Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate map survives legal challenge

The Southern Poverty Law Center survived one of its toughest courtroom challenges last week, when a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit accusing the group’s vaunted hate map of libel for describing an immigration crackdown group as “anti-immigrant.”

Georgia-based activist D.A. King, who led the Dustin Inman Society, had prevailed at an earlier stage when a federal court allowed the case to proceed to the discovery stage.

But U.S. District Judge Corey Maze in Alabama ruled Wednesday that the SPLC is entitled to maintain and publish its own opinions and was justified in its own mind when it gave King, who has since died, the “hate” and “anti-immigrant” labels.

“Plaintiffs cannot prove actual malice when SPLC labels [the Dustin Inman Society] an ‘anti-immigrant’ hate group,” Judge Maze wrote.

The SPLC, in making the hate designation, cited King’ complaints about immigrants’ general racial makeup and struggles assimilating, some of his organization’s financing and his support for legislation to make life tougher for illegal immigrants.

King argued during the litigation that he was anti-illegal immigrant but not anti-immigrant. He pointed out that the society had immigrants on its board and that his own sister is an immigrant.

But Judge Maze, a Trump appointee, said the SPLC was entitled to generalize to all immigrants, saying it was “rhetorical hyperbole” protected by the First Amendment.

He acknowledged that King might have convinced a jury that the designation was inaccurate on its face, but the judge said it also matters what’s in the mind of the speaker. And in this case, even if the SPLC was using “unfair” definitions, it was on safe ground because it “believed its definitions and resulting statements were accurate.”

Tyler O’Neil, author of “Making Hate Pay,” a study of the SPLC, was surprised that the judge waved the anti-immigrant argument away so quickly.

“The whole case hinged on the SPLC’s claim that the Dustin Inman Society essentially exists to vilify all immigrants. That statement there, that they never removed from the extremist profile, really runs in the teeth of the facts of the Dustin Inman Society,” Mr. O’Neil said.

The SPLC didn’t respond to request for comment. Neither did lawyers for the society or the estate of King, who died in March.

The SPLC was founded in Alabama in the early 1970s and quickly established itself as a major advocate in civil rights work, taking on groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

In the 1990s it began a broader examination of “hate” groups and its aperture expanded. It now lists nearly 1,400 organizations as hate or extremist groups. Its targets for its “hatewatch” range from the KKK to Turning Point USA.

The group reached a settlement in 2018 with a Muslim organization it had wrongly labeled an “Anti-Muslim extremist.” The group, the Quilliam Foundation, in fact battles Muslim fundamentalism and anti-Muslim hate.

The SPLC paid out a settlement of more than $3 million and issued an apology, which curiously appears to have since been scrubbed from the SPLC website.

U.S. District Judge Keith Watkins, a George W. Bush appointee, had ruled in 2023 that King’s lawsuit against the SPLC could proceed. He said King had made a “plausible” case for defamation and granted legal discovery, which SPLC critics had hoped would produce more juicy dirt on the organization.

Judge Maze took over the case and, after discovery was completed, ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to sustain the defamation case.

Mr. O’Neil, who is managing editor of the conservative Daily Signal, said despite the loss, the lawsuit helped puncture the veneer the SPLC has maintained of being a fact-based referee of hate and extremism.

Indeed, early in the litigation, the SPLC admitted that its evaluations were little more than a political opinion.

“SPLC’s anti-immigrant hate group designation is not capable of being proved false, but is an opinion expressed as part of a political debate,” the organization argued.

Mr. O’Neil said the SPLC uses its designations as “a weaponized tool of ritual defamation.”

That sentiment is now shared at the highest levels of the federal government.

The FBI last year ended ties with the SPLC.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a social media post. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which had previously sued over the SPLC’s hate designation, said he has noticed a drop in people citing the SPLC’s work, both from traditional news outlets and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

It used to be standard when a center employee testified on Capitol Hill to be hit with SPLC-fueled denunciations. Mr. Krikorian said that hasn’t happened recently.

“It’s kind of unfortunate they’re not being held accountable for their lies, but they just aren’t very relevant anymore,” Mr. Krikorian said. “I don’t feel bad for SPLC, they’ve got $800 million in the bank. You can live off that for a long time. But as far as their importance, their role in the immigration debate, it isn’t what it used to be.”