The Southern Poverty Law Center is “doxxing” the staff of the site Not the Bee, the website affiliated with The Babylon Bee that writes lighthearted news stories highlighting the absurdities of the left.

SPLC published its piece on The Babylon Bee on Tuesday afternoon. It revealed the identities of six authors from Not The Bee from around the country who contribute to the site. SPLC published their names, where they lived, and their professions, which ranged from fitness instructor to high school teacher

The Babylon Bee’s leadership team got ahead of SPLC’s story on Tuesday morning. Dan Dillon, CEO of Not The Bee, which publishes true stories so absurd that they seem like parodies, said SPLC managed to extract the identities of contributors who write under pseudonyms, and contacted the website saying it plans to publish their identities.

“They’ve taken personal information about our authors and pieced together a story that is meant to ‘expose’ our anonymous staff to their employers and the general public,” he said on X. “While we take the actual issue of doxxing very seriously and will defend those on staff that wish to stay anonymous, what we don’t take seriously is this organization that’s behind the attack. They are angry, bitter, resentful hacks that feel like their ability to pummel people into worldview submission is slipping away.”

Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, said that his companies are still working to figure out how exactly the identities were extracted by SPLC, but he already knows exactly why it was done.

“They did it because they’re left-wing activists masquerading as journalists,” Dillon said. “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.”

The discredited, scandal-ridden smear factory known as the SPLC is about to publish a hit piece doxxing several of our “Not the Bee” writers who wished to remain anonymous so they could speak freely, without fear. The SPLC extracted sensitive information from our site, then used… pic.twitter.com/toQLfga5SU

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) November 19, 2024

SPLC was founded in 1971 by mail-order salesman Morris Dees. Dees had worked for notorious segregationist George Wallace, but with the advent of widespread revulsion at white supremacy, he saw an opportunity to apply his trade to raising money to oppose groups like the KKK. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees would say of SPLC’s business model.

Since such groups were, even then, essentially eradicated, it began declaring increasingly moderate groups — often Christian ones — to be “extremists,” keeping the fundraising going.

According to its 2022 tax form, it took in $170 million that year, and had about $700 million stashed away as “private investment funds.” $26 million was stored in “Central America and the Caribbean.” The Free Beacon reported in 2019 that tax documents from 2014 showed it transferring millions of dollars to the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.

The group now has little to do with poverty in the south, and according to a former employee’s 2019 essay, almost all of its employees were white and straight. Dees was fired in 2019 after minority and female staffers said he engaged in racism and sexual harassment.

SPLC now functions as a smear factory, allowing reputable groups like legacy media outlets to call center-right groups extremists without engaging in defamation because they attribute it to SPLC, a nominal expert, instead of saying it themselves. In 2012, a left-wing gunman stormed the conservative think tank Family Research Council because he saw it listed as “anti-gay” by SPLC. He was later convicted of terrorism for the attack.

In 2018, SPLC’s insurance company paid British activist Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million because the group falsely named him an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Last year, a judge ruled that a defamation suit from the Dustin Inman Society could proceed after SPLC called it an “anti-immigrant hate group… vilifying all immigrants,” when the Society says it simply opposes illegal immigration.

Among the blog authors doxxed by SPLC were names such as “Planet Moron.”

The request for comment posted by Not The Bee said, “This is Creede Newton, a journalist with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.” It said that it had identified the the real name of the pseudonymous “Planet Moron”’ and planned to publish the employment and residency information of the author because he is a “prolific writer on culture-war issues.”

Prominent conservatives defended The Babylon Bee ahead of the SPLC piece. Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro praised Dillon for going after SPLC rather than waiting for the smear to come out.

“This is the right strategy,” Shapiro wrote on X.

This is the right strategy https://t.co/D93GP4xl0P

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 19, 2024

Chris Rufo, a journalist and activist, said on X that the fact that SPLC was going after a comedy site “proves that ‘systemic racism’ is such a marginal problem in American life that organizations supposedly dedicated to fighting it do things like this instead.”