In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center put Army of Parents on their “hate map.” Same list as the Klan. Same list as neo-Nazis. A nonprofit I built to defend children and families — branded an extremist organization by people who, a federal grand jury now alleges, were literally writing checks to the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
Read that again. Slowly.
This week, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on 11 counts — wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering — alleging they secretly funneled over $3 million in donor money to paid informants inside the KKK, the Aryan Nation, and the National Socialist Party of America. Acting AG Todd Blanche said it plainly: the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.” They disguised payments through shell companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” One informant helped coordinate transportation to the 2017 Charlottesville rally — while on the SPLC’s payroll.
This is the organization that labeled us hate groups.
And they had help.
Here in Loudoun County, a group calling itself the “Loudoun Love Warriors” was systematically compiling dossiers on parents who dared speak at school board meetings — a physical book they titled “Chardonnay Antifa’s List of Sketch People,” cataloguing 115 people as “Racist Bigots & Political Operatives.” That intelligence was fed into a network with the SPLC’s platform and institutional reach behind it. The result was predictable. The result was intended.
Members of that group posted that I should be “curb stomped.” That I was “so lucky there are laws.” That someone wanted to be “left in a room alone with Elicia.” And then the calls started. Nearly 80 of them. Threatening. Relentless. From a caller who has never been identified.
I need you to understand what it means to be a Jewish woman and receive language like that.
“Curb stomp” is not a generic insult. It is a specific method of execution with deep roots in neo-Nazi and white supremacist culture — a stomping of a victim’s skull against a curb. It has appeared in hate group manuals. It has been used as a threat against Jewish people for decades. When the SPLC — an organization now alleged to have been financially entangled with actual neo-Nazis — placed my name and organization on a list alongside Klan chapters, and when Loudoun Love Warriors followed with that specific language directed at me personally, they were not being careless. They were speaking a particular dialect. One with a body count behind it.
The history of antisemitism is not abstract to me. It is inherited. Jews have been designated enemies of society by institutions with moral authority throughout history — by governments, by churches, by newspapers. The mechanism is always the same: first you are labeled. Then you are isolated. Then the threats come. Then something worse. The SPLC’s “hate map” is that first step dressed in the language of civil rights. And when left-wing activist groups and a media ecosystem amplified that label without scrutiny, they completed the circuit.
Nearly 80 calls from an unknown number. Threatening my life. No arrest. No accountability. Just silence from the same people who claimed to be fighting hate.
No group felt the weight of this smear campaign more than Moms for Liberty. The SPLC didn’t merely list them — they prosecuted them in print. They published an extensive extremist profile comparing Moms for Liberty to the segregationist “mothers of massive resistance,” suggesting the group existed to preserve what they called an “unseen but understood caste system.” They weaponized fringe affiliations to indict an entire movement of mothers, used the full machinery of their “hate map” — the same machinery allegedly built on a foundation of fraud and payments to actual white supremacists — to paint women fighting for their children as the real danger in American schools.
Then came the media. USA Today didn’t investigate. They amplified. They accepted the word of an organization — now facing federal criminal charges — and used it as a weapon against parents without once asking whether the SPLC itself deserved scrutiny. This is the same SPLC whose co-founder was fired in 2019 after nearly two dozen employees alleged sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and systemic misconduct that leadership buried for years. Whose relationship with the FBI was formally severed, with Director Kash Patel calling them a “partisan smear machine” that fed false intelligence used to target Catholic Americans. The red flags were not hidden. Reporters chose not to look.
That is not journalism. That is complicity.
Army of Parents. Moms for Liberty. Education First Alliance. Parents Defending Education. We were not random casualties. We were the targets of a coordinated, institutionally backed smear operation — one that invited threats, endangered lives, and caused real and documented harm to real people. The individuals who compiled dossiers and fed them to activists. The activists who issued threats and made calls. The organization that weaponized the “hate” designation while allegedly funding actual hate. The media that laundered the narrative without a single phone call to the people being destroyed by it. Every link in that chain bears legal and moral responsibility for what followed.
The DOJ indictment changes everything. What was once a political grievance is now a federal evidentiary record. The question of whether the SPLC acted with knowing recklessness when it targeted parent advocates — while allegedly aware of its own institutional rot — is no longer a matter of opinion.
I don’t know exactly what justice looks like yet. But I know the legal landscape just shifted dramatically. And I know that the parents and organizations who were harmed — who received threats, lost donors, lost standing, and in my case feared for their physical safety — deserve to understand every option now available to them.
I’m paying attention. And I’m listening.
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