Article from The Week by Shikha Dalmia.

With America’s president casually stirring racial and other hatreds, it would be helpful for our civic good to have an organization that tracks with honesty and precision what rabble his rhetoric is rousing. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s largest (and richest) watchdog of hate groups, has long sought to fill that role. Unfortunately, the SPLC is not up to the task. It is too busy enforcing liberal orthodoxy against its intellectual opponents.

For proof, look no further than how it has treated conservative feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers.

The SPLC, which was formed in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement with the noble goals of seeking justice for victims of racial violence and fighting hate, recently published a piece in which it accused Sommers of giving a “mainstream and respectable face” to groups peddling “male supremacy.”

It was a single, throwaway line about Sommers in a much-longer report — but it prompted Portland’s Lewis & Clark Law School’s eagerly excitable students to declare her a “known fascist” and condemn the Federalist Society, the center-right outfit of legal scholars that had invited her to speak on campus, for perpetrating an “act of aggression.” They hooted and heckled her, forcing her speech to be cut short.

Read the entire article at The Week.

Image Credit: Joe Ravi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons