Vimeo Cancels Conservative Group’s Account, Refuses Refund, After SPLC Attack

The parental rights group Moms for America has faced public attacks, the deletion of its accounts, and threats after the far-left smear factory known as the Southern Poverty Law Center put the group on its “hate map” earlier this year.

“I definitely attribute hateful messages, shadow-banning, and outright threats to Moms for America being on the SPLC’s ‘hate map,’” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms for America, told The Daily Signal.

“Big Tech platforms list SPLC as a major factor in determining whether someone should be blocked or even banned from their platforms,” Fletcher noted. “Media articles have referenced the fact that we are a ‘hate group,’ which has caused us to receive an influx of obscene and threatening calls and emails. It also led to Vimeo canceling our account in August.”

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has leveraged its track record of suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy to develop a “hate map,” which it uses to smear enemies and raise money. It has placed mainstream conservative and Christian groups on the map alongside KKK chapters.

Earlier this year, the SPLC placed Moms for America and other parental rights organizations on the map, branding them “anti-student inclusion antigovernment extremist groups.” Although the SPLC often publishes a separate article explaining its reasons for putting an organization on the map, it did not publish a separate article for Moms for America.

In 2012, a terrorist used the SPLC’s map to target the Family Research Council for a mass shooting in Washington, D.C. The SPLC condemned the attack but kept the conservative organization on its map.

Despite a sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal that prompted the SPLC to fire its co-founder in 2019, and a former employee revealing the SPLC’s “hate” accusations to be a “highly profitable scam,” Big Tech companies such as the video platform Vimeo still use the SPLC to exclude users.

Vimeo terminated Moms for America’s account in August, citing three videos the company flagged for “misinformation,” according to emails reviewed by The Daily Signal.

Moms for America told The Daily Signal that it had operated the account for two years, uploading 815 videos that took over 120 man hours. The parental rights group had paid $599 for an annual subscription on May 25; Vimeo declined to grant even partial reimbursement, saying the request came outside the 30-day refund window.

“Your account was terminated for repeated violations of Vimeo’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,” Vimeo Trust & Safety wrote to Moms for America. “Unfortunately we cannot reconsider the status of accounts terminated for repeated violations.”

Yet Moms for America noted that Vimeo’s guidelines on “Restricted Users” states that “hate groups” “may not use our services, regardless of their content.” The web page clearly states, “For U.S.-based groups, we consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designations of hate groups to be conclusive.”

Vimeo didn’t respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment on whether the SPLC’s “antigovernment” designation had any impact on this account cancellation.

Moms for America also pointed to hostile and threatening messages it received after the SPLC attack. (WARNING: Images contain explicit language)

“Sometimes there’s a good reason to call women c—s,” a man who identified himself as Michael Carson wrote. “You are that reason. F— you, you Nazi Christian nationalists. Take your s— to Russia or Hungary or North Korea. Here’s hoping your daughters get gang-raped.”

The same person sent another message reading, “Nazis like you need to be exterminated.”

“People should spit on your f—ing children, grandchildren.”

“Moms for America has been empowering moms to promote and defend freedom and American values for 20 years,” Fletcher said. Her organization brings moms together for “Cottage Meetings” and other gatherings “to empower moms to raise patriots and promote liberty for the healing of America.”

The parental rights movement grew quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when children attended classes remotely and parents saw some of the extreme and sexual lessons their kids received in school. Parents demanded that schools reopen and that they cease teaching lessons based in critical race theory (a lens that analyzes American society as inherently oppressive in favor of white people and against non-whites) and gender ideology.

“The open attack on our children has launched a mom-led revolution, and we are at the forefront providing moms with the support, tools, and resources to protect our children, preserve our freedoms, and restore the republic,” Fletcher said. “If the Southern Poverty Law Center has determined that to be hate, they need to include our Founding Fathers, veterans, U.S. military, and every freedom-loving American on their list.”

“We are deeply concerned with the fact that our schools have turned into propaganda machines promoting political agendas and launching psychological warfare on our children,” the Moms for America leader said. “We send our children to school to learn to read, write, and calculate not social engineering.  Our children are not science experiments.”

“They deserve a quality education free from bullying and intimidation by adults with an agenda,” she added. “Focusing on which bathroom to use, what pronoun is acceptable, and how to use a condom is a time-consuming distraction that is detrimental to the learning experience of all children.”

“We just want common sense returned to the classroom and our culture,” Fletcher said. “We want real science, true history, math that actually works, and classical literature that builds character and helps children develop critical thinking skills. Graphic sexual content does not belong in the classroom at any grade level.”

Moms for America has proposed model legislation aiming to prevent public schools from promoting sexualized content in the classroom. The bill would bar content that violates the Federal Communications Commission’s standards against obscenity from use in the classroom.

“It is a simple concept: If you can’t show it on TV and you can’t air it on the radio, it should not be in the classroom,” Fletcher said.

Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, Learning for Justice, have argued that efforts to remove sexually explicit materials from school libraries and classrooms represent an attack on diversity—an attempt to remove stories of children and adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Yet many of the books that parents oppose include graphic depictions of sex acts, some between adults and children.

Learning for Justice also promotes critical race theory in the name of “teaching hard history.” Critics claim that such lessons stigmatize students by teaching black students that they are oppressed and white students that they are oppressors.

“Our children are being taught every day to hate their country, hate their neighbor, hate themselves, and completely disenfranchise from their parents,” Fletcher said. “We are in a cultural crisis of epic proportion. We cannot just ignore it and hope things will ‘go back to normal.’ This is the new normal and it will not change unless we change it.”

The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.