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Billionaire X owner Elon Musk is calling out Michigan Secretary of State’s previous employer amid allegations the organization is working to smear writers for conservative outlets.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a criminal organization imo,” Musk posted to X on Tuesday.

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The post came in response to another from Seth Dillon, owner of Christian satire site The Babylon Bee and its spin off real news site Not the Bee.

“The discredited, scandal-ridden smear factory known as the SPLC is about to publish a hit piece doxing several of our ‘Not the Bee’ writers who wished to remain anonymous so they could speak freely, without fear,” Dillon wrote.

“The SPLC extracted sensitive information from our site, then used that information to contact our writers directly,” the post read.

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“We’re determining how they obtained this information, but we already know why they went digging for it. They did it because they’re left-wing activists masquerading as journalists. They did it because they lack principles. They did it because they’re vindictive bullies who’ve admitted their aim is to ‘completely destroy’ individuals and organizations they disagree with by making them pay a steep price for speaking freely,” Dillon continued.

“As a public figure, I’ve been attacked many times. It comes with the territory, and I accept that,” he wrote. “What I won’t accept is the doxing and smearing of our staff because they said some things the SPLC doesn’t like.”

While the SPLC promotes itself as a “catalyst for racial justice” that’s working on “fighting for justice and equity in courts and combating white supremacists who are emboldened and energized,” spokesman Mark Patok explained the real motivations behind the group during a Michigan Alliance Against Hate Crimes conference in 2007.

“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups,” he said, “I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them.”

That’s evident in the SPLC’s controversial “hate map,” which includes an array of conservative groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty and others mapped out along with KKK chapters.

Tyler O’Neil, author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains how it works.

“If you disagree with the SPLC’s open-borders approach on immigration, you’re an ‘anti-immigrant hate group.’ If you don’t think kids should be told that a boy can become a girl and vice versa, you’re an ‘anti-LGBTQ hate group,’” O’Neil wrote for The Daily Signal, where he serves as managing editor. “If you condemn the ideology of radical Islam, you’re an ‘anti-Muslim extremist.’ If you support parental rights in education, you’re an ‘antigovernment extremist group.’”

The approach has led to plenty of problems for conservative groups, from an attempted mass shooting at the Family Research Council in 2012, to companies like Amazon, Eventbrite, and NextDoor using the SPLC’s guidance to ban “extremists.”

It has also led to plenty of problems for the SPLC, which was forced to fire its co-founder Morris Dees amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, which also featured employees labeling the accusations of “hate” as a “highly profitable scam,” according to O’Neil.

There’s also been multiple defamation lawsuits, and efforts to snuff out information from Christian groups like The Babylon Bee on social media. Musk thwarted those efforts with his purchase of Twitter, which resulted in the site restoring the Bee’s account after it was de-platformed for disagreeing with transgender ideology.

The SPLC’s tactics to control the media narrative and quash “misinformation” are lessons Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson took to heart when during her tenure as an SPLC “hate crimes investigator.”

Throughout the 2024 election, Benson crusaded against election “misinformation,” going as far as setting up a state hotline for Michiganders to report their neighbors.

Benson, who also served on the SLPC’s board of directors, implored the media this year to help Democrats “prebunk what we anticipate … to be an onslaught of misinformation” and to “protect the minds of voters” in an effort to control the “narrative battle” in this “era of misinformation.”

She also repeatedly attacked Musk, labeling him a “troll” for spreading “dangerous misinformation” about Michigan’s overinflated voter rolls that’s posted on the Michigan Secretary of State’s website.

Voters, of course, saw through the schtick and overwhelmingly elected Republican President-elect Donald Trump to a second term, effectively cutting off SPLC’s close relationship with the White House over the last four years.

Benson now appears focused on 2026, when political observers are convinced she will run her own election to replace Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.