to ban transgender medical experiments on kids are hateful supporters of white supremacy. It is high time PBS pays a price for promoting this morally bankrupt organization.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
