There are two inconvenient truths about the Southern Poverty Law Center. One is obvious. The other less so.
The obvious inconvenient truth is that the SPLC is a lefty group that doesn't fight racism, but targets political opponents, and uses its past tussles with the KKK to link anyone whose politics it disagrees with to racists. That's what it did with its latest attack on Sam Harris.
But that's what it always does.
The less obvious inconvenient truth (to anyone who hasn't read through reams of its garbage), is that it's incompetent and sloppy. Despite its vast wealth, it's the Snopes of lefty hate trackers, running on its brand, disinterested in the most basic fact checking, and doing little more than hiring bottom of the barrel people to write smears that fit with the current political agenda.
I ought to know because the Southern Poverty Law Center had added me to its list of anti-Muslim hate groups. Now even if we grant its ideological premise, an individual is still not a group.
And that wasn't even the worst howler on that list. This was.
Until its closing, the SPLC hate map included Casa D'Ice signs, the sign hanging outside a Pennsylvania bar, in its list of hate groups.
So that list of hate groups was so thoroughly researched that it met Snopes standards. As was its entire hate map.
On Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) removed the historic Iowa town Amana Colonies from its "hate map" that inspired a terrorist attack in 2012.
The SPLC "had previously designated the historic settlement as the home of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacy news and commentary organization," the Press-Bulletin reported. On Monday, one of the Amanas leaders received word that the SPLC had changed Daily Stormer's designation to "statewide."
The town had previously contested the claim, but the SPLC had stood by its marking the Amanas on the "hate map." Why? The organization claimed "it had confirmation that a group of individuals met sometime in September 2016 at a restaurant in the Amanas."
"The First Iowa Stormer Bookclub was a success!" a user with the screen name Concerned Troll posted in a September 26, 2016, thread. Concerned Troll did not provide specific details about the visit, but went on to suggest a subsequent meeting in Des Moines.
There are a legion of other examples. I've documented some of them over the years.
The default SPLC position used to be sneering at anyone who challenged the designations. Even entire town governments. But that changed as the lawsuit threats began coming in. And this is a big win.
he Southern Poverty Law Center has removed an online list of “anti-Muslim extremists” after British Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz threatened to sue the SPLC over his inclusion on the list.
The list is the fourth article in two months the SPLC has deleted over accuracy concerns.
In addition to Nawaz, the list included Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who advocates against female genital mutilation, among other issues. Ali blasted the SPLC’s “deeply offensive smears” in an August 2017 op-ed for The New York Times.
The SPLC wanted to be in the Islamophobia business because it was "hot". But it had no idea what it was doing. That's how it added me and a bar sign to its list. More recently its anti-Muslim list seemed to have been written by the usual Islamists. Or based on their work. And the Muslim Brotherhood is notorious for hurling Islamophobia charges at other Muslims. (It's that Takfiri thing you know.)
And that was particularly stupid because, unlike me or Bosch, Pamela Geller or a bar sign in Pennsylvania (from a bar that has since closed), these are people who have supporters in the media.
So it's time for some more retooling.
But now the SPLC is trying to get into the alt-right business, because that's hot. It outsourced the job though to people who seem to be settling online scores. And that's how Sam Harris ended up there.
The SPLC has a lot of money. As Matthew Vadum's CPC's expose notes.
The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) ended the last tax year with close to a half billion dollars – $477 million in assets – after taking in an astounding $136 million that year, the group acknowledges in a new IRS filing.
The SPLC has made a ton of money. But its old business, the KKK, gets less relevant every year. And it keeps trying to cash in on the latest trend without having a clue.
Now it's finally being held accountable.