It appears that not only the FBI but the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden consulted the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. Such trust placed in such a morally corrupt organization has had catastrophic downstream effects.
Through internal documents, the Daily Signal reported that in 2023, officials representing the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division interacted with a “Hate Crimes Symposium” put on at the National Advocacy Center. The symposium covered topics ranging from “Prosecution of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery” to “Talking to victims in the LGBT+ community” to “FACE prosecutions in the post-Dobbs era.” The SPLC attended, with one member giving “an overview of important, disturbing trends and developments within the anti-LGBTQ movement” in order to “help investigators and prosecutors identify potential evidence and motivations for bias crime.”
At this symposium, “More than 100 [assistant U.S. attorneys] and [criminal division] trial attorneys are anticipated to attend as well as agents from the FBI’s Hate Crimes/Domestic Terrorism Fusion Cell.”
Meanwhile, the SPLC regularly updates its Hate Map with “anti-LGBTQ+” organizations such as Focus on the Family, Moms for Liberty, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Let us not forget the role the SPLC played in compiling a list of Catholic groups it named as “hate groups” for the FBI to investigate.
That sort of political influence comes down especially hard on today’s youth as they confront gender ideology. Those who thought that transgenderism would fizzle out quicker after President Donald Trump’s election have been sorely disappointed. The crooked methods of the DOJ and FBI are, fortunately, under course correction, but the mode of resistance represented by left-wing activist groups such as the SPLC has left significant indents. Young people are the most susceptible to them.
Back in 2022, we saw the ideology pour into traditionally conservative regions. The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Pediatrics department published an oft-cited study in which, “after passive parental consent, youth in grades 7 through 12 in 16 Appalachian public schools were anonymously surveyed online during school hours.” It concluded that 7.2% of youth in the area were “gender diverse,” meaning their “gender identity and sex assigned at birth were incongruent.”
The study is often cited as a call for greater support of these “nonbinary” youth. That support comes in the form of legal prohibition against counseling that goes against a child’s “gender diverse” identity or schools that “deliberately hide vital information from parents” as administrators socially transition their children.
In this light, the JAMA study makes more and more sense the further we get from it. Some West Virginian news sources are examining the study’s deceitful practices. According to Beacon News West Virginia, “Passive consent means that permission is assumed unless the parent signs a form to refuse their child’s participation. Was this done because the response rate is typically higher under passive consent? Because they suspected parents might resent their 7th grader being asked about their sexuality?”
The local news source questions whether the study’s methods and undisclosed conflicts of interest were political activism.
The Appalachian location plays into this assumption. It’s a region in which levels of poverty and addiction exceed the national average, and in which the Left’s social demands sit in stark contrast to long-established standards. The hate group narrative led by the SPLC generalizes the region as a bed of prejudice and sees it as a mass market for left-wing ideological reproduction.
So they exploited children who, living in Appalachia, are more likely to have experienced broken homes and be full of angst toward their hometowns. They are more vulnerable to the idea that the deep unrest in their lives is just a problem of antiquated norms and that the solution is liberation. All of leftist politics ignored these factors and amplified the idea of innate transgenderism. The effects will linger among the most troubled youth for many years past peak activism on the matter.
Of course, these incidents occurred when Biden administration ideologues still had free rein. Support for transgenderism is on a downswing, in large part by the catalyst of women’s sports. Overall, social sensibility is supported by the Trump administration’s executive order “Restoring Biological Truth.” Rampant far-left political violence, so common within transgenderism, hurts the movement.
CLEARING UP THE CONFUSION SOWN BY BIDEN’S REWRITE OF TITLE IX
Yet numbers of “LGBTQ-identifying” adults are still climbing, particularly among members of Generation Z, and Democrats are leaning hard into support for transgender matters.
Of course, teenagers are always inclined toward heterodoxy. “Trans” is the new “outcast” look, and one controversial enough to attract a parent’s attention. But with the matter’s hyper-politicization, the line between teenage unrest and actual mental illness is too blurred to be able to tell. And transgenderism, as intended, is much more sensitive and irreproachable a topic than before.