Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and members of the Committee, thank you for the privilege of testifying before you today. My name is Ryan Bangert, and I serve as the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Counsel to the President at Alliance Defending Freedom.
Over 50 years ago, the SPLC was founded to fight the scourge of racism. But the SPLC has drifted from that founding purpose.
The indictment alleges that the SPLC deceived donors into funding the racist groups it claimed to fight.
But beyond these shocking allegations of hypocrisy lies a broader story: how the SPLC tarred mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups” and then relentlessly sought to silence those groups by persuading America’s leading financial and technology firms to exclude those groups from the marketplace of ideas.
ADF is one of those organizations. We’ve been on the SPLC’s Hate Map since 2016. Which is odd, given that we wholeheartedly oppose racism in all its forms: our Christian faith teaches that all are created equal because all are made in the image of God.
But it makes sense when you understand today’s SPLC, in the words of some, as a political hit operation. The SPLC has branded ADF and others like us as “hate groups” solely because it disagrees with our work, grounded in our religious convictions, on behalf of children told by the medical establishment to disfigure and permanently mutilate their bodies; and on behalf of the most vulnerable among us at the beginning and end of life.
Our advocacy for these mainstream positions has repeatedly led us to the Supreme Court, where ADF has won 18 cases since 2011, with two more under submission. In fact, the SPLC even quietly filed an amicus brief supporting one of ADF’s Supreme Court wins on behalf of freedom of association and donor privacy.
But the SPLC cannot abide our work on behalf of the vulnerable: parents, children, the elderly, and the unborn. So, it has slandered ADF and other groups like us as “hate groups,” and sought to lock us and our views out of the public square.
The SPLC began targeting mainstream Christian and conservative organizations by first adding them to its Hate Map in 2010.
Seven years later, the SPLC’s fundraising skyrocketed in response to the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. But this wasn’t a stroke of good luck: the indictment alleges that the SPLC funded and supported one of its ringleaders. In the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville, the SPLC received large donations or commitments from leading firms and personalities, including JPMorgan Chase, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Tim Cook at Apple.
In 2018, it helped launch a coalition of left-wing organizations called Change the Terms. They understood that you don’t have to win a debate with your opponents if they’re invisible.
So, the coalition targeted critical banking, payment processing, donor-advisory, technology, and digital communication infrastructure. It embedded the SPLC within the infrastructure of corporate decision-making, allowing it to influence terms of engagement, flag business partners, and bully corporations into compliance.
In short, the SPLC mobilized corporate America to crush mainstream conservative viewpoints and organizations.
The Biden years saw the SPLC deepen its presence in America’s political and corporate infrastructure. The Biden DOJ and White House met regularly with SPLC officials. Amazon used the SPLC to blackball groups from its AmazonSmile giving program. So did the employee charitable giving platform, Benevity, which serves nearly a quarter of the Fortune 1000. The list goes on.
ADF saw tangible impacts. We lost access to the AmazonSmile program; nonprofit pricing from large technology providers like Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit; web hosting on the Pantheon platform; and access to donor-advised funds at Fidelity.
A partisan political organization like the SPLC should never have been allowed to function as an unaccountable private gatekeeper to critical financial, technology, and communication services. And corporations should never have accepted the word of an organization that itself is severely compromised.
- In addition to standing indicted, the SPLC has paid millions in settlements for defamation.
- Its co-founder and president left in 2019 amid staff reports of a “systemic culture of racism and sexism.”
- It received an “F” from Charity Navigator for hoarding donor money to the tune of more than $800 million, much of it offshore
- Former employees have said that the SPLC is little more than a “highly profitable scam.”
The time has come to uproot the SPLC from America’s financial and technology infrastructure. Congress can help. Investigations of the SPLC can reach beyond the indictment to examine the SPLC’s relationships with financial institutions, technology companies, and digital communications platforms. Moreover, Congress can pass legislation barring federally insured financial institutions from delegating decision-making to private entities that discriminate based on First Amendment-protected activities.
These would be critical steps toward dismantling the SPLC’s shadow censorship regime.
We thank the committee for its interest in doing so.
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