In this piece at the Jewish News Syndicate, writer Aaron Bandler quotes Professor Jacobson extensively.
From the piece:
Begun to fight racists, Southern Poverty Law Center became ‘weaponized against right-of-center people,’ experts sayWilliam Jacobson used to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center in the late 1970s, because he thought it was going after violent, racist groups in the right way. Jacobson, now a clinical law professor at Cornell University and director of its securities law clinic, lost track of the center in the 1980s and it didn’t reappear on his radar until he started the website Legal Insurrection in fall 2008.Jacobson’s first post about the Southern Poverty Law Center on the conservative site came in 2009, when he described it as a “victim of its own success.”“The Southern Poverty Law Center once served a vital role in shutting down Klan groups and dangerous white supremacist groups. Morris Dees endured death threats and was a heroic figure in the struggle for civil rights,” Jacobson wrote at the time.But “the reason to be of the SPLC no longer exists. The Klan and other such groups are virtually non-existent,’ he wrote in the post. “The threat to society is from two sources, lone wolves or very small groups of people, as to which the SPLC cannot be effective, and Islamic extremists, as to which the SPLC appears not to care.”The sticking point, for Jacobson, was the center labeling a conservative scholar, Carol Swain, then of Vanderbilt University, an “apologist for white supremacists” for her review of a film. Nothing in the review “or prior writings, possibly could be considered legitimate fodder to brand her an ‘apologist for white supremacists,’” he wrote in 2009.“That’s when I started to look at them and said, ‘Well maybe they’re not the people I knew in the late 1970s,’” he told JNS. “They lost their way, they morphed into a more generalized political operation that was weaponized against right-of-center people, against Christians.”Swain told JNS that “I could say that there are a lot of things that probably hurt my career and led me to leave academia early, but having the Southern Poverty Law Center label you, a black woman, as an ‘apologist for white supremacy,’ it sort of makes you like kryptonite for any universities that would be looking to hire you.”Conservatives have a “real fear” about being “falsely accused of being a racist group” and listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” and having their reputations ruined, Jacobson told JNS.
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