The SPLC: Turning Leftist Hysteria into Cash

Kyle Smith has an excellent piece over at National Review entitled “Hate, Inc.: The SPLC Is a Hyper-Partisan Scam” that accurately states: “The purported fact-finding group is in fact a machine for turning leftist hysteria into cash.” This description sounds about right. Here is more from the article:

There was a time when the Southern Poverty Law Center did useful work reporting on actual hate groups such as the KKK. These days, though, the SPLC is simply a MoveOn or Media Matters–style outfit. Its core mission now is trying to marginalize and shut up even mildly right-of-center voices by calling them instruments of hate, making increasingly strained attempts to tie conservative commentators, authors, political figures, and professors to the alt-right or neo-Nazism. At the same time it elevates absurd bloggers to the level of potential leaders of lynch mobs.

The equivalent of a Drudge-siren moment for SPLC is when it rolls out yet another faux-neutral report on hate, which is always getting worse and threatening to engulf the republic. The SPLC’s report on “Male supremacy,” which it calls “a hateful ideology for the subjugation of women” and ties to the men’s-rights activists lurking on 4Chan and Reddit who boast about their supposed dominance of women, lists as pernicious allies the psychologist, author, and PJ Media columnist Helen Smith and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling them “anti-feminist female voices” who “give the men’s rights movement a veneer of even-handedness” and lend a “mainstream and respectable face to some MRA concerns.”….

The SPLC is, as Philanthropy Roundtable put it, “Hate, Inc.,” or “The Anti-Hate Group That Is a Hate Group.” Its shameful attacks on Smith, Sommers, Ali, Carson, Paul, Krikorian, and others are simply scaremongering for suckers. It may portray itself as a justice-minded team of Atticus Finches. In reality it’s more like a goon squad of David Brocks.