How The Southern Poverty Law Center Started Inventing ‘Hate Groups’

1. Tyler O’Neil, a senior editor for PJ Media, ably documents in his book, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, what seemed like a sudden comeuppance for the SPLC was years in the making.
2. O’Neil, who has carefully followed SPLC’s machinations at PJ Media for years, dug through the history of Dees and the SPLC to reveal the truth that the SPLC was far from the righteous crusaders for civil rights that the direct-mail brochures portrayed.
3. O’Neil here covers the role of the SPLC in policing online speech on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and the major tech companies including Amazon and Google came to increasingly rely on the ever-expansive SPLC “Hate List” for their growing efforts to censor and deplatform, particularly after the tragic events of Charlottesville in 2017.
4. As O’Neil writes, Attorney General Dana Nessel and the Michigan Department of Human Rights then-executive director Agustin Arbulu openly referenced the SPLC hate group list as the impetus for establishing a new Hate Crimes Unit.
5. In August 2019, ABC News noted somewhat gleefully that seven of the leading Democratic candidates for president had openly called President Trump a “white supremacist.” Left-leaning national security journalists openly seek the designation of domestic white supremacist groups as foreign terrorists even while they accuse the president’s advisors of being “extremists.” A substantial industry has popped up perpetuating the false perception that white supremacists (or just white American men in general) are the gravest terrorism threat by aggressively massaging the statistics while evidence continues to show that the threat of jihadist terrorism remains the far more lethal challenge.
6. Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center does an ample job exposing the SPLC as a dishonest racket and hypocritical arbiter of hate.
7. Unfortunately, while the right may treat the wild accusations of SPLC and its imitators scornfully, it’s unlikely that the book will move the needle with those who take the SPLC’s argument at face value: big tech, woke capital, and elements of the homeland security establishment.
8. While O’Neil catalogs examples of shocking and sordid behavior from the SPLC and its founder the revelations arising from Dee’s 1980 divorce are particularly disturbing and foreshadow later allegations of sexual harassment perhaps what is most remarkable about the early history O’Neil cites is how contemporaneously well-documented it was.
9. In the earliest days of the SPLC, the Alabama-based civil rights law firm did target truly racist and hateful groups, most famously the United Klans of America, which the SPLC devastated in a successful lawsuit it launched in 1984.
10. Industry collusion with the SPLC reached its zenith post-Charlottesville, as major charity rating organizations Guidestar and Charity Navigator began displaying the SPLC Hate Group designation on their websites, which potential donors use to identify a non-profit’s bona fides.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/24/how-the-southern-poverty-law-center-started-inventing-hate-groups/