For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has published an annual census and “Hate Map” showing where domestic hate groups operate. Its 2023 map tracked more than 1,430 groups promoting racial hate, antisemitism and extremism.
Founded in 1971, SPLC originally worked to expose and sue racial hate and white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1990s, the SPLC began tracking and reporting on anti-LGBTQ groups, including conservative Christian “pro-family” groups that use hateful rhetoric in their appeals.
Christian groups have long complained about appearing on SPLC’s Hate Map and criticized SPLC’s methods. One ministry unsuccessfully sued SPLC for defamation.
Now these groups have a Hate Map they can call their own: “A geographic catalog of religious bigotry, racism and violence perpetrated by the American left that the SPLC refuses to monitor.”
Gregory T. Angelo
“There are organizations and individuals across the country on the left today who are promoting, inspiring and, in some cases, directly engaging in physical violence against those with whom they disagree,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of New Tolerance Campaign, who announced the new map on Fox News. He called the new map “a foil” to SPLC’s ideological bent.
The New Tolerance Campaign’s map calls the SPLC an agent of hate along with U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, college professors, state antifa groups, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and groups supporting LGBTQ people, Palestinians, and Muslims The map labels Jewish Voice for Peace antisemitic and claims the pro-LGBTQ group GLAAD “has engaged in numerous provocative actions targeting churches and people of faith.”
Pop singer Madonna appears on the map for her 2017 comments: “While speaking at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2017, American pop singer and songwriter Madonna told the gathered crowd that in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, “Yes, I am angry! Yes, I am outraged! Yes, I have thought about blowing up the White House!”
Attacking pro-LGBTQ groups is a 180-degree turn for New Tolerance Campaign President Angelo, who once led the pro-LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans. For years, he worked to promote gay rights, claiming, “The gay conservative agenda has increasingly become a space for family values.”
He called the Republican Party’s 2016 anti-LGBTQ platform the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history, writing, “Opposition to marriage equality, nonsense about bathrooms, an endorsement of the debunked psychological practice of ‘pray the gay away’ — it’s all in there.”
He began to change his tune while working for the Trump administration, tweeting in 2021: “Americans in red *and* blue states are FED. UP. with woke nonsense, cancel culture and institutions pushing liberal orthodoxy.”
Angelo now condemns his past pro-LGBTQ activism. “I helped make corporations woke, and I regret it,” he confessed in a 2023 column for the Wall Street Journal.
“Gay issues are the ‘prime accelerant’ of companies going woke,” Angelo told Fox Business. He said companies and their CEOs “should not get political or discuss social issues.”
“Gay issues are the ‘prime accelerant’ of companies going woke.”
Last week, a publicist for New Tolerance Campaign offered to arrange an interview with Angelo but then he quit responding to this reporter’s emails.
The New Tolerance Campaign was founded in late 2019 and claims it “has mobilized over 75,000 activists of diverse backgrounds from all 50 states to combat ‘phony tolerance,’ which it describes thus: “The ‘tolerance establishment’ has lost its moral compass by failing to uphold basic standards of decency for all people and is inspiring others to do the same. The establishment criticizes the moral conduct of certain people while ignoring vile bigotry by others. Even worse, the establishment wields ‘tolerance’ selectively as a weapon for political attacks, sometimes even aligning with extremists to advance their goals.”
The group issues an annual “Worst of the Woke” Awards. The 2023 winners included Amazon, Bud Light and the Academy Awards.
The 501(c)3 nonprofit organization’s 2022 tax return showed revenue of $171,848, up from $104,285 in 2021, $24,606 in 2020, and $50,000 in 2019. Its listed address is a UPS Store in a shopping center in Oro Valley, Ariz.
New Tolerance says the SPLC was “the Praetorian Guard for African Americans besieged by the likes of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other violent hate groups. The center filed lawsuits against these domestic terrorist groups and held press conferences to raise awareness about their activities.”
But now? “The SPLC morphed into something much different. Instead of defending Americans from violent racial terrorists, the SPLC has become little more than a left-wing smear machine — betraying black America in the process,” the group claims.
SPLC has annual revenue of $117 million, and its popular Hate Map includes Christian groups that battle LGBTQ rights, including American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, and groups founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council. The 2023 map added a number of anti-LGBTQ groups that are members of Focus on the Family’s network of 40 state partners.
SPLC also has documented conservative Christian groups’ increasing use of demonic rhetoric to label ideological opponents as evil and Satanic.
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