Tyler O’Neil over at the Daily Signal does a good job of keeping up with the news about the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC web site has been used by domestic terrorists to target Christians and conservatives. Recently, the FBI decided to cut ties with the SPLC. But many big corporations are still using their resources. Which corporations? Tyler has done the research.

Here’s his article from Daily Signal, and then after that, I have some other information that might help you to keep your dollars away from the secular left.

Tyler writes:

Conservative shareholders at eight major corporations have filed resolutions urging those companies to stop using politicized tools like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” which added Turning Point USA a few months before the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

[…]“As someone who lives in Alabama, right in the SPLC’s backyard, I’ve seen its nefariousness up close,” Allen Mendenhall, senior advisor for Heritage’s Capital Markets Initiative, told The Daily Signal. “The assassination of Charlie Kirk has made tragically clear what conservatives have warned for years: When groups like the SPLC equate mainstream conservative beliefs with hatred, they help create a culture of dehumanization with deadly consequences.”

You might remember that SPLC’s resources were used by a convicted domestic terrorist who attacked the Family Research Council headquarters, in an attempted mass shooting. It turns out that big American corporations are using these same resources.

Anyway, here are the companies:

The Heritage Foundation filed resolutions with Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Mastercard, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), PayPal, Salesforce, and Starbucks. Bahnsen filed a resolution with Texas Instruments.

I’ve written about the left-wing extremism of many of these companies before. I’m trying to avoid using their products and services. I closed my account with PayPal. One of my co-workers gave me a Starbucks gift card for Christmas, and I just threw it in the garbage. I’m trying to buy more and more from Publix, which doesn’t get involved in secular leftism as much as Amazon. Even Wal-mart is better than Amazon. I buy my technical stuff from NewEgg or the local Best Buy instead of Amazon. I do my best to stay clear of these 8 corporations as much as I can. Not only are they opposed to my religion and values, but their bias also creeps into their products, making them unreliable. Have you tried search using the Google search engine lately? It just returns a bunch of data from left wing hate groups and far-left corporate news media. I just ask Grok when I need something. Google is useless as a search engine.

The Daily Signal article has details on how each of the 8 companies is linked to the SPLC. I will leave those for you to read.

Let’s look at who the SPLC puts on their hate map:

The Southern Poverty Law Center… publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups… A terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for an attempted mass shooting in 2012…

The SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map” this summer, a few months before the assassination of Kirk, Turning Point’s founder. The SPLC condemned the assassination, but has yet to remove Turning Point from its map.

In recent years, the SPLC has added parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty to the “hate map,” along with groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care,” conservative Christian nonprofits including Focus on the Family, and even the nonprofit PragerU, best known for producing 5-minute educational videos.

Far-left extremism, if you ask me.

Now for something very new. As I mentioned in a previous post, I worked in several tech companies that pushed me to make mandatory donations to the far left United Way. It was so bad that the CEO of one company met with me, and at a different company, someone from the head office met with me. That’s how alarmed they were that I wanted no part of the United Way giving. I don’t give money to United Way, and neither should you.

Well, there’s another company called Benevity, which uses the SPLC “hate map” to discriminate against Christians and conservative charities.

This article from Do No Harm explains:

Benevity is a software company that provides a platform to facilitate companies’ charitable giving efforts to nonprofit organizations.

However, Benevity uses a so-called “Hate List” and “Hate Map” developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to vet the nonprofits deemed eligible for corporate charitable giving and employee matching programs. The SPLC fully supports radical identity politics, branding efforts to fight back against discriminatory DEI practices and gender ideology as somehow hateful.

And at some point, the SPLC designated Do No Harm as a “hate group.”

Do No Harm, along with 11 other similarly-branded organizations, is signing onto a letter urging Benevity to immediately cease relying on this discredited and harmful list.

“By relying on these partisan designations, Benevity legitimizes a severely biased blacklist that inspires violence, urges discrimination against mainstream organizations, and undermines the spirit of charitable giving,” the letter reads.

The letter then cites examples of groups that have been falsely deemed hateful by the SPLC and subsequently subjected to violence.

I never had to deal with Benevity. But one thing for sure – if you work in one of these companies that wants you to give your money to any charity, say no. Take the money and give it to charities you trust. Me, I like Ratio Christi. Find a chapter, and partner with them. But don’t co-operate with these secular left companies, and don’t give them any of your money.

You might remember how famous philosopher Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently investigated Christianity. He found the evidence good enough to make a commitment. I wrote about what arguments he found convincing in this post. A new famous scholar, Charles Murray, has investigated into Christianity. Let’s see what arguments he looked at and where he came out.

Before we see what Charles Murray found, here is a good list of arguments for a Creator and Designer.

