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The Southern Poverty Law Center’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Not only was the SPLC allegedly boosting members of the hate groups it says it exists to oppose while demonizing mainstream conservatives, but it also reportedly settled a racial discrimination lawsuit as recently as 2024.
Michael Edison Hayden, who worked as a senior investigative reporter at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote a tell-all article on Substack last month.
Hayden faulted the SPLC for not attacking conservatives enough; for harassing members of the SPLC’s union; for responding poorly to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath; and for engaging in racial discrimination against him.
Insufficiently Anti-MAGA
Hayden joined the Intelligence Project—the branch of the SPLC that puts out a “hate map” plotting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—in December 2018. Yet he said the SPLC had gone weak at the knees in opposing the Right since then.
Hayden blamed then-CEO Margaret Huang—whose lavish salary earned her the monicker “Half-a-mil Mags.” SPLC leadership at the time “seemed to love spending donor money on retreats, and they seemed to hate publishing anything, especially pieces that might upset MAGA,” the Make America Great Again movement.
During the 2022 midterms, “while the organization warned donors about threats to democracy, it sent our editorial team on a retreat to a pricey, wine-centric hotel with no clear agenda,” he wrote.
He faulted the SPLC for delaying the release of the 2022 “hate map”—released on June 6, 2023—in order to help Senate Democrats confirm SPLC lawyer Nancy Abudu to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Union-Busting
A few months after Hayden started, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. During the scandal, employees formed a labor union, and Hayden took a leadership position in the union in 2022. When he did so, management turned on him “overnight.”
He said SPLC’s leadership called him into “Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred.” He even accused leadership of writing down “quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale.”
His criticism echoes the union’s 2024 accusations against Huang and SPLC leadership at the time. The SPLC Union voted to demand Huang resign, and she ultimately left in July 2025.
Israel
Hayden, who traces his descent to Egyptians who lived in what is now Israel, condemned the SPLC for doing “almost nothing publicly” after the Oct. 7 attacks.
He helped draft the union statement condemning Israel for launching “the beginnings of a genocide” in Gaza. Apparently, the statement would have been even worse without Hayden, who says he insisted that the union at least mention antisemitism.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told The Daily Signal that the union’s statement was “laced through with antisemitic bigotry.”
Even though the SPLC Union, not the center itself, had released the statement, Hayden recalled that “pro-Israel donors threatened to pull their funding.” This confirmed my suspicions about the Left’s generational divide over Israel.
Hayden and his colleague, Hannah Gais, also signed an open letter demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and calling Israel an “apartheid” state. When The Washington Free Beacon reported on the letter, Hayden condemned it as a “racist attempt” to target him.
The SPLC disciplined Hayden.
“Maybe I had alienated a wealthy donor,” he speculated. “Whatever it was, the SPLC’s leadership still went through the motions, dressing up the discipline in different justifications because they couldn’t say outright what they were doing. They were a civil rights group, after all.”
The SPLC punished him, an Arab American, but not Gais, a woman of Jewish heritage. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyers were “eager” to represent him and “go after the SPLC,” but ultimately backed down due to conflicts of interest.
The SPLC fired Hayden amid a difficult struggle with mental illness, and he threatened to sue the SPLC for discrimination.
“Rather than let the story become public, they settled in the spring of 2024,” he wrote.
Yet the story is public now, and it does not reflect well on the SPLC.
Not only did the SPLC allegedly not stand up for Jews in the aftermath of Oct. 7, but it also stood accused of applying a racial double standard in punishing staff who spoke out. The SPLC did not respond to my request for comment, and neither did the ACLU.
When the SPLC settled with Hayden, someone in management reportedly told him that the SPLC leaders had given “buyouts” to the people who treated him harshly. The lawyers reportedly told him “the SPLC had become too wary of MAGA’s litigiousness and vengefulness to continue confronting the movement.”
A Bone-Chilling Complaint
I find Hayden’s major complaint against the SPLC rather curious.
If anything, the SPLC proved more aggressive during Huang’s leadership. That 2022 “hate map” included Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The following year, the SPLC added groups of doctors who oppose transgender ideology to the map. Last year, it added PragerU, Focus on the Family, and Turning Point USA to the map. A few months later, Charlie Kirk got a bullet in the neck.
Hayden’s story reveals yet more dysfunction and corruption at the SPLC, but his suggestion that the SPLC should grow even more aggressive in demonizing conservatives is bone-chilling.
Let’s hope the new leadership doesn’t follow his advice.
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