President Donald Trump and SPLC Founder Morris Dees. Dees was forced to resign in 2019 amid allegations related to workplace harassment. (Susan Montgomery/ Shutterstock)
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- The Southern Poverty Law Center, described in Politico as a “partisan progressive hit operation,” has announced $330,000 in donations to the Mississippi organization leading the fight against parents who want a say in how their children are educated. Their opposition stands in stark contrast to prominent politicians, like President Donald Trump, who support more options for families.
There are some fundamental markers of conservatism. Two come to mind in the debate over school choice. The first is that competition, and the choice that comes from it, is a net positive. This belief undergirds the entire U.S. economy and is one distinct reason our nation is the most prosperous in human history. Monopolies with captured customers seldom work efficiently.
The second reason is perhaps even more fundamental for conservatives. The family is the core building block of society. Parents are responsible for the rearing of their families and know what is best for their children.
Both of these principles favor providing families more options when it comes to the education of their children. Trust parents. Governor Tate Reeves and Speaker of the House Jason White want to do just that.
They have at their back the support of a president in Donald Trump who has been a vocal advocate for school choice, labeling it “the Civil Rights issue of our time” and pledging to ensure that every child in America has education options. The President played an active role in Texas’ push toward universal school choice, openly endorsing individual lawmakers who supported the policy.
Already administration officials have traveled to Mississippi and hosted a delegation of Mississippi legislators in D.C. to show their commitment to the cause. The expectation is that both the support and the intensity of that support coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will grow.
Perhaps more importantly, Mississippi families want more options. In poll after poll taken over the last decade, support for school choice in the Magnolia State has consistently been at or above 70 percent. Even parents fully satisfied by their local public school like the thought of having more options were circumstances to change. Most people understand that every kid is different, with different learning needs.
But since people sometimes distrust polls — even repeatedly lopsided ones — it’s worth noting that no legislator in any other state that passed expansive school choice programs has ever lost their seat for the vote.
Not one.
Conversely, several Republican lawmakers have lost their seats for opposing it. See Texas.
But on the other hand…SPLC
So what stands on the other side of parents, Donald Trump, core conservative tenets, and electoral safety that might entice Republican lawmakers to shirk their own Party’s platform? If you said the Southern Poverty Law Center, you’d be right.
More on that later. First, a refresher on who SPLC is.
The Montgomery, Ala. based organization, with over a half-billion dollar endowment, built a reputation on fighting for civil rights and pushing back against the Ku Klux Klan in the South.
The organization has faced scrutiny in recent years, however, as it expanded its targeted “hate groups” to include many mainstream conservative and Christian organizations.
In 2017, Politico acknowledged the growing criticism that SPLC is “becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.” Shikha Dalmia, President of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, said “the SPLC is not up to the task” of monitoring actual hate groups because “[i]t is too busy enforcing liberal orthodoxy against its intellectual opponents.” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel called SPLC a “far-left activist group” that “exists to smear conservatives.”
SPLC’s former editor-in-chief of the Intelligence Report, Mark Potok, said, “sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on…. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.”
According to Alliance Defending Freedom, a public interest law firm that SPLC identifies as a “hate group,” other groups and individuals identified by SPLC include Ben Carson, The Federalist Society, Franklin Graham, Focus on the Family, American College of Pediatricians, Catholic Medical Association, Heritage Foundation, and Family Research Council, among others. In Mississippi, the American Family Association and Moms for Liberty have been included.
In 2012, the identification of the Family Research Council led to a gunman attempting to infiltrate their headquarters. In the process, a security guard that subdued the would-be killer, Floyd Corkins, was shot. Corkins later told authorities that he selected the Family Research Council because of its inclusion on SPLC’s list and that he “planned to stride into the building and open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many as possible.”
In a report filed this May under “Dismantling White Supremacy,” SPLC shone its ire on Turning Point USA. SPLC argued, “Turning Point USA’s primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.” Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September.
Trump’s FBI recently ended a relationship with SPLC. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
SPLC’s Big Bet in Mississippi
“So the SPLC is now a lefty smear operation that incites violence, what does this have to do with school choice?,” you say. The answer, simply, is that SPLC is helping fund the anti-school choice effort in Mississippi. In September of last year, SPLC announced three years of grant support totaling $330,000 to “The Parents Campaign” — the organization at the center of efforts to defeat giving families more education choices.
Orwellian in name, “The Parents Campaign” stands almost exclusively for the interest of education bureaucrats seeking to prevent parents from having a voice in how and where their own children are educated.
Among its other partners, according to the group’s 2022 IRS 990 form, The Parents Campaign counts state affiliates of far left national teachers’ unions like the National Educators Association. Between 2022-2024, the NEA and American Teachers Federation spent over 43 million dollars supporting progressive causes and candidates that have little, if anything, to do with education (think higher taxes, support for illegal immigration, and gun control). Democratic candidates received nearly 100 percent of their combined political contributions.
Other partners listed by The Parents Campaign include Democracy Forward, a group that paints President Trump as an authoritarian who must be stopped and that brags about filing over 100 lawsuits against the Trump administration. The League of Women Voters, an organization that advocates for abortion, is on the list too.
In-state partners listed include the School Board Association, the Association of Administrators, and the Association of Superintendents, along with several progressive think tanks. Glaringly absent from the Parents Campaign’s listed partners is any actual parent group.
Know them by Their Deeds
“Stop with the guilt by association,” you say. Fine, know them by their deeds. The Parents Campaign has fought against every major conservative education reform in Mississippi.
The Parents Campaign opposed the Literacy Based Promotion Act (sometimes referred to as third-grade reading gate). That law and a package of other reforms passed in 2013 has been widely credited with sparking “the Mississippi miracle.”
As LBPA neared full implementation in 2015, “Parents’ Campaign” head Nancy Loome told the Clarion Ledger “we are setting these kids up for failure.” Her warning came alongside dire predictions that the LBPA would result in 28 percent of all third-graders being held back.
Loome and other doomsayers were wrong. In the first year of the program, the actual retention rate for third-graders in Mississippi was roughly 8 percent. Instead of seeing marked increases in students held back, Mississippi has achieved historic gains in reading and math that have been nationally celebrated and emulated.
The group and its acolytes were so offended by Republican management of education policy on the backend of the 2013 reforms that they pushed a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution. Initiative 42 was first sold as a way to increase education funding. In reality, the proposal would have taken control of education policy away from Mississippians’ elected representatives and given it to a judge in Hinds County that most Mississippians had no choice in electing. Ultimately, voters rejected the power play.
Then as then-Speaker Philip Gunn tried to push a new funding formula, and again when current Speaker Jason White showed up with the INSPIRE Act, The Parents Campaign lodged opposition. The INSPIRE Act ultimately served as the foundation for a new funding formula that is pumping hundreds of millions more dollars into public schools annually.
Pick a Side
To recount: on one side of the brewing fight, you have President Donald Trump, Governor Reeves, Speaker White, the Mississippi Republican Party’s platform, popular support, and conservative principle. On the other side, a group that tried to take away the people of Mississippi’s elected voice on education policy, that is funded by the SPLC, that aligns with far left organizations, and that has opposed significant policy efforts to improve our schools.
Lawmakers will have to pick a side and weigh the consequences of their decision.
