Elon Musk has called the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center a “scam organization” after it included MAGA activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on its signature “Hate Map” and branded it “an anti-government extremist group.”
Kirk’s Arizona-based collective was founded in 2012 and considers itself “the largest and fastest-growing” conservative grassroots organization in the United States. It boasts a presence on “over 3,500 campuses” nationwide.
It has long been associated with President Donald Trump, who has regularly delivered speeches to its gatherings.
But the SPLC’s inclusion of TPUSA on the map places it in the same company as regional chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and other far-right, neo-Nazi and Islamophobic organizations.
Kirk, 31, who is currently on a speaking tour of the United Kingdom and last week addressed the Oxford Union, responded angrily in a lengthy post on X by calling the SPLC’s move “a cheap smear from a washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades.”
He continued: “They somehow still rake in over $100 million a year peddling their ‘hate map’ nonsense, sitting pretty in their Montgomery ‘Poverty Palace’ while crying about ‘hate’ to line their pockets. Even former staffers called their racket a ‘con.’
“Their game plan? 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.”
Kirk concluded his rant by claiming that “nobody with a functioning brain buys their garbage anymore” and branding the SPLC “a laughingstock, a hollowed-out husk of an organization that’s been exposed as a grift time and time again” and fuming: “They’re not just irrelevant – they’re a cautionary tale of how to torch your own credibility.”
The world’s richest man reacted to Kirk’s post by declaring, “SPLC is a scam organization. " Kirk replied enthusiastically with two 100 percent emojis, signaling his agreement.
The Independent has contacted the SPLC for its response to Kirk’s attack.
In an essay accompanying the latest instalment of its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, published alongside the map, the legal advocacy group describes the TPUSA as “a well-funded, hard-right organization with links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hard-right extremists” with “a tremendous amount of influence in conservative politics.”
It continues: “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.
“TPUSA and its spokespeople often warn their audience that their children, wives, religion, way of life and they themselves are under attack by various constructed enemies [and] exploits complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”
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