What Happened to the SPLC—and Me
Union breaking, Gaza, and fear of MAGA turned the SPLC into an organization that abandoned its own civil rights principles.
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.
Most people I’ve spoken to lately have only seen the SPLC during Trump’s second term through a maudlin commercial airing regularly on MSNOW. The ad flashes images from the civil rights movement set to “We Shall Overcome.” Ironically, most of the events pictured in the ad happened before Morris Dees built the SPLC in 1971.
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.
I was so proud of the work I did with that editorial team before they deliberately destroyed it. If you just stumbled into this post, and you aren’t familiar with my work, I investigated pseudonymous white supremacists and tracked down their identities and whereabouts. People still link to my 2019 SPLC investigation into Stephen Miller’s previously private emails. I would prefer Miller were no longer relevant, but there’s nothing I can do about that right now.
I took the job at the SPLC because I admired the work of Heidi Beirich. She ran the Intelligence Project before I arrived and had a history of identifying and exposing people in the white supremacist movement until she left at the end of 2019. I had never even heard of Dees, who the org pushed out months after I arrived amid internal complaints that included allegations of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct.
For most of my time there, I did the work I came to do. But Margaret Huang took over as the SPLC’s CEO in 2020, and over time, an already tense publishing process became almost impossible. “Half-a-mil Mags”—the nickname workers gave her because of her bloated salary—installed a director in Heidi’s role who showed little understanding of, or curiosity about, the world we covered.
The Biden-era leadership at the SPLC seemed to love spending donor money on retreats, and they seemed to hate publishing anything, especially pieces that might upset MAGA. One telling example came during the 2022 midterms: while the organization warned donors about threats to democracy, it sent our editorial team on a retreat to a pricey, wine-centric hotel with no clear agenda. Staff ultimately had to beg management for permission to monitor and report on the election instead of remaining idle. I had to scramble just to make arrangements to vote.
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.
The stress of trying to live your life normally during something like that is immense—which is why I believe they carried on the way they did. Because of our union, they couldn’t fire me at will, so they went for the next best thing: they wanted me to quit. That spring, the kind of extremists we typically covered threatened my life. This was a common occurrence in my job. Normally, I handled it well, but the added pressure of being targeted by the SPLC’s leaders made it harder. I had a panic attack and blacked out in the shower. When I informed leadership about the threats and suggested they ease up in their war against the union, they responded by attempting to discipline me again.
Meanwhile, my colleagues continued to message me about their disillusionment. Tensions escalated when the SPLC delayed the release of its annual Year in Hate and Extremism report by nearly six months. Leadership told us directly that the delay came at the request of Democratic lawmakers. The rationale, we were told, was that holding the report might improve the chances of Nancy Abudu, an SPLC attorney, being confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. My colleagues respected Nancy—but not enough to dispel the impression that our work was being shaped by political considerations. A few employees of the Intelligence Project ended up quitting after that.
A few months later, everything spiraled. On Friday, October 6, 2023, I went to Brooklyn to meet a casual date, and on the train ride home, I spaced out on X, the app that used to be Twitter. Work was crushing me, and I was exhausted. That’s when I first read that Hamas had carried out a deadly attack in Israel, hitting both civilians and military personnel. Egyptians on my mom’s side had come from Palestine, so the issue around Gaza was inherently fraught for my family. As Israel started to mount a response, American discourse quickly locked into a highly tilted narrative around antisemitism and the devaluation of Arab life.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which shared the field of extremism research with the SPLC, pushed a line that seemed to conflate empathy for Palestinians and criticism of Israel with the kind of antisemitism embraced by the white supremacist movement. Watching their CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, repeat this message on cable news almost daily made me feel sick.
For their part, the SPLC said and did almost nothing publicly in the aftermath of October 7, which was becoming increasingly typical of them. Responding to their silence and the ADL’s anti-Arab messaging, the SPLC’s union posted a statement on social media condemning what was then the start of a brutal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. My only contribution to the statement was to add one line mentioning antisemitism. I felt we couldn’t issue it without acknowledging that it was also happening in the U.S. at the same time. But it didn’t matter. MAGA posters on X portrayed the union statement as terroristic, and privately, pro-Israel donors threatened to pull their funding from the SPLC.
In late October, Hannah passed me an open letter from a global group of writers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza that she signed. The letter described Israel as an “apartheid” state and “ethno-nationalist.” My freedom to sign it was protected by the SPLC contract, and I believed in the statement, so I signed it too. I felt that would be my lone contribution to the Palestine discourse.
I had forgotten about the letter until November 4, when The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, published a post titled “Southern Poverty Law Center Spokesman Signed Letter Blaming Israel for Hamas Terrorism.” Instead of using a picture of me, the post featured an image of Hamas militants carrying heavy weaponry. To someone unfamiliar with such imagery, they probably looked like Cobra from G.I. Joe.
I was out playing soccer with my six-year-old son when I read it. I got so angry that my hand shook. I emailed the author, and the website added a note:
“Hayden responded to the Free Beacon after publication, claiming that the article was a ‘racist attempt’ to target him. He said any ‘attempt to conflate my concerns about Palestinian rights with supporting Hamas is cowardly and vile,’ and added that he has ‘made considerable sacrifices to undercut the activism of American antisemites.’”
