With each subsequent tranche of evidence, what Tyler found was not just an institution that had been co-opted,

he found an organization that's actually been the puppeteer behind a lot of manufactured stories.

Frankly, a lot of political hoaxes in this country.

This means they should be shut down.

Welcome back to the Kevin Roberts Show.

I'm Larry O'Connor.

We'll get to Kevin Roberts in a minute.

But it's an important episode today.

We're talking about an organization that for years was treated by the media and corporations and corporate boards and universities, even parts of the federal

government, as some sort of neutral authority on extremism and hate. I'm sure you've heard of

them, the Southern Poverty Law Center. But the deeper you look into the SPLC and their history and their recent tactics, it becomes pretty hard to understand how so many institutions accepted its judgments without serious scrutiny. It's an organization that didn't monitor violent extremists, like they said they did. Over time, it helped redefine ordinary political disagreement as some sort of moral disqualification and, frankly, divided our country even further. So, Dr. Roberts, let's start there. How exactly did the SPLC gain this kind of fake cultural and institutional, even moral

authority and power? Well, this won't surprise you. The first step they took was to ingratiate

themselves with American professors, the vast, vast majority of whom are very left of center.

And what that did was give the Southern Poverty

Law Center a sort of false credibility because these supposed experts, these university faculty

members, would cite them, not just in their lectures, but in their peer-reviewed journal

articles, a really big deal in academia, as you know. And then, of course, at the same

time, what's happened as well is that the SPLC ingratiated itself with the American media.

And so you've got the two biggest institutions on the American left, universities and the media,

not only accepting Larry what the center said, but actually integrating their own work with that center.

And to refute anything the SPLC would say, which I tried to do, for example, as a young,

untenured history professor, would be like saying a Christian doesn't accept the New Testament in the Bible.

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