This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Gavin McInnes’s lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is part of a wave of legal action by far-right figures against the Alabama-based anti-hate watchdog.

McInnes filed a federal suit in Alabama on Monday over the SPLC’s designation of the Proud Boys as a hate group.

McInnes founded the self-confessed “western chauvinist” group, and promoted them from his media platforms, before publicly quitting the group late last year in the wake of prosecutions arising from a brawl in New York City, and revelations about the FBI’s advice on the group to local law enforcement agencies.

These incidents followed sometimes riotous violence involving the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon. McInnes also made a string of on-air remarks asserting that “fighting solves everything”, “I cannot recommend violence enough” and, of anti-fascist opponents, “let’s destroy them”. He has described the Proud Boys as a gang.

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes quits 'extremist' far-right group Read more

Despite his departure from the Proud Boys, McInnes subsequently lost the broadcasting slot he had enjoyed on CRTV, founded by the conservative media host Mark Levin, after its merger with Glenn Beck’s the Blaze. This followed McInnes’s and the Proud Boys’s removal from major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, a PayPal ban and the Australian government’s decision to refuse McInnes a visa to enter the country.

McInnes’s complaint against the SPLC – posted online by his lawyer G Baron Coleman – says that that McInnes was “successfully targeted for personal and professional destruction by a self-appointed enforcer of [political] orthodoxy”.

Later, the complaint alleges that the SPLC is responsible for “the termination of Mr. McInnes’s employment, an almost complete deplatforming and defunding and subjecting him to employment discrimination based on his lawful non-employment recreational activities”.

In a statement Monday, the SPLC president, Richard Cohen, said: “To paraphrase FDR, judge us by the enemies we’ve made”, continuing: “The fact that he’s upset with SPLC tells us that we’re doing our job exposing hate and extremism. His case is meritless.”

It’s not the first time McInnes has criticized the SPLC. Last June, he told the Guardian at a New York City rally supporting Tommy Robinson, the far-right founder of the English Defence League, that the SPLC was a “pernicious group that preys on old Jewish people … (with) cultural PTSD because of what happened in world war II”.

McInnes is not alone among far-right figures in pursuing legal action against an organization that has fiercely criticized him. Like him, many allege that the SPLC destroys conservatives in order to raise funds from liberal backers.

Gavin McInnes: founder of far-right Proud Boys denied Australian visa – report Read more

In January, the anti-immigration group the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) filed a suit that named the SPLC director, Heidi Beirich, and Cohen.

CIS – whose reports and research are widely quoted in conservative and far-right media – filed a racketeering claim against Beirich and Cohen, alleging that a string of articles on CIS on the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog constitute a conspiracy to brand it as a hate group, and to raise money off of this accusation.

And last September, the lawyer Glen Allen filed suit against the SPLC, Beirich, the former employee Mark Potok and others claiming that the SPLC is “motivated by lucrative fundraising aims … to destroy, through public shaming … groups and persons the SPLC broadly defines as its political enemies”. The suit rejected as “farcical” the SPLC’s “assertion that Allen is a ‘well known’ ‘Neo-Nazi Lawyer’.”

Allen’s fundraising efforts for the suit have been heavily promoted on white nationalist and far-right websites.

But the threats to SPLC are not coming solely from the right. The group also withdrew three articles by the anti-fascist researcher and author Alexander Reid Ross last year after a legal letter from the journalist Max Blumenthal. He was responding to an article Ross wrote about Blumenthal’s appearances on Russian media and at a Moscow gala in 2015.

The suits come after Maajid Nawaz, the founder of the London thinktank Quilliam, who in June 2018 extracted $3.375m and an apology from the SPLC in a suit over their designation of Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist.

FBI now classifies far-right Proud Boys as 'extremist group', documents say Read more

The claims come as conservative figures attack the SPLC’s credibility in the Trump era.

In 2017, 47 high-profile conservatives wrote an open letter in the wake of the Charlottesville murder of Heather Heyer, calling the SPLC “an attack dog of the political left … (which) has realized the profitability of defamation”.

The following year, the former attorney general Jeff Sessions launched an attack on the SPLC – whose research had previously been used in FBI investigations – in a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly attacked the SPLC on his prime time show.

McInnes’s suit was reported positively in a range of rightwing media outlets on Monday.