For years, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been one of the left’s most devastating weapons, chiefly because of the cynicism and deceit at the heart of its operations.
Most Americans think of it as a neutral watchdog organization, valiantly fighting against a still deeply entrenched racism. Far fewer are aware of how the SPLC has taken the good will it built up fighting against the Ku Klux Klan and used it to give a patina of objectivity and fairness to its efforts to defame and destroy patriotic organizations that dissent from the left’s agenda. And now, oddly enough, a Trump-appointed district court judge has handed this unsavory and mendacious group a massive victory in court.
Daily Signal Senior Editor Tyler O’Neil reported Saturday that district court Judge Corey L. Maze of the Northern District of Alabama “repeatedly shielded the Southern Poverty Law Center from scrutiny during a defamation case and then dismissed a conservative group’s case because it ‘lacked evidence,’ according to the conservative group’s attorneys.”
It was President Donald Trump who appointed Maze to serve as a U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama back in 2018, and renominated him in 2019 after the senate failed to take prompt action on his nomination.
Certainly judges should judge cases as they believe the law requires, without allowing partisan considerations to sway them. Yet when the America-First president appoints a judge, patriots have every reason to expect that he will be faithful in enforcing the law without partiality, even when doing so harms the left’s interests. The strangeness of this case suggests otherwise.
The plaintiffs, Donald A. King and his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, on Thursday filed a brief “asking a higher court to reconsider the case.” They contend that Maze “erred in rejecting their attempts to obtain evidence proving the SPLC acted with actual malice in branding the society an ‘anti-immigrant hate group.’”
One of the attorneys for the Dustin Inman Society, Harry Mihet, explained: “The case was decided by stacking four errors. Cutting off discovery, ignoring what the SPLC already knew, twisting the legal standard, and stretching the single-publication rule, until the plaintiffs had no case left. And so the case was decided, not because there is no evidence available, but because the court did not allow any evidence to be gathered, to show that the SPLC acted with actual malice.”
Mihet added that the case as it continues now “is really about a simple principle: you can’t block discovery, and then win because there’s no evidence.” Indeed. That sounds like the tactic of an unscrupulous, win-at-all-costs, damn-the-Constitution far-left judge. So what is Corey Maze thinking?
The case is important as a step toward the complete discrediting of the SPLC, which is still so influential that numerous patriotic individuals and groups are still deplatformed, debanked, and subjected to various restrictions on their activities because the SPLC calls them “hate groups” or “hate group leaders.” The Daily Signal notes that the SPLC “routinely smears mainstream conservative and Christian groups by placing them on a ‘hate map’ with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. King, founder of the Dustin Inman Society, sued the center for defamation after it branded his Georgia-based organization—which opposes illegal immigration—an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
Related: The Propaganda Will Continue: Democrat Megadonors Bail Out NPR
The leftists, eagerly rounding upon a wrongthinker, claim that “the Dustin Inman Society, led by D.A. King, poses as an organization concerned about immigration issues, yet focuses on vilifying all immigrants.” But now, the Dustin Inman Society is continuing to fight back, contending that Maze “violated precedent when he denied the society’s request for documents related to SPLC’s internal policies for designating “hate groups,” SPLC’s communications about the society, and materials concerning SPLC’s methodology as applied to other groups in the immigration context.”
Maze’s rulings made for “a record stripped of the evidence on which defamation plaintiffs depend.” Then, acting every bit the part of a leftist activist judge, Maze turned around and “granted summary judgment because that evidence was missing.”
So what’s going on with Judge Corey Maze? And why is it that so many patriots at some point make a large left turn, while so few leftists come to their senses? We may never know the answers to those questions, but we can hope that the Dustin Inman Society’s ongoing legal efforts will bring us closer to the day when the sinister and destructive SPLC closes its doors for good.
