Hear that? That rustling sound? It’s not the wind. It’s thousands of geriatric lefties shuffling toward their check books. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified yet another violent extremist group bent on subjugating minorities, sowing hatred, spreading militant fundamentalist white Christianity and engaging in armed anti-government resistance.

The latest of these malign actors against decency is … wait, it’s here somewhere … oh, yes: Moms who go to school board meetings are a threat to civil liberties and tolerance and rainbow-iced cupcakes and puppies and …

Sadly, plenty of mainstream media types are conditioned to respond as well. They dutifully repurpose SPLC’s terrifying press releases, no matter how often the group’s been discredited. And discredited it is.

It was once a noble force. It fought the KKK and financially destroyed it. That was back during the Nixon administration. Now it’s a progressive direct mail giant — a lefty hate group that makes money screaming “Hate Group” at anyone to the right of People for the American Way.

There’s fresh news about SPLC’s chicanery, but let’s run through a brief greatest hits, shall we?

2012: Unhinged gay activist Floyd Lee Corkins entered the Family Reseach Councill’s office in D.C. with a plan to kill everyone there and stuff their lifeless mouths full of Chick-fil-A. He got the idea and the address from SPLC’s Hate Map. James Hodgkinson was also an SPLC fan. He was the Bernie Bro who shot up the Republican baseball practice and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise.

2017: Forty-seven conservative groups addressed a letter to the mainstream media, calling on news outlets to immediately cut ties to SPLC.

2017: Department of Defense completely erased all SPLC related training materials on extremism from its Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). The FBI had already “distanced itself” from the SPLC.

2017: SPLC president refused to brand Antifa a “hate group.” (Just as today it won’t say that about “Jane’s Revenge.”)

2017: Liberal Politico writer Ben Schreckinger published “Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost its Way?” He quoted another liberal: “Time and again, I see the SPLC using the reputation it gained decades ago fighting the Klan as a tool to bludgeon mainstream politically conservative opponents.” He quoted another of SPLC’s shady practices: “The organization has always tried to find ways to milk money out of the public by finding whatever threat they can most credibly promote.”

2018: SPLC ordered to pay $3.4 million to a U.K. group that it smeared as anti-Muslim

2019: SPL co-founder Morris Dees fired for harassment, discrimination(!)

2023: The FBI is forced to disavow and apologize for a report warning that “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” were the new front in the war on White Christian Nationalism. It was based on information from the same group the FBI had previously distanced itself from: SPLC.

After all that, you’d think SPLC would sit quietly on the zillions it’s already socked away. But it’s still going after moms who don’t like dirty books in the classroom, and it just published its 2022 version of the Hate Map. The vampire grift won’t die.

Tyler O’Neil at the Daily Signal took a hard look at the map. He concluded that SPLC is no more reliable than it ever was, and he quoted a former former SPLC employee who admitted being “part of the con,” a “highly profitable scam.”

The 2022 Hate Map shows “1,225 ‘hate groups’ and ‘antigovernment extremist groups.’ Yet a quick perusal of the SPLC’s data reveals something curious: Many organizations are listed far more than just once.”

Hmmm.

Moms for Liberty, for instance, appears on the list no fewer than 220 times, once for each chapter the SPLC recorded. Eagle Forum, a conservative group founded by Phyllis Schlafly to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, appears 16 times, to account for multiple chapters.

So if retired office manager Bernice Jones keeps the books for your anti-abortion group from her Bonita Springs Apartment, SPLC SAYS you have a presence in Southwest Florida. (It they count Bernice’s cat Mr. Fluffy, you could have a dangerous cluster of extremism festering just outside Ft. Myers.)

Another funny numbers thing:

Brigitte Gabriel, who is Lebanese-American, founded ACT for America to warn about the threat of radical Islam that overran her birth country. ACT for America has appeared on the SPLC list for years, but it never appears merely as one “hate group.”

Although ACT for America’s executive director told PJ Media that the group “scrapped” its “chapter model entirely” in 2020, the SPLC “hate map” has plotted dozens of ACT for America chapters in the years since. The 2022 list includes 13 ACT for America chapters.

But SPLC knows it’s business. It could decide tomorrow that ACT for America is suddenly uniquely dangerous and fire up a press release and crank out a mailing. Red Depends Babies will drop their Pete Seeger records and spring (carefully – hip breaks are so painful) to fund the fight.