Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr created the Southern Poverty and Law Center (SPLC) in 1971. It was intended to be a civil rights law center, and SPLC focused initially on the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. As time went on, it began to include other civil rights topics, and has become a go-to group for journalists writing about “hate groups.” And over time, its information and slant on issues has become more and more misleading, and often outright false.

Over the years, the SPLC has shifted emphasis from its legal work to “educating the general public, public officials, teachers, students and law enforcement agencies and officers with respect to issues of hate and intolerance and promoting tolerance of differences through the schools,” spending about half its yearly reported budget on this task. As a part of that effort, the Southern Poverty and Law Center releases a report on hate groups and hate crimes each year, and this year the latest report claims that these organizations are on the rise. They claim that there are more than 1,000 of these groups for the first time since the 1980s.