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  • 2017-06-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Is SPLC a ‘Left-Wing Smear Group’ That Encourages Violent Attacks? (en)
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  • In the wake of the shootings of U.S. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and three other people at a GOP charity baseball practice session in Alexandria, Virginia on 14 June 2017, partisan news and opinion outlets cited social media postings by the perpetrator, James T. Hodgkinson, to make the case that he was incited to violence by the (in their words) left-wing smear group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama dedicated to monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists in the United States. SPLC publishes investigative reports, conducts law enforcement training sessions, and provides expert analysis on hate group activities to the media and public. A key feature of their web site is a Hate Map spotlighting more than 900 groups that evince beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. On the day of the Alexandria shootings, WorldNetDaily ran an article reporting that James Hodgkinson liked SPLC on Facebook (a fact confirmed by multiple sources prior to Facebook's deletion of Hodgkinson's page). The article further stated that SPLC had been linked to a domestic terror attack against a conservative Christian group called the Family Research Council (FRC) five years earlier: Similarly, the Washington Examiner ran an article stating that domestic terrorists Hodgkinson and Floyd Corkins were linked by their support of SPLC: And yet another right-leaning web site, Breitbart, claimed that in addition to labeling the Family Research Council a hate group, SPLC repeatedly implied that Rep. Steve Scalise, one of the people shot by James Hodgkinson in Alexandria, Virginia, is associated with white supremacists. However, the implication that the Southern Poverty Law Center inspired or encouraged these acts of violence has no discernible basis in fact. Far from being an instigator, SPLC has consistently condemned the use of violence against any groups or persons for any reason, a stance reaffirmed in a public statement on the Alexandria attack by the organization's president, Richard Cohen: A like on Facebook, moreover, does not a link to violence make. We can conclude, based on his Facebook page, that James Hodgkinson knew of the Southern Poverty Law Center and presumably approved of the work they do, but beyond that there is no evidence to suggest he actively engaged with SPLC, or even read its published materials. Nor, despite Breitbart's implication of a connection between Hodgkinson's shooting rampage and comments SPLC previously made about Rep. Steve Scalise, is there any evidence to support a link. In 2014, SPLC cited a report that Scalise gave a speech in 2002 to a group called European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), an outspoken white nationalist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The same article cited a 1999 Roll Call interview in which Scalise appeared to compare himself to Duke: However, we have no way of knowing whether Hodgkinson even read the SPLC's report on Scalise, much less that it figured into Hodgkinson's motives for the shooting rampage, which, based on the evidence available thus far, does not seem to have been targeted at Scalise personally. Southern Poverty Law Center president Richard Cohen responded to our request for comment with this statement: (en)
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