I have a list of 8 scientific arguments:

1. origin of the universe
2. cosmic fine-tuning
3. origin of life (building blocks and sequencing of information)
4. Cambrian explosion (and other surges of information in the fossil record)
5. galactic, stellar and planetary habitability, e.g. – habitable zones
6. molecular machines in the cell, e.g. – bacterial flagellum
7. evidence for a non-material mind, e.g. – split brain surgery
8. the waiting time problem

And then there are philosophical arguments, too:

1. the moral argument
2. the contingency argument
3. arguments for substance dualism, e.g. – intentionality
4. the argument from reason

And historical arguments:

1. reliability of the New Testament documents
2. minimal facts case for the resurrection, e.g. – Paul’s conversion
3. prophecy, e.g. – Psalm 22

I excluded all “soft” arguments from my list, because emotion-based claims grate on my software engineer and military history soul.

So, what was Murray’s starting point? He explains in a New York Post article:

By the middle of the 20th century, academia’s appraisal of religion amounted to “Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.”

That’s the message I got when I reached Harvard in the fall of 1961.

None of my professors was religious (at least visibly). I didn’t have any friends who were religious.

When the topic of religion came up, professors and friends alike treated it dismissively or as a subject for humor.

I didn’t expend energy rejecting religion. It was irrelevant. I ignored it.

That’s his starting point. And why investigate Christianity when you are already at the top of your field, getting a lot of respect for the influential books that you are putting out?

So often, Christians are taught to think that Christianity is something that you investigate when you have a life crisis. Then you take this irrational leap into the dark, and turn over a new leaf, to get your life in order. Maybe to make people stop judging you. That’s how Christianity is seen today. Most people think that Christianity is about feelings and community, but that’s not the way Jesus saw it. Jesus said that everyone who is on the side of TRUTH listens to him. He used evidence in order to appeal to people who didn’t believe in him already. We talked about Christianity as a “truth quest” in our podcast episode with Dr. Gunter Bechly, who went on a truth quest and arrived at Christianity. Intellectuals who are curious and open can find solid evidence for the Christian worldview.

Science and Culture has an article up about what evidence Charles Murray looked at in his new book:

“Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant,” Charles Murray writes. “For them, I think I have a story worth telling.”

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness, from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of biblical texts, and the scholarship surrounding the resurrection story.

These align with some of the arguments that I mentioned (origin of the universe, fine-tuning, consciousness, moral argument, gospel reliability, resurrection), showing you how these arguments really do work on non-Christian scholars.

A Wall Street Journal article (archived) has more about his process of changing his mind:

Whatever else may be said about Mr. Murray, he can’t be accused of dishonesty or cowardice. He has a penchant for saying what many other writers and scholars know but either can’t say or can’t say clearly and without a thousand qualifications. He has often been typecast in liberal organs as an ideologue, but that is exactly wrong: Reading Mr. Murray’s work—this is most plainly true in “Losing Ground” and “Coming Apart”—you often sense that the writer would rather draw different conclusions but, in view of the evidence, can’t.

“Taking Religion Seriously” is, in that sense, typical of its author. Mr. Murray wasn’t searching for religious belief.

He starts out with a book written by a famous atheist astronomer, Martin Rees, about the cosmic fine-tuning argument. This argument is generally viewed by atheists as the most compelling argument for a Creator and Designer of the universe:

Mr. Murray’s conversion, if that’s what it is, began in the early 2000s, when he read a few theoretical accounts of the universe’s origins, among them Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” (1999). So wildly improbable were the conditions necessary for the so-called Big Bang, it seems to Mr. Murray, that the whole business, whenever it happened, sounded very much like what Christians call creation. “I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he recalls reflecting, “but it’s the only plausible explanation”—“it” meaning the divine origin of everything.

He was also impressed by the case for the reliability of the gospels, including the relatively recent, ground-breaking work done by Dr. Richard Bauckham on the eyewitness backing of the gospels:

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened?

If you’re a student of apologetics, then you’ll have heard of these concerns before, maybe in the writings of William Lane Craig for one and two, and N.T. Wright for number three. That’s why Christian apologists spend all this time reading this stuff, so that we can suggest these books to skeptics like Charles Murray! And these books do work on skeptics. It’s a shame that so many Christians never learn about how to use these books in church.

Anyway, if you like stories about very, very famous non-Christians taking a look at the good evidence for God’s existence, and Christianity in particular, then mark this one down on your list. It’s good to not care too much about flashy celebrities, and people who draw crowds based on their entertainment ability. Life isn’t about that. Life is about taking the time to puzzle about the evidence in nature and history that you can follow to get into a two-way relationship with the Boss. Many people seem to get so busy with other things. Some of these things are bad, and some of these things are good. But the purpose of life is surely to puzzle about the big questions, and to be reconciled with God.

Maybe you’ve been a Christian all your life, and you don’t even know why. Maybe you’d like to find out how to show non-Christians your work? In that case, it’s helpful to consider the stories of people like Gunter Bechly, Larry Sanger, Charles Murray, etc. and do a little study to see how good the evidence that they found really is. It’s fun to talk to people about the clues that the Boss has left.

