With media help, Moms are smeared by SPLC

I am not a supporter of Moms for Liberty.

I am a supporter of unbiased reporting and the Moms have not been getting it.

Nearly every news story written or broadcast makes this assertion, usually high in the story: “The group is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ‘an anti-government extremist group.’” [SPLC made that declaration in 2022, and  rolls MFL into its off-cited bundle of other “hate groups.”]

That smear plants a negative image in the mind of the reader or viewer that is not balanced by the media’s use of Moms’ self-description of itself as “a parental rights group.”

What you don’t see is any characterization by law enforcement, such as the FBI, of Moms for Liberty as a hate group. It is not listed in the FBI’s vault. As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell,  it is only SPLC that drops that bomb on MFL.

SPLC is itself described as a “civil rights watchdog group,” which it once was, back when I was a member and supporter. But it has since strayed from that mission into backing various Left to Far Left causes, only. In the view of SPLC, conservatives never have their rights abrogated. 

SPLC is hardly a fair and disinterested observer.

If, say, the Conservative American Caucus described the Democratic Party as a coven of Marxist pedophiles, would any legitimate news outlet use it? (There is no Conservative American Caucus; I invented the name to illustrate the issue.)

Let’s hope not, but SPLC is given an authority it does not deserve.

I am neither the first, nor the only, to question its status as a fair arbiter.

Back in 2019, the Washington Post, known as a bastion of liberal thought, asked  if SPLC was a fair judge of “hate” in America. 

In the story, the head of the SPLC calls its hate list a “blunt weapon” and practically admits it applies it, well, liberally.

The Post reports, “For decades, the hate list was a golden seal of disapproval, considered nonpartisan enough to be heeded by government agencies, police departments, corporations and journalists. But in recent years . . . the list has swept up an increasing number of conservative activists — mostly in the anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim categories. . . .”

I am none of the above, but those are social, and political expressions, and they are protected by the First Amendment.

“Along the way, the SPLC undermined its own credibility with a couple of blunders,” the Post reports. “In  2015, it apologized for listing Ben Carson as an extremist (though not on the hate list), saying the characterization was inaccurate. Then, this past June, the group paid $3.4 million to Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam organization to settle a threatened lawsuit. The SPLC had listed them in a ‘Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists’ (again, not on the main hate list). The SPLC apologized for misunderstanding Nawaz’s work to counter Islamist extremism.”

In its previous practice, SPLC used to sue the Ku Klux Klan — and bankrupted that actual extremist group.

Now, SPLC itself has a record of, well, extremism. 

And it can’t write it all off to mistakes.

About 10 years ago, its newsletter started referring to illegal immigrants as “immigrants,” in complaints about how they were threatened.

I called them and said legal immigrants aren’t under threat, and SPLC was  commingling legal immigrants with illegals.

They said it was a mistake, but it happened again, and again I complained, and again it was called a mistake.

When it happened again, I stopped giving it money and it stopped answering my complaints.

Late in 2019, word came from leadership inside the elaborate SPLC headquarters that the progressive group that fights for the oppressed would fight its employees’ attempt to form a union. Wow! Talk about hate.

The SPLC reorientation seemed to start after the removal of SPLC founder, the widely-respected Morris Dees.

Or formerly-respected, after a damning piece on Dees and SPLC was published by the uber progressive The New Yorker. That takeout recapped earlier stories that had questioned, or attacked, SPLC.

And these attacks came from friends, not from those on the hate list.

With all this evidence readily available, why in the world does the mainstream media continue to give SPLC such unquestioned authority? 

Confirmation bias, perhaps?