“Benevity’s denial that it defaults to the SPLC filter is hard to square with its own history,” Greg Scott, executive vice president at 1792 Exchange, told The Daily Signal in response to the Benevity statement. “Former CEO Kelly Schmitt bragged about its use of the ‘hate list’ as recently as 2021.”
Schmitt delivered a PowerPoint presentation explicitly stating that the company had “vetted” almost “2 million nonprofits,” adding that it used the “Southern Poverty Law Center Hate List.”
Scott added, however, that “the real issue isn’t how the SPLC filter is used, it’s why this list is used at all.”
Critics have said the SPLC trades on its history of suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy to smear conservatives. The center publishes a “hate map” that plots parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty, conservative groups like Turning Point USA, and Christian groups like Focus on the Family alongside chapters of the Klan.
In 2012, a convicted terrorist told the FBI he targeted a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., the Family Research Council, for a mass shooting. Four months after the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map” last year, Tyler Robinson allegedly murdered Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, aiming to silence his “hate.”
According to 1792 Exchange, 252 companies using the Benevity platform exclude conservative groups by using the SPLC list as a screening tool. The list includes Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, McDonald’s, Netflix, PayPal, Salesforce, Starbucks, and many more.
The full article can be found in Daily Signal