In the last few years, the bloom has fallen off the rose for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. Once positioned as the preeminent authority on American hate groups, the organization has been exposed as the left-wing, anti-Christian fraud that it has always been.
In its zeal to make the most of the Black Lives Matter/Trump era, in which there was an inordinate amount of interest from the media when it comes to near-defunct groups like the Ku Klux Klan and marginally-more active groups like the Proud Boys, the SPLC saw its chance. They appeared in every news story they could get their grubby little hands on, produced report after clickbaiting report, and, well, they made some glaring mistakes along the way. In doing so, they made their media caretakers look quite foolish.
One such mistake was when they labeled then-presidential candidate Ben Carson as an extremist purveyor of hate. Another was when they slammed Jeff Sessions for hanging around with the likes of Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF’s sin? Oh, they represented some high-profile Christians who, you know, didn’t want to be run out of business by attention-and-money-grubbing gay couples.
The SPLC’s biggest mistake came in going after Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim who has dedicated his career to exposing the extremism inherent in Islam and working to reform what is a depressingly backwards and terrorism-prone religion in many parts of the world. They labeled him an anti-Muslim hatemonger – a label that ultimately cost them $3.4 million and much of their reputation in the media.
Well, we thought that last part was true, anyway. So imagine our surprise on Thursday to see a banner headline in The New York Times: “Over 1,000 Hate Groups Are Now Active in United States, Civil Rights Group Says”
Hmm, surely they aren’t talking about…
Yep.
“The number of hate groups in the United States rose for the fourth year in a row in 2018, pushed to a record high by a toxic combination of political polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment and technologies that help spread propaganda online, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Wednesday,” reported the Times.
To be fair, it takes them a whole four short paragraphs to finally mention the name “Trump.” The president, we’re told by an SPLC director, “has made people in the white supremacist movement move back into politics and the public domain.”
Cool. If only you had a shred of credibility left, we might be concerned.
Shame on you, New York Times. You really should know better. But then, we’re not surprised that you don’t.
