(The Center Square) – An Illinois-based parental rights group sent an open letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center requesting that it remove parental rights organizations from its “hate map,” where they are placed right alongside the Klu Klux Klan.
Founder and president of parental rights group Awake Illinois Shannon Adcock told The Center Square that her organization’s letter “is about accountability.”
“The SPLC has spent four years trying to destroy us,” Adcock said. “With their federal indictment now public, the moment has arrived for them to clean up the mess they made or stand exposed as a discredited smear machine.”
Adcock told The Center Square that the Southern Law Poverty Center’s (SPLC) hate map is “deliberately harmful.”
“The Hate Map is not a public service; it’s a partisan weapon,” Adcock said. “It brands peaceful, law-abiding parents as ‘hate groups’ right alongside the KKK, then legacy media, school administrators, and politicians treat that label as gospel.”
The SPLC’s hate map “has triggered doxxing, death threats, job losses, frivolous lawsuits, and reluctant donors. It triggered mass legacy media smears,” Adcock said.
“In Naperville, it stopped the City Council from even giving me a vote for a volunteer, unpaid committee role,” Adcock said.
Awake Illinois is based out of Naperville.
Adcock told The Center Square that the SPLC "came after Awake Illinois before the ink was even dry on our founding documents because our message threatens their far-left, anti-American agenda.”
“While they poured resources into tracking hundreds of parental-rights chapters, they listed only 14 KKK groups, zero Antifa networks, and zero Islamist extremists,” Adcock said.
“That selective blindness isn’t oversight – it’s a strategy,” Adcock said. “The map doesn’t protect anyone; it silences dissent and turns ordinary moms and dads into targets.”
Adcock told The Center Square that “parents are fierce” but the attacks on them have been “absolute hell.”
“Nonstop harassment, employers getting called, cars driving down our streets yelling that we’re Nazis,” Adcock said. “The SPLC’s smear turned everyday families into villains.”
Adcock noted that “at the exact same time [the SPLC was] defaming us, a federal grand jury just indicted [them] for secretly funneling millions to the very extremists it claims to oppose.”
“The irony is damning,” Adcock said.
The SPLC was indicted by the Department of Justice on charges it “secretly" funneled "more than $3 million in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups," as The Center Square reported.
A few of the groups the SPLC was accused of funding are the Klu Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.
Adcock told The Center Square that the SPLC can “smear” parent rights groups “all it wants but the civil rights warriors of our era are uncancellable.”
“Their hate map failed,” Adcock said. “None of us will bow to their anarchy.”
In her organization’s letter to the SPLC, Adcock called on the center to remove parental rights organizations from the hate map, to issue a public retraction and apologize for its reckless designations, as well as to adopt “verifiable standards that separate actual hate groups from citizens peacefully and lawfully advocating for their children.”
“Cease treating parental advocacy as extremism,” Adcock wrote in the letter. “Parents are not the enemy; the real extremists are those erasing biological reality in classrooms and silencing dissent through defamation.”
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