A prominent but embattled left-wing civil rights organization that has built a fundraising juggernaut by labeling some conservative groups as hatemongers has added a new bogeyman to its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” list: the parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, in a report released Tuesday, lumped in Moms for Liberty — founded by two former school board members in Florida in 2021 to protest mask mandates and other Covid-related restrictions in public schools — with the usual array of neo-nazis, white supremacists, racist skinheads, and anti-government militias that it monitors.

“In 2022, the hard-right movement mobilized hate and extremism from the mainstream to the main street,” the director of the center’s Intelligence Project, Susan Cork, said. “Extremist actors — often armed — brought hatred into our daily lives and public spaces, protesting LGBTQ inclusion, reproductive rights and classroom discussions of systemic racism.”

The center’s report says Moms for Liberty is part of a wave of “reactionary anti-student inclusion groups” spouting “racist and nationalist themes” that are “intimidating and harassing teachers and administrators” in an effort to “preserve the unseen but understood caste system in public schools.” The group’s founders are said to have “quickly led their troops to the front lines to combat inclusive curriculum, LGBTQ rights and what they see as inappropriate reading material in classrooms and libraries.”

At its first annual gathering at Tampa last year, Moms for Liberty said it had some 195 chapters in 37 states with a total of 100,000 members nationwide. Most of the major GOP candidates for president in 2024, including both President Trump and Governor DeSantis, are scheduled to speak at the group’s 2023 summit at Philadelphia later this month.

After the report was released, dozens of prominent conservatives and Republican politicians stepped up to defend Moms for Liberty and ridicule the Southern Poverty Law Center for what some called its defamatory fear-mongering.

“I’ve long argued that the SPLC should lose its tax exempt status,” Senator Cotton said on Twitter. “Engaging in systematic defamation is not a tax-exempt purpose.”

Senator Vance said: “The SPLC is a garbage organization now dedicated to harassing groups that advocate for parents,” adding “In the future, their pronouncements must be met with scorn.” Senator Cruz simply labeled the classification: “Absurd.”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center cares more about silencing parents who want to have a say in their children’s education than they care about a violent domestic terrorist among their own ranks,” Mr. Cruz said.

Mr. Cruz is referring to the case of Thomas Jurgens, a SPLC staff attorney who was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism by authorities in March after he attended an anti-police riot outside Atlanta. The center said he was at the melee as a legal observer and called his arrest an example of “heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protesters.”

The center, which survived a series of embarrassing scandals involving racism and sexism that led to the ouster of its founder, Morris Dees, in 2019, has been sued in the past by some of the groups it targets in its reports. This year, one of those lawsuits has made it into the discovery phase and will likely proceed to trial.

In 2018, the center included the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, which advocates for strict enforcement of immigration laws, on its annual list of hate groups. The society later sued for defamation and a federal judge in Alabama has refused to dismiss the case. The group’s leader, Donald King, told the Sun in April that being included on the SPLC’s “hate map” has caused it “severe reputational damage” and forced its members to “live in a climate of severe fear.”

The co-founders of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, have not said whether they plan to pursue legal action against the center. In a statement to the Sun, the pair said they are sticking to their stated mission of empowering parents and encouraging them to take a more active role in public schooling.

“Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school — parents or government employees?” the pair said in the statement. “We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that.”