Casey Mattox, Director of Center for Academic Freedom with the Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote a commentary piece for The Daily Signal in which he describes how the indiscriminate "hate map" produced by the fraudulent, biased Southern Poverty Law Center almost got him murdered:
When the elevator door opened in the lobby, my colleagues and I saw a man sitting, bleeding, surrounded by police.
We stared in silence as police yelled at us to get back upstairs. The elevator door quietly closed, and we returned to our fifth-floor office.
Up there, we hadn’t heard Floyd Corkins’ gunshot that hit our security guard, Leo Johnson—just the sudden rush and wail of police cars and ambulances filling our D.C. street.
Even after the scene in the lobby, it didn’t occur to us that the bleeding man was Leo, or that something had happened inside our own building.
We just assumed that someone had been injured on the street outside and was receiving medical attention in the lobby of the Family Research Council building, where our D.C. office for Alliance Defending Freedom was housed at the time.
Then we saw the first news reports. There was a shooter in our building.
That was just over five years ago. My colleagues and I now know that Corkins intended to kill us. Along with enough rounds of ammunition to do the job, he’d also brought a supply of Chick-fil-A sandwiches to stuff in our mouths, to mock our corpses.
Corkins said he chose our building after finding it listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, which labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group” (because of its support for the historic definition of marriage).
I don’t work for the Family Research Council, but Corkins didn’t know that. And had he made it past the lobby and into the elevator, my employment status wouldn’t have mattered.
[...]Two weeks ago, the memories came back, sharp and clear. I walked to our new Alliance Defending Freedom office to find CNN uncritically promoting the same Southern Poverty Law Center “hate group” list that had inspired Floyd Corkins—a list that now includes Alliance Defending Freedom.
[...]
A list of KKK, Neo-Nazi, and other violent groups could be a non-partisan service to the public. But that isn’t what the cash-infused Southern Poverty Law Center provides.
Instead, the Southern Poverty Law Center expressly acknowledges that its list is biased, focused on taking out groups it describes as the “American radical right”—which it defines broadly, smearing all its opponents equally.
Thus, under the guise of fighting “hate,” the Southern Poverty Law Center lumps together with Nazis and the KKK veterans, Catholics, Muslims who oppose terrorism, nuns, and now my own Alliance Defending Freedom.
[...]
When the Southern Poverty Law Center lumps every organization it hates into one "hate map" filled with red dots, my office becomes an equal opportunity target alongside neo-Nazi groups and the KKK.
"Floyd Corkins is not unique," Mattox concludes. "Earlier this year, a mob inspired by Southern Poverty Law Center’s claims physically assaulted Charles Murray, a respected social scientist and author, when he answered an invitation to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont. James Hodgkinson, who this summer attempted to assassinate several Republican congressmen—including Majority Whip Steve Scalise—was also a follower of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"There will be more like them. After the recent events in Charlottesville, a growing chorus of voices are embracing violence as a means of confronting ideological opponents."
