By Kyle Smith | 1 March 2018
The purported fact-finding group is in fact a machine for turning leftist hysteria into cash.
NATIONAL REVIEW — 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.”
You will search Smith’s and Sommers’s writings in vain for the sort of chest-thumping idiocies espoused by men’s-rights bloggers such as Paul Elam of the site A Voice for Men or “Roosh V.” (a.k.a. Daryush Valizadeh), a self-proclaimed “pickup artist” from the site Return of Kings. The SPLC is designating both of these websites “hate groups,” which offers an answer to the question of why the number of hate groups always seems to be growing in the SPLC’s tabulations. Got a blog you use to attract clicks by saying the most outrageous things you can come up with in between playing shoot-’em-up games on the PlayStation? Congratulations, you’re a “hate group.” Just like the Nazi party. […]
There was a time when the Southern Poverty Law Center did useful work reporting on actual hate groups such as the KKK
That’s funny. In rightfully criticizing the SPLC, the National Review reveals itself!