There is more than P.R. symbolism behind a letter delivered to major media outlets, signed by the leaders of 47 organizations.  Major outlets are being placed on legal notice that use of the Southern Poverty Law Center as an arbiter of hate group status, including use of its notorious "hate map," may lead to liability through recklessness and defamation, among other possibilities.

The game that the SPLC and its media enablers have played is to brand utterly nonviolent law firms and think-tanks as "hate groups," the same label it uses for neo-Nazis and violent extremist groups that are white.  The letter cites but one of a number of attacks in which the SPLC Hate Map played a role.

Take a look at the language in the first paragraphs.

The SPLC is a discredited, left-wing, political activist organization that seeks to silence its political opponents with a "hate group" label of its own invention and application that is not only false and defamatory, but that also endangers the lives of those targeted with it.

The fifth anniversary has just passed of the terrorist event for which the SPLC's hate map and website were used to target its victims for political assassination. The following facts were established in the record of a federal court case. On August 15, 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the Family Research Council offices in Washington, D.C. and shot and badly wounded its building manager, Leo Johnson, who stopped his intended killing spree.1 According to his own statements to the FBI, Corkins intended to kill everyone in the building, and then go on to terrorize additional organizations.

That day, Corkins carried both the means to carry out this act of terrorism and a list of additional targets. The U.S. Attorney stated in federal court that Corkins targeted FRC and the additional targets by using the SPLC website's "Hate Map." On February 6, 2013, Corkins pleaded guilty to three felonies, and became the first person convicted of violating the District of Columbia's Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002.2

We believe the media outlets that have cited the SPLC in recent days have not intended to target mainstream political groups for violent attack, but by recklessly linking the Charlottesville melee to the mainstream groups named on the SPLC website – those that advocate in the courts, the halls of Congress, and the press for the protection of conventional, Judeo-Christian values – we are left to wonder if another Floyd Lee Corkins will soon be incited to violence by this incendiary information.

The fact is that there are numerous flashing red warning signs about the SPLC that in the past would have seen investigative journalists asking why this group needs an endowment of $319 million, $69 million of it parked overseas, and a chunk of that in secrecy havens like the Cayman Islands.  The group pays its top managers large salaries, occupies an ostentatious work-of-art headquarters building, and keeps on raising money faster than it can spend it, becoming a hedge fund with a marketing team that pushes virtue-signaling.

And its criteria for applying the hate group label are basely political.

Last night, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recounted their experience with Tucker Carlson.  It is worth a view:

I hope we have now seen "peak SPLC," and that its decline and fall are rapid.

And I still wonder what all that untraceable money overseas is doing.