So, I am still on Cloud 9 from the amazing essay and lecture by Helen Andrews that I posted on the weekend. My female friends were unanimous in their praise for the article. My male friend Blake and I talked about it for 2 hours on the phone. My other male friends have not had the chance to read it. But on the heels of that, here’s another fantastic podcast about feminism. Terrell found it for me.

I don’t need to introduce economist Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (of the Ruth Institute) to regular readers of the blog, as she is well known for her opposition to feminism, and her policy-oriented approach to solving the problems of the Sexual Revolution. Whereas many social conservatives just moan and complain about the Sexual Revolution, and then expect men to “fix it” so that women are happy, Dr. Morse has all sorts of interesting ideas about what laws and policies to change to bring us back to normal.

Her guest Dr. Hannah Spier is someone I had never head of before. She’s a former psychiatrist who is married and lives in Switzerland with her husband and children. She’s a stay-at-home mother now. And you might not believe this but she describes herself as very supportive of “men’s rights”. Now, don’t get me wrong, she’s not a basher of women. What I heard in the podcast was a lot of discussion about what feminism is, and how women who believe in it order their lives. Does it work out for them?

Anyway, I have the video version and the audio version. So here’s the uncensored video from Rumble:

And the audio-only version: (opens in new tab)

https://sites.libsyn.com/20124/psychiatrist-proves-feminism-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-hannah-spier-dr-j-show

Don’t forget that our Knight and Rose Show is also posted on Rumble, if you don’t like YouTube. I certainly don’t.

I was supposed to be working on work-work (work related to my job) on Sunday, and doing the laundry. But I could not escape from this podcast. I kept re-winding it to play parts over.

Anyway, I was going to write a summary of this, but I fed Grok the transcript, and told it the parts that impressed me, and asked for a summary. I got this:

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse and Dr. Hannah Spier explore how feminist ideology influences women’s choices, often leading to mental health challenges and unfulfilled desires. Dr. Spier, a psychiatrist, shares insights from her practice, highlighting how societal pressures and personal decisions rooted in feminism can create resentment and emotional distress across different life stages.

For women in their 20s, Dr. Spier observes a pattern of pursuing demanding degrees while grappling with unmet emotional needs. Many focus on dating or social status, influenced by feminist ideals of career-driven success, only to face anxiety and panic attacks when academic and romantic goals clash. This mismatch stems from chasing a glamorous career image that doesn’t satisfy deeper attachment needs.

In their 30s, women often experience burnout from unfulfilling jobs, compounded by the pressure of declining fertility. Dr. Spier notes that some women invest years in relationships with partners hesitant to commit, partly because career-focused women initially seem less likely to prioritize marriage or children. When these women later seek commitment, the delay can lead to conflict.

By their 40s, married women with children may face depression and marital strain, often feeling guilt over their children’s struggles, like ADHD, which Dr. Spier links to attachment issues from balancing work and family. Resentment toward husbands for perceived unequal responsibilities can push some toward divorce, seeking relief but facing new challenges.

Both critique feminism’s narrative that pits men and women against each other, arguing it undervalues motherhood and fuels bitterness. They encourage women to make choices aligned with their biological and relational needs, fostering healthier emotional lives and stronger families, rather than adhering to societal pressures that may lead to regret.

What was most interesting to me about all this was how even though women were making these decisions all along, it was pretty clear that they had been sold a bill of goods by powerful people who wanted them to go in this direction for whatever reason.

In particular, I was pleased to hear Dr. Spier mention how women who are committed to full-time careers deliberately choose men who support that. I.e. – men who don’t want to be burdened by commitment and children. So, to the woman who has her eventual demands for commitment and children rejected, it looks like “all men are bad” because the man she chose was bad. I know that many modern women, for example, consider support for abortion rights to be a non-negotiable when dating a man. If a feminist woman chooses a pro-abortion man, it gives her maximum autonomy for her career during her 20s. But how likely do you think it is that a pro-abortion man is going to suddenly sign up for marriage and children when she hits 32? It seems unlikely. After all, abortion is nothing but seeking reckless sexual pleasure, and then resorting to deadly violence to avoid the consequences of your actions. A man who believes in that is not going to sign up for marriage and kids. Marriage and kids are responsibilities, and pro-abortion men don’t want that.

What we need to do is to tell women that good men are men who want to commit early, and raise kids early. And so, they need to choose those good men early. Men marry for a specific plan. Good men want a helper who can help them with their plans. It’s wrong to pass up good men in the woman’s 20s, and then hope that they will be there in the woman’s 30s. That’s not a good deal for the good men. They will not take that deal. The right solution is for older women to teach younger women to reject feminism when they are still young. So, please share the podcast with young women.