Four days later, the SPLC dragged me into yet another investigatory meeting. They issued a written warning, claiming I had violated some vague protocol for spokespeople when I defended myself by stating that I wasn’t Hamas and wasn’t antisemitic. Again, the warning contained several provable inaccuracies.
When the union pointed out those errors, the SPLC responded by producing a stripped-down version of the same warning, this time focused narrowly on the fact that I had tried to defend my reputation against a racist article. It had little to do with our contract and everything to do with silencing speech about Gaza. Maybe I had alienated a wealthy donor. Maybe I had angered the ADL. Whatever it was, the SPLC’s leadership still went through the motions, dressing up the discipline in different justifications because they couldn’t say outright what they were doing. They were a civil rights group, after all.
One of the SPLC’s lead union stewards pointed out that they had disciplined me, an Arab American, but had not disciplined Hannah, a woman with Jewish heritage. The steward said this violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the section covering employment discrimination. I didn’t know what to make of that at first. Hannah called me and said the same thing. Another steward told me to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over the retaliation I had faced since February.
In a kind of trance, I did everything people told me to do. I called the Arab American Institute for help; they recommended lawyers. I called the American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU lawyers were eager to take the case and go after the SPLC, but they ran into conflicts of interest with our legal team. They referred me to outside counsel and wished me luck. I ended up speaking with six lawyers in a single week.
In November, with some members of SPLC leadership out of the office, a longtime researcher—let’s call him Andy—co-led an online meeting in their place. I considered him a good friend. During the meeting, Andy claimed that the SPLC hadn’t retaliated against workers who spoke out about Gaza. I corrected him in the chat, saying it was happening to me. He didn’t respond. Instead, he abruptly ended the meeting, as if trying to stop me from telling others what had happened. I have never felt as alone as I did when the screen went dark. I closed my laptop and rested my head on it.
Two months later, while researching my book about how a “Great Replacement”-focused nonprofit reshaped the town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the cumulative stress I had been under finally caught up with me. I experienced severe suicidal ideation and spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital. A day after I agreed to treatment and requested paid family leave, the SPLC terminated my employment. They also suspended Hannah without pay for the apparent offense of accompanying me on my research and contributing to a freelance article in The Daily Beast.
The managers above me who carried out much of the bullying I endured later left the organization under unclear circumstances. Someone in management who sympathized with me told me, in confidence, that management gave them buyouts. “Half-a-mil Mags” also stepped down at some point, though she likely had bigger issues to deal with than just me.
A few weeks after leaving the hospital, I threatened to sue the SPLC for discrimination. Rather than let the story become public, they settled in the spring of 2024. It only took a few months. They didn’t have much of a case, and more liberals began publicly acknowledging the horrors of Gaza. What could the SPLC even say to defend their behavior?
After my departure, the SPLC moved Rachel Janik—the editor who handled most of my stories—into the communications department. The remaining investigative reporters and editors were either pushed out or reassigned. In the months leading up to this restructuring, the SPLC even created “Hopewatch” as a Pollyannaish alternative to Hatewatch. I learned about these changes during the settlement process, when the organization had to reclassify my termination as a layoff. Lawyers told me my position as a Senior Investigative Reporter likely wouldn’t have existed much longer anyway—the SPLC had become too wary of MAGA’s litigiousness and vengefulness to continue confronting the movement. Instead, they wanted to shift into a lane that attracted less attention.
This problem isn’t unique to the SPLC. It’s happening at nonprofits across the country and in newsrooms as well. When I first began reporting on the far right, I knew dozens of reporters across institutions covering the same beat. Today, only a handful remain. The journalism industry has been gutted by layoffs, and the few new hires seem more cautious in their coverage of MAGA than the previous cohort.
The misleading and, at times, corrupt discourse around antisemitism has also had a chilling effect, in part because Democrats—the de facto political opposition to right-wing authoritarianism—helped enable a genocide. This is happening even as antisemitism is becoming worse than I have ever seen it. You can’t talk about the moral corruption of fascists with a clear voice when you yourself are morally corrupt.
The righteously critical voices that spoke up after the 2017 Unite the Right rally, or after the violence of January 6, 2021, have largely been smothered or pushed to the margins on platforms like Bluesky during Trump’s second term. This is a problem America won’t solve until we build an opposition leadership that fights for everyone—not just a few executives hoping to cling to an easy life in a backsliding country.
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.
Strange People on the Hill comes out April 7. This post includes an adapted excerpt from “Chapter 19: Friends and Enemies.”
Want to dive deeper into the lives of people from Morgan County, West Virginia? Use the promo code STRANGE20 for 20% off for the next few days—early reviews are already calling it a must-read:
Publisher’s Weekly: “A captivating, unsettling up-close look at America’s increasingly vicious partisan split.”
Booklist: “Deeply personal, disturbing, and intense… an urgent call to action.”
Insidehook: “A gripping exploration of political extremism and local activism that’s more relevant by the day.”
You can also catch me and Jared Holt talking MAGA, online culture, and our fractured politics on Posting Through It. Free episodes drop every Monday, but Patreon subscribers get our Thursday episodes — often the best ones.
The show has been recognized by HuffPost as one of the best podcasts of 2025 and recommended by Slate’s Culture Gabfest.
Jared and I will also be appearing at Politics and Prose on April 11th at their Conn. Ave. location in Washington D.C. at 5PM, where we will be talking about the book. Please join us!