A legal victory for a Georgia
-based border security group is poised to uncover details on how the Southern Poverty Law Center brands certain conservative organizations as hate groups.
A federal judge rejected a motion from the SPLC to dismiss a defamation case involving the Dustin Inman Society, which was challenging its “hate group” label.
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“We’ve overcome what I am told is the biggest and most often interjected hurdle when people try to fight back against the well-funded Southern Poverty Law Center,” D.A. King, founder and president of the Dustin Inman Society, told the Washington Examiner in a phone interview.
The SPLC publishes a “hate map,” which in 2021 monitored 733 organizations it deems “hate groups” in the United States.
Likening more mainstream organizations to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC has maintained its designations are protected under the First Amendment as “non-actionable opinion.” SPLC hate groups include the Alliance Defending Freedom, Ruth Institute, the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-FAM, the Center for Immigration Studies, Liberty Counsel, Catholic Family News, and the Family Research Council.
That defense largely worked in favor of the SPLC until March 31, when U.S. District Judge W. Keith Watkins rejected the SPLC’s motion to dismiss in a case brought by the Dustin Inman Society and King.
King said he and his organization are considered public figures for legal purposes, which means they will have to clear a much more significant legal hurdle to prove defamation: actual malice.
This standard, created by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan, requires plaintiffs to prove intent in their defamation claim. King told the Washington Examiner that, since the dismissal was rejected, his party can enter legal discovery to discern internal communications to find evidence of actual malice.
The Dustin Inman Society is named after a 16-year-old who was killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant and “takes the position that we should honor our immigration system and the real, legal immigrants that we bring into the country every year by enforcing our immigration laws.”
The group was labeled an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018 because it “denigrates immigrants and supports efforts to make the lives of immigrants so hard that they leave on their own,” according to the SPLC.
King, however, counters that the SPLC is the “political enemy because they advocate for sanctuary cities and against enforcement.”
Once the SPLC published the label, King sent a letter requesting a removal, noting that they were “clearly overlooking the fact that we have immigrants on our board. We are clearly not anti-immigrant and we don’t hate anybody.”
Receiving the “hate group” label has negatively affected the organization’s ability to advocate legislation or make changes, King said.
“It’s clearly an empty smear designed to marginalize us in the eyes of the media and the legislators with whom I’ve been working for nearly 20 years,” King said.
“Once you get a newspaper like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or any other newspaper with a sentence saying the society has been labeled a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that’s all the leftists need in the media, in politics, and anywhere to disregard anything you say,” he continued. “It is intended for the purpose of marginalizing dissent against the agenda of open borders.”
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King wants a trial and is seeking compensatory damages, punitive damages, and an injunction requiring the SPLC to remove its label, issue a public retraction, and publicly apologize.
The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
