The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has become in recent years the go-to authority for major media outlets seeking to document hate crimes. But its reputation as a neutral source of expertise and authority is unwarranted. In an October 2017 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, I pointed out that the lead anecdote in the SPLC’s report on the aftermath of the 2016 election was a hoax. There had been a fire at the historically black Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Mississippi; it was indeed arson, but it wasn’t a racist hate crime. A member of the church was subsequently arrested for the fire and for the spray-painted “Vote Trump” vandalism that accompanied it.

Revisiting that SPLC report, “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” shows that the arson anecdote was not an outlier. The SPLC did subsequently footnote and correct the report of the church arson. But at least three other alleged “hate crimes” in the report turn out not to be what they seemed either.