The organization that put Charlie Kirk’s organization on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan ahead of his assassination last week also has a long history of carrying water for the violent Antifa movement that President Donald Trump has targeted for investigation.
Tyler Robinson, 22, who faces murder charges in the assassination of Kirk, had reportedly adopted leftist political positions and endorsed the transgender movement, according to authorities. His bullet casings reportedly included anti-fascist messaging resonant of Antifa.
Trump announced Wednesday night that he would be designating Antifa a terrorist organization.
Antifa agitators brand their opponents as akin to Nazis, identifying themselves as “anti-fascist.” These agitators reportedly embed themselves in more mainstream protests, break away to engage in violence, and occasionally return to the safety of the crowd later. While the movement is largely disconnected, it sometimes forms organizations like Rose City Antifa in Portland.
Antifa agitators have engaged in violence for years, most notably in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The riots that grew out of those protests caused an estimated $2 billion in damage, measured by insurance payouts, and took the lives of 26 Americans, notably including black people like 77-year-old retired St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest law firm that gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy and presents itself as America’s premiere “hate” watchdog, has steadfastly refused to put any Antifa organization on its “hate map.” Meanwhile, the SPLC puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on the map, calling them part of the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”
A terrorist used the map to target the conservative Christian Family Research Council in 2012, and the man who opened fire at a Congressional Baseball Game practice in 2017 had “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC condemned these attacks.
This summer, the SPLC added Kirk’s Turning Point USA to the “hate map.” It remains unclear whether this may have inspired Robinson, and the SPLC condemned the assassination, but it has not removed Turning Point from the map.
The SPLC has refused to add Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or vandals targeting churches and pro-life pregnancy centers to the “hate map.”
Richard Cohen, who resigned as SPLC president amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, did offer a rare explicit condemnation of Antifa violence in 2017.
“We oppose these groups and what they’re trying to do,” Cohen said.
“We think they are contributing to the problem we are seeing,” he added. “We think it’s likely to lead to other forms of retaliation. In Berkeley, antifa showed up and shut down speeches. The next time the white supremacists brought the Oath Keepers with them, they brought their own army.”
Yet he said SPLC wouldn’t label Antifa a “hate group” because it does not discriminate people on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or other classes protected by antidiscrimination laws.
“There might be forms of hate out there that you may consider hateful, but it’s not the type of hate we follow,” Cohen said.
In 2023, however, the SPLC added “antigovernment extremist groups” to the “hate map,” including parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty. Antifa remains absent.
In June 2020, the SPLC attacked then-President Trump for announcing his intention to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. It warned that “those who identify with” the Antifa label “represent a large spectrum of the political left” and that “far-right extremists use similar tactics” to the Trump administration in condemning Antifa.
The SPLC condemned Trump’s move as “unprecedented and alarming” and minimized Antifa violence as “skirmishes and property crimes,” adding that “the threat of lethal violence pales in comparison to that posed by far-right extremists.”
In 2023, authorities arrested an SPLC lawyer, charging him with domestic terrorism for his alleged role in an Antifa riot involving Molotov cocktails. The lawyer is one of 61 defendants, who are represented by many attorneys. That case remains ongoing, and prosecutors expect a ruling from the judge soon.
Megan Squire, whom Wired profiled as “antifa’s secret weapon against far-right extremists” in 2018, reportedly worked closely with the SPLC, feeding the organization data on white nationalist and other groups. She said she does not consider herself antifa but is “sympathetic to antifa’s goal of silencing racist extremists.” She passed along information “to those who might put it to real-world use. Who might weaponize it.”
Squire joined the SPLC full-time in 2022 before leaving the organization in March 2025, according to her verified LinkedIn profile.
Neither Squire nor the SPLC responded to requests for comment about relationships with Antifa.
While the relationship between Antifa rioters and the SPLC remains unclear, its history suggests an investigation may prove fruitful.
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