SPLC

‘If the SPLC was not supported and propelled by the mainstream, traditional media, they would just be another hate-mongering, money-making organization,’ King said.

Five years ago, Dustin Inman Society (DIS) Founder and President D.A. King didn’t know how he would be forced to deal with smears against his organization from the Southern Poverty Law Center, but that didn’t stop him from filing a landmark lawsuit against one of the biggest anti-Christian, anti-conservative organizations in the nation.

“I’m proud that we constructed a factual complaint that the judge observed ‘the plaintiff has the best argument,’” King told The Federalist. “All we did in the complaint was outline some — not all — of the facts of the case.”

The SPLC is known for tarnishing organizations with Christian missions or conservative ties by disseminating its 1,225-organization-long “hate group” list to Democrat allies in Congress, Big Tech, and woke corporations. The leftist activist organization has also gained infamy in recent years for galvanizing a Virginia man to attack the Family Research Council and the behavior of its staff, like lawyer Thomas Webb Jurgens, who faces domestic terrorism charges for targeting an Atlanta police training facility with rocks and incendiaries.

An analysis of White House visitor logs by The Daily Signal shows SPLC staff have met with President Joe Biden and members of his cabinet nearly a dozen times since he took office. It was mere months after the SPLC’s latest meeting at the executive mansion that it dubbed a dozen grassroots parents’ rights organizations as hate groups.

Until the SPLC openly committed to continuing the Biden regime’s crusade against concerned parents like those at Moms For Liberty, King said he believed his lawsuit was the only opportunity that “normal Americans and conservatives have to show the world who the Southern Poverty Law Center really is.”

In his defamation case brought against the SPLC, King argued that the SPLC did not conduct a “meaningful fact finding or investigation” before dubbing his organization a hate group for “vilifying all immigrants” in the SPLC’s 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 annual Intelligence Report magazine.

King also noted that the SPLC was “aware of Mr. King’s documented history of opposing only ‘illegal immigration’ through the ‘enforcement of immigration laws’ and of not opposing legal immigration” and even “explicitly stated” that DIS was not a “hate group” in 2011.

Yet, the SPLC repeatedly refused to rescind its characterization of DIS as an “anti-immigrant hate group” because it is “an expression of opinion protected under the First Amendment” and “not capable of being empirically proven true or false.”

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Todd McMurtry, the lawyer who secured settlements from CNN, NBC Universal, and The Washington Post on behalf of Covington Catholic High School teen Nick Sandmann, has joined the legal team for D.A. King and the Dustin Inman Society, who are suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for defamation.

“We’re proud of the willingness of both Liberty Counsel and Todd McMurtry in agreeing to represent us in defense of our good name and reputation from the ridiculous charges of the hatemongering Southern Poverty Law Center,” King, an anti-illegal immigration activist whose organization the SPLC branded an “anti-immigrant hate group,” told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Monday. “We’re also proud of Mr. McMurtry’s experience and success in defamation law.”

“I hope we are successful in court and that no violent, hate-filled supporter of the SPLC finds us first,” the plaintiff added. King was referring to a 2012 incident in which a now-convicted terrorist targeted the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting, relying on the SPLC’s inclusion of the group on its “hate map” of organizations the left-wing SPLC considers bigoted or hateful in some way.

I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, the SPLC fired its cofounder and a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

McMurtry and the Christian law firm Liberty Counsel joined with King’s current lawyer, James McKoon, on Monday. McKoon, of the McKoon and Gamble law firm in Phenix City, Alabama, initially filed the lawsuit.

“The SPLC’s stated motivation is to ‘destroy’ groups with which it disagrees, and it accomplishes this objective by falsely labeling nonviolent organizations as ‘hate groups,'” Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said in a statement Monday. “This label is false and those who rely upon it must stop.”

The SPLC has accused Liberty Counsel of being an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” an accusation Liberty Counsel disputes. Liberty Counsel claims SPLC attacks it due to its Christian faith and opposition to same-sex marriage. In 2007, former SPLC spokesman Mark Potok said, “Our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them.”

Legacy media outlets attacked Sandmann in 2019 when a video of him near the Lincoln Memorial while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat after the annual March for Life went viral. McMurtry represented Sandmann in multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against legacy media outlets, securing undisclosed settlements from CNN, NBC Universal, and The Washington Post. A federal judge dismissed Sandmann’s other defamation lawsuits in July 2022.

King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process earlier this year. Other conservative groups have sued the SPLC for defamation, but King’s succeeded because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported.

The lawsuit cites an SPLC definition for “anti-immigrant hate group” that dates back to 2020, which no longer appears on the SPLC website—although the center appears not to have adopted a new definition:

Anti-immigrant hate groups are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist groups that have proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigration xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Most white hate groups are also anti-immigrant, but anti-immigrant hate groups single out that population with dehumanizing and demeaning rhetoric. Although many groups legitimately criticize American immigration policies, anti-immigrant hate groups go much further by pushing racist propaganda and ideas about non-white immigrants.  

New evidence makes an immigration activist group's defamation lawsuit against the SPLC even stronger. The SPLC had branded the organization a "hate group" putting it on the "hate map" with Ku Klux Klan chapters. Pictured: SPLC 2021 hate map (Credit: SPLC website screenshot)

In order to win a defamation lawsuit, the person suing must convince the court and ultimately the jury that the slanderer didn’t just publish something false, but that he did so even while suspecting that the attack was false.

Immigration enforcement activist D.A. King’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center made it to the discovery process while so many other lawsuits have failed precisely because King showed that the SPLC had reason to doubt the truth of its claim that his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, was an “anti-immigrant hate group.” In fact, the SPLC had explicitly stated that the society was not a “hate group” in 2011, but it reversed course in 2018, right after registering a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay,” the SPLC routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. This smear inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, but when conservatives sue to defend their good names in court, they repeatedly fail, in part because they do not allege that the SPLC itself doubted the “hate group” smear.

King can claim that, and newly revealed evidence bolsters his claim even further.

According to an article King unearthed on the SPLC website, not only did the SPLC state publicly that his group was not a “hate group” before it reversed course, but an SPLC whistleblower who went on to describe the SPLC’s “hate” accusations as a “highly profitable scam” had himself been involved in the SPLC’s monitoring of King’s organization. He even quoted a source who stated that an early version of King’s organization was not a “traditional ‘hate’ group.”

In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that barely made a blip in the legacy media. At the time, a former SPLC employee by the name of Robert Moser published an article, “The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center” in The New Yorker.

Moser wrote about the guilt he “couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.” He wrote that SPLC staffers would chat “about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups.”

“‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say,” he wrote. “It was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”

Moser’s revealing article has become even more important since he published it in 2019. Moser himself wrote for the Intelligence Project, the SPLC division that produces the “hate group” list. In fact, he also wrote an article about King back in 2005, in which one of Moser’s sources said the first version of King’s organization—known as American Resistance—was not a hate group.