When accused Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson’s parents questioned him over why he murdered the conservative political activist, Robinson responded that Kirk “spreads too much hate,” according to charging documents.

And Robinson texted the man he was engaged in a relationship with (who identifies as a woman), “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Robinson’s explanation for why he murdered Kirk shows that he fell for and was radicalized by the leftist effort to smear as hateful Christians who hold socially conservative viewpoints on marriage, gender roles, biological sex, and family life.

In recent years, the SPLC’s primary target has been organizations that support traditional marriage and believe biological sex is innate.

Leading the charge on this effort is the Southern Poverty Law Center. For a long time now, the SPLC has capitalized on the goodwill it won from its 20th-century mission to fight the Ku Klux Klan to vilify conservative organizations. In recent years, the SPLC’s primary target has been organizations that support traditional marriage and believe biological sex is innate. (RELATED: The Southern Poverty Law Center Is the Real Hate Machine)

The SPLC’s modus operandi is to fill its notorious “Hate Map” with the few remaining neo-Nazi hate groups and then malign by association conservative groups. Socially conservative organizations it has smeared in recent years include Focus on the Family, the California Family Council, Florida Family Voice, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. (RELATED: The Loser of the Year: The Southern Poverty Law Center)

Earlier this year, the SPLC placed Kirk’s Turning Point USA on its “Hate Map” of “hate and antigovernment extremist groups” for the first time. In so doing, it deliberately targeted Turning Point USA and brazenly equated it with the Ku Klux Klan.

The SPLC went so far as to publish an explainer on why Turning Point USA represents a hateful threat and is worthy of being listed right alongside Aryan Nations (which notably has long since been entirely disbanded). The report, which was published in May of this year, was titled “Turning Point USA: A case study of the hard right in 2024.”

The SPLC Promotes the Idea That Social Conservative Views Are Hateful

The SPLC’s report has a long section in which it claims that Turning Point USA’s promotion of biblical gender roles, advocacy for the importance of biological sex, and support for traditional marriage are hateful. “Turning Point USA also exploits fear to advocate for increasingly restrictive gender roles and a system of male supremacy,” it says.

The SPLC claims that Turning Point USA holds to a “rigid gender dichotomy” and that “[w]omen, men and nonbinary people” who “deviate from this” are therefore “demonized because they threaten the hard right’s efforts to maintain white, male, Christian dominance in America.” Additionally, the report says, “TPUSA frames the existence of trans people — trans women in particular — as an existential threat to womanhood.”

It is likely here, in particular — in the Left’s insistence that traditional views on sex are hateful — that Tyler Robinson found inspiration for murdering Charlie Kirk. Robinson’s relationship with a man attempting to become a woman, his use of a bullet casing engraving celebrating his own sexual proclivity, and his belief that Kirk is a fascist all point to this source of inspiration.

In its report, the SPLC went on to deem Turning Point USA’s basic social conservative activism as exemplative of hatred. This includes Turning Point USA’s opposition to public schools’ provision of sexual books to children, its disagreement with teaching children that America is institutionally racist, and its boycott of Target for selling a bathing suit for children labeled as “Thoughtfully Fit on Multiple Body Types and Gender Expressions.”

The SPLC Spews Anti-Christian Hatred

The SPLC did not stop with branding Kirk’s social conservatism as hateful. It smeared his Christian faith as hateful, dangerous, and evil as well.

The SPLC wrote that Turning Point USA is “emblematic” of a shift “toward an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy” and that it is at the “forefront” of an effort to promote the view that “Christian values and beliefs should inform the government and wider culture.”

The SPLC sought to link Turning Point USA’s promotion of Christian values — which it deems as Turning Point’s “patriarchal Christian supremacy” — to racism and bigotry. “Turning Point USA’s primary strategy,” said the SPLC report, “is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.”

