The State of Michigan, through its Attorney General and Department of Civil Rights, has decided to use the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claimed identifications of “hate groups” to spearhead those two agencies’ pretended protection of Michigan citizens from the ravages of hatred.
One of the targets of the State’s AG and MDCR, selected from the SPLC’s smear lists, is the American Freedom Law Center, an Evil Judeo-Christian law firm. Far from being cowed, the law firm is pushing back, in spades: they’ve filed suit against Dana Nessel, the AG, and Agustin Arbulu, the MSCR’s Executive Director. Robert Muise, AFLC’s Co-Founder and Senior Counsel:
It’s one thing for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a private organization, to engage in political propaganda and political hyperbole. [It’s a violation of the Constitution] when you have the Attorney General who’s relying on that political propaganda to investigate and target us with the power of the state.
You now have the government giving its endorsement to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s nonsense—that now triggers our constitutional protections[.]
The AFLC is bringing three charges to their suit:
violation of free speech rights under the First Amendment; violation of expressive association rights under the First Amendment; and violation of equal protection as guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Here’s a bit of the central evidence against Nessel and Arbulu according to the AFLC’s suit:
According to the SPLC report relied upon by Defendants, Plaintiff [AFLC] is identified as a “hate” group because it is allegedly “anti-Muslim,” and according to SPLC’s “Hate Map,” Plaintiff is located in the Ann Arbor area. Consequently, Plaintiff is one of the very groups that Defendants referred to in their public announcement as an “extremist and hate organization in Michigan.”
The AFLC also alleges in its suit that Nessel’s and Arbulu’s goal is to legitimize the SPLC’s own hatred of those disagreeing with them, to
create in the collective mind of the public that organizations designated by SPLC as “hate” groups are criminal organizations rather than legitimate charitable organizations.
And so on. RTWT.
Trouble is, though, even if the AFLC wins its suit—which ultimately it should, based on published information—nothing serious will change. Nessel and Arbulu still will be in place, and they’ll still pursue their anti-freedom policies. They’ll just be doing it sub rosa. These two persons and their senior staffs have to go. That’s the only way there can be any hope that the policies they’ve put in place overtly can be believed to be beginning to be prevented from continuing covertly.
