We have to talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which aggressively retaliated against union employees and gutted its investigations of white supremacists following Donald Trump's election.
For five years, I wrote about far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and served as one of its spokespeople. Then, one day, I wasn’t there anymore. I never publicly explained why I was no longer with the SPLC, and I took a year off from social media after I left. On Posting Through It, the podcast I co-host with Jared Holt, I’ve occasionally hinted that something went wrong at the SPLC without getting into specifics. With my book Strange People on the Hill publishing on Tuesday, I’m going to explain what happened here—clearly and in full.
Some of what follows reflects poorly on the SPLC as an institution. It should be said, though, that many union members there are people I respect and care about. They’re still fighting for a better organization and doing important work in a difficult, often repressive environment. After the right-wing authoritarian shift the SPLC had warned about for years arrived, the organization chose to reduce its public profile. That isn’t on these workers. They deserve better, and so does the broader civil rights community.
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Donors to the SPLC may not realize that the organization purposefully discarded not only me but also the entire editorial team operating within the Intelligence Project—the division focused on far-right extremism—before Trump took power again in January 2025. That’s why you’ve seen fewer investigative pieces from them, even as open displays of hate have become increasingly common in American life.
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That’s why I agreed to become a union steward at the end of 2022. I had seen enough of that type of dysfunction. There were other, related issues. Extremists threatened my friend Hannah Gais’s physical safety during a reporting trip, and the Huang-picked Intelligence Project director didn’t even seem to know what was happening. But my primary goal in becoming a steward was to help us do our jobs without interference from leadership. We wanted to publish the investigative work on the radical right that we believed our donors expected of us.
The SPLC’s unionization effort began before I arrived—a response to underpaid staff working in palpably toxic conditions. (When you’re done reading here, check out the comments on the SPLC’s Glassdoor page for some dark comedy.) Before I became a steward, I had a spotless employment record, and leadership treated me as one of their own. I was once pulled into a Zoom call Huang held with CBS News to feed her talking points in real time. I also participated in ongoing chats with leadership and communications teams, advising them on how best to respond to breaking news. All that changed overnight when I became a steward.
For those who have never experienced actual union-busting tactics firsthand, consider yourselves lucky. It really, really sucks. Throughout 2023, the SPLC’s leadership team called me into Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred. In one case, leadership put in writing quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale.
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You hear a lot of liberal and Democratic rhetoric about how dire this moment is. I agree. The only thing I have ever wanted, for the SPLC and for everyone living through this extraordinarily challenging moment, is for us to act like it.
Cowardice and union busting. Now there is a toxic mix.
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