I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.

Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech and not a hate group while easily listing any other organization that opposes their political views as hate groups.

If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.

> Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech

Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.

It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)

Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.

> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.

The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)

And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)

> I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham

Hate groups have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around (and especially since it started tracking hate groups, but even when it was just doing pro-civik-rights legal work for 20 years before that) and the US has lots of hate groups.

Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.