Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Map Pin It
Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Map

Leaders of Christian organizations the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) unfairly labels as "hate groups" told PJ Media that a massive legal onslaught is headed toward the SPLC — and it could involve as many as sixty separate lawsuits in different states around the country. Rather than one big defamation lawsuit, the left-wing attack dog will face a scattershot approach.

"What we're considering is not a class-action lawsuit," Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Christian nonprofit branded a "hate group" by the SPLC and currently suing the charity navigation site GuideStar, told PJ Media on Monday. "These are individual lawsuits that we're looking at, not class action."

He explained that the roughly 60 organizations considering the suit intend to "make the SPLC defend itself all over the country."

"The people we're talking to are looking at individual lawsuits — could be up to sixty but definitely quite a number of cases," Staver explained.

In June, the SPLC settled a defamation lawsuit from Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim reformer the group had defamed as an "anti-Muslim extremist." The leftist smear factory paid $3.375 million to Nawaz's anti-terrorism nonprofit, Quilliam International. That case was particularly egregious, as the SPLC called Nawaz an "extremist" for, among other things, going to a strip club on his bachelor party.

After the Nawaz settlement, Staver told PJ Media that "about 60 organizations" "have been considering filing lawsuits against the SPLC, because they have been doing to a lot of organizations exactly what they did to Maajid Nawaz."

PJ Media followed up,