(LifeSiteNews) – The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reportedly laid off more than 60 employees this week, representing a quarter of its staff, amid allegations of gross misuse of donations.
On Wednesday, the SPLC Union, which represents SPLC employees, announced the layoffs in a lengthy X/Twitter thread detailing the cuts as including the entire “Learning for Justice” department and “Southern Immigrant Freedom Initiative” of an organization it says has “nearly a billion dollars in reserves” and was “given an F rating by CharityWatch for ‘hoarding’ donations.”
“SPLC’s decision has a catastrophic impact on the organization’s work in support of immigrants seeking justice and its mission to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance human rights through support of educators,” the union bemoaned.
It claimed that the cuts are “designed to punish Union activists and intimidate employees just as we saw when Mercedes-Benz fired union organizers in Vance, Alabama. Management’s goals here are clear, but they will not win. Our union is strong.”
SPLC currently has no statement about the layoffs on its website or X account but told the Associated Press that it “is undergoing an organizational restructuring” that involved staff reductions, without confirming a specific number. The move was a “difficult but necessary decision to focus and align our work with our programmatic priorities and goals,” it said.
Hannah Gais, one of the laid-off SPLC “journalists,” said she “endorse(s) each and every single word of” the SPLC Union’s condemnation of her former employer, adding that “an organization with this much money has no excuse.”
SPLC has long been notorious for labeling mainstream Christian and/or conservative organizations – such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Jihad Watch – “hate groups” to be distrusted by the public and blacklisted from various online platforms and services.
In 2012, would-be mass shooter Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the lobby of the socially conservative Family Research Council (FRC), armed with SPLC’s “hate group” list and planning to, in his own words, “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” Nobody was killed thanks to the intervention of security guard Leo Johnson, who was wounded, but the link between SPLC’s message and a violent left-wing extremist was far more linear than common claims of “dangerous extremism” on the political Right.
Over the past few years, SPLC was forced to make a public apology and pay $3.4 million in defamation damages to Maajid Nawaz’s Quilliam Foundation, ousted co-founder Morris Dees for alleged “inappropriate conduct,” and has endured testimony from insiders that the organization is a “highly profitable scam” and that Dees saw “civil rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”