The Lessons for Conservatives in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Struggles

I t’s bad news for left-wing activists who want to silence or place a Justice Department target on the backs of their conservative political opponents, but good news for almost everyone else: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) employees’ union, the major left-wing fundraising factory is laying off one-fourth of its staff.

One could follow the old Top Gear meme and dismiss it with an “Oh no! Anyway.” But there are lessons to learn as one roots for injuries in the fight within an advocacy group that demonizes mainstream conservative education-advocacy groups, devises teaching materials to instill left-wing race and gender propaganda into elementary-school lessons, and was forced to oust its leadership in 2019 amid scandal over the mistreatment of staff allegedly on the basis of race and sex. The fracas illustrates that liberals and progressives often do not live up to their stated commitments on employee power and worker rights, that organized labor is profoundly committed to a full-spectrum “Everything Leftism,” and that the SPLC does not deserve the moral high ground that the metropolitan press too often gives it.

The first lesson is that liberalism’s commitment to employee organizing, labor unionism, and worker power often ends at its own office doorsteps. According to the union, a biased source that has legal and public-relations incentives to make its members’ employer look as bad as possible, as all unions in a workplace dispute do, the SPLC’s layoffs decapitated the union, ousting “five Union stewards and our Union Chair” and did so “less than a year before we will bargain our second contract.”

When businesses targeted by union organizing or in a fight with their union coincidentally lay off or fire union organizers for a separate legitimate cause, liberals are first to the barricades to declare that these acts are illegal retaliation for union organizing if not cause for the government to step in and give the union whatever it is demanding. But SPLC, which has received small (relative to its nearly $48 million annual income and $711 million asset pile) contributions from labor unions, is hardly the first left-wing group to put its employer power over political commitments that it would impose on everyone else: regional affiliates of Planned Parenthood, media outlets like Vox Media, and even labor unions themselves such as the National Education Association have faced allegations of what one might charitably call hard-nosed responses to union campaigns.

The second lesson should be a restatement of things that conservatives already know: Unions are just progressive activist groups by another name. Sure, it’s not entirely fair to hold just the SPLC union, being a literal union of progressive activists, against all of Big Labor, but the union’s statement on the layoffs focuses on how the layoffs will supposedly hold back SPLC’s left-wing activism. And the SPLC union is part of the broader Big Labor infrastructure: It’s a member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents journalists and activist-group employees and the Communications Workers of America union, one of America’s most left-wing major unions.

From the bottom to the top, Big Labor is left-wing, and conservatives should remember that.

Finally, the last lesson serves as a conclusion: The SPLC is not the moral arbiter that left-wing corporate and nonprofit activists think it should be. The Service Employees International Union–backed Amalgamated Charitable Foundation, charity-rating service GuideStar (now Candid), and various Big Tech companies have all used or said that they would use the SPLC as a supposed arbiter of “hate groups” or hate speech online. All were, wittingly or unwittingly, giving over their power of judgment to a radical left-wing activist group with a history of scandal. One hopes that they, and other American culture and power brokers, have learned their lesson.