House Hearing Examines How Southern Poverty Law Center Vilified Charlie Kirk Before His Murder

Let’s be clear about what happened here: The Southern Poverty Law Center spent years painting Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk as dangerous extremists, and three months after Kirk warned this rhetoric would put him “in the crosshairs,” an assassin murdered him on a college campus. This is not coincidence. This is consequence.

Andrew Sypher, Turning Point USA’s Executive Vice President of Field Operations, delivered devastating testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, connecting the dots between the SPLC’s reckless labeling practices and the escalating political violence against conservatives. Sypher was standing ten feet from Kirk when he was assassinated on September 10 at Utah Valley University.

The facts are straightforward and damning. The SPLC operates what it calls a “Hate Map” that places conservative organizations alongside the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. This is not analysis. This is defamation with deadly consequences. Kirk himself recognized the danger, warning that the SPLC’s designation would put Turning Point in the crosshairs. He was right.

“Over the years, Charlie and Turning Point have been attacked by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which villainizes our open-dialogue approach on campuses,” Sypher testified. “The SPLC hastily labels ideologically opposing organizations as ‘hate groups,’ misleading well-intentioned entities and blurring the line between real hate and mere differences of opinion.”

This is the fundamental problem with the modern left’s approach to political discourse. They cannot defeat conservative ideas through debate, so they attempt to eliminate those ideas from the public square entirely by labeling them as hate speech. When you tell people that conservatives are equivalent to white supremacists, you create an environment where violence against conservatives becomes morally justified in the minds of unstable individuals.

The assassination proved prophetic of Kirk’s own warnings. “Just months later, an assassin took Charlie Kirk’s life on campus, during one of those very open-dialogue events that often lowered tensions and fostered healthy debate among young people,” Sypher explained.

But here is where the story becomes even more disturbing. After Kirk’s murder, the very people who had falsely labeled him and his organization “later condoned and justified” the assassination, according to Sypher. This is not merely irresponsible rhetoric. This is moral bankruptcy.

The violence has not stopped. Sypher cited violent protesters harming Turning Point USA event attendees at UC Berkeley following Kirk’s assassination. The pattern is clear: demonize conservatives, justify violence against them, and then act surprised when that violence materializes.

“We cannot allow biased organizations like the SPLC to arbitrarily dictate good and evil in our government and culture or to weaponize the ‘hate’ label against ideological opponents,” Sypher asserted before the committee.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government convened Tuesday’s hearing, titled “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy,” to examine the organization’s coordinated efforts with the Biden-Harris Administration to target Christian and conservative Americans. The hearing investigates how the SPLC has worked to deprive conservatives of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.

This raises an obvious question: Why is a partisan political organization that smears mainstream conservatives as hate groups being consulted by federal agencies on civil rights policy? The answer is that the administrative state has been weaponized against half the country.

“My hope is that this becomes America’s turning point: that we never forget Charlie Kirk’s murder and that Congress confronts the brewing political violence in our midst,” Sypher concluded.

Congress must act decisively. The SPLC’s influence over government policy must end, and organizations that deliberately incite violence through reckless labeling must face consequences. Charlie Kirk’s murder should serve as a wake-up call. The question is whether Congress has the courage to answer it.