The Southern Poverty Law Center recently announced its policy recommendations for social media and Internet companies to help them “reduce hateful activities on their platforms.” Under its “Change the Terms” initiative, the SPLC aims to “ensure that companies are doing their part to help combat hateful conduct on their platforms” by encouraging social media companies to “adopt and implement” their “model corporate policies,” otherwise known as “Curbing Hate Online: What Companies Should Do Now.” That “encouragement” will take the form of the SPLC and other organizations tracking the “progress of major tech companies” and then giving them “report cards” on how well they have complied with and executed these “anti-hate speech policies.” Hello, 1984.

As we have repeatedly noted, the leftist SPLC is anything but an impartial judge on “hate.” Quite the contrary. And the suggestion that the SPLC has any true concern over protecting Americans’ First Amendment rights is downright laughable. Rather, this action by the SPLC is exactly the opposite. It is a blatant attempt to pressure social-media companies into producing policies that actively work to silence the speech of people the SPLC finds offensive. As if social-media giants needed any help suppressing speech.

By simply labeling a broad spectrum of political and religious views as “white supremacist,” “bigoted,” “anti-LGBTQ,” “sexist,” or “racist,” the SPLC hopes to convince companies to accept its leftist views on speech-censoring policies as mainstream and to see no problem in limiting Americans’ speech rights online.

How else does on explain the ridiculous claim from the SPLC’s intelligence project director, Heidi Beirich, who wrote of the Pittsburgh synagogue attacker, “He said he ‘wanted all Jews to die’ and also that ‘[Jews] were committing genocide to his people. These conspiracy theories are perpetuated and elevated by the increasing amount of hateful rhetoric flying from the mouths, or keyboards, of a growing cast of characters, up to and including President Trump.” Ironically, Beirich failed to mention the fact that the synagogue attacker was no fan of Trump, having loudly declared that he had voted against him. The Narrative trumps all.