SPLC Apologizes, Removes Ben Carson from Extremist List

The Southern Poverty Law Center has announced they have removed Dr. Ben Carson from their “extremist” file.

In an unsigned statement released on Wednesday, SPLC said, “In October 2014, we posted an ‘Extremist File’ of Dr. Ben Carson. This week, as we’ve come under intense criticism for doing so, we’ve reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson for having posted it.”

Though the statement goes on to laud Dr. Carson’s contribution “to medicine, his philanthropic work,” and his “personal story,” they still “believe his views should be closely examined.” SPLC insists, “Dr. Carson has, in fact, made a number of statements that express views that we believe most people would conclude are extreme.”

SPLC lists a number of Carson quotes they charge are extremist, including his comparison of Obamacare to slavery, and that we now “live in a society where people are afraid to say what they believe.”

SPLC is a group that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars—they currently have $300 million under financial management—publishing lists of Nazis, Skin Heads, and KKK groups. In recent years, they have taken on the LGBT cause and have started putting Christian conservatives on their hate lists.

Quite famously, an armed man invaded the offices of the Family Research Council with the intention of murdering as many staffers as he could. He ended up wounding a security guard before he was subdued. He later said he got the idea of shooting up FRC from the SPLC hate list.

More recently, the North Carolina shooter who gunned down three Muslim students was a Facebook fan of the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least according to his Facebook page.

Up until last year, the FBI used SPLC information in identifying domestic threats. After the FRC shooting, and after a wave of complaints from Christian conservatives, the FBI quietly took SPLC off of its website, though a senior adviser to SPLC told Breitbart News they were still advising the FBI.

Those social conservative groups that have been targeted by SPLC insist that SPLC is a left-wing pressure group out to punish those who disagree with them politically.

Even the left seems to have grown weary of the claims and actions of SPLC. The group has been criticized in Foreign Policy magazine for inflating its hate lists in order to keep donors interested. Similar claims have been made by leftist Alexander Cockburn and also in the pages of Harper’s Magazine.