The SPLC’s claim that Turning Point USA upholds a “white Christian supremacy” is laughable. Since when has anyone who isn’t in an insane asylum supported such an idea this century? Of course, the SPLC, as a leftist civil rights organization with the mission of stopping racism, is desperate to cling to any racism it can manufacture in a country in which racism, for the most part, remains only in leftist DEI policies. (RELATED: Why All Christians Must Reject DEI)

The SPLC goes on to lambast Turning Point USA’s “Turning Point Faith” subdivision, its “Believers’ Summit,” and its “Pastors Summit,” which it says work toward “Christian supremacy.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s assessment that a pastor’s summit is emblematic of a dangerous conspiracy of “Christian supremacy” comes across as entirely unhinged and disconnected from American life. But apparently the SPLC has been infected with an anti-Christian animus to such an extent that it believes Christianity is being used to “threaten[] the foundations of our democracy.” (“TPUSA simultaneously positions Christianity as superior and dominant, while also orchestrating myths of religious persecution. This framing is used to justify its extreme, authoritarian vision for the country that threatens the foundation of our democracy.”)

Robinson was definitely listening when the Southern Poverty Law Center — or organizations like it that put forward the same ideas — said all this.

“Too Much Hate”

Robinson said he killed Kirk because he “spreads too much hate.” Robinson could have found, with an easy Google search, a 2,300-word essay from a premier “civil rights” organization that lays out a rationale for why Kirk’s Christian worldview and socially conservative beliefs amount to pure hatred. And, even if he didn’t see the SPLC’s prominent determination that Kirk’s organization deserves to be on a “Hate Map,” Robinson would still have absorbed the mindset that the SPLC has successfully cultivated on the Left: that socially conservative organizations are not merely ideological opponents but are a sinister apparatus plotting against racial minorities and LGBTQ people.

The SPLC and organizations like it are guilty of riling up the radical hatred toward Christian conservatives, particularly Charlie Kirk, that resulted in his death.

The SPLC’s “Game Plan”

Kirk recognized the hatred and danger fomented by the SPLC’s fear-mongering when it added Turning Point USA to its “Hate Map.”

“Their game plan?” he said in response. “Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.”

Recognizing the bad look of a gunman murdering a political opponent whom they had smeared as the leader of a hate group, the SPLC responded to Kirk’s death by saying, “We condemn the shooting of Charlie Kirk and all violence in any form. Our history shows violence only fuels division — justice requires peace.” But, of course, there was no apology.

The SPLC Should Be Crushed

The SPLC should be rejected into oblivion on account of its hateful and dangerous methods. Kirk’s murder should demonstrate once and for all that the SPLC’s designation of its political opponents as neo-Nazi equivalents — by cause of their Christianity, of all things — is a cheap and dangerous trick that should be roundly rejected by all. The organization’s credibility should be shot.

As Kirk captured perfectly, “[I]t’s 2025, and nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore. The SPLC is a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again. They’re not just irrelevant — they’re a cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility.”

Rep. Chip Roy seems to want to investigate the SPLC, as he requested that the House form a select committee to investigate the radical Left and cited the “targets placed on the Family Research Council and Charlie Kirk by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) only to witness shootings toward each.” But there isn’t anything to investigate when it comes to the SPLC. Its fomentation of hatred toward Christians has been public and unapologetic, but also perfectly legal.

What must happen is the exposure of the SPLC as the truly hateful and dangerous organization so that it is discredited once and for all. This is necessary because the SPLC is showing no signs of backing down from its extremism. In response to the reports of a possible congressional investigation, the organization stood by its stance that Kirk’s organization, and those like it, “allow hate and violence to grow” and said that it simply engaged in “monitor[ing] extremism.” It maintained its commitment to continue its work “exposing extremism.”

The SPLC’s end has arrived. Its responsibility for riling up the hatred that inspired Kirk’s murder is as clear as day. No longer can any media organization — as they long have — cite the SPLC’s designation of a conservative organization as a “hate group” so as to lazily discredit it. To do so is to associate oneself with the hatred and malicious smear tactics of an anti-Christian organization.

Charlie Kirk said it best: “Keep crying, SPLC — America’s done with your scam.”

Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power.

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