In the midst of the endless news cycle surrounding Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax, our own Louis DeBroux highlighted just how prevalent such hoaxes are. Ask yourself a simple question: Do we really live in a nation filled with hate groups committing rampant hate crimes when the hip new thing is to perpetrate fake hate crimes to get attention?

The nation’s premier hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, laughably insists the answer is yes and that it’s getting worse under President Donald Trump. In its newest Intelligence Report (try not to laugh), the SPLC calculates that the number of “hate” groups in the U.S. supposedly increased for the fourth consecutive year in 2018. Citing the report, The New York Times warns, “The law center said the number of hate groups rose by 7 percent last year to 1,020, a 30 percent jump from 2014. That broadly echoes other worrying developments, including a 30 percent increase in the number of hate crimes reported to the F.B.I. from 2015 through 2017 and a surge of right-wing violence that the Anti-Defamation League said had killed at least 50 people in 2018.”

U.S. News & World Report laid bare the blame game with the headline “Trump ‘Fear-Mongering’ Fuels Rise of U.S. Hate Groups to Record.” Clearly, this SPLC report is political, not an honest assessment.

Two points about reports from the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). First, as we observed in November, the reason “hate” crimes are supposedly on the rise is because hundreds more law-enforcement agencies have begun reporting such a category. So if that category is to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as political and subjective, all it means is that we’re now keeping count. Second, assume for a moment that the leftist ADL’s numbers are even remotely accurate (they’re not). Fifty murders is 50 too many for any reason, but blacks kill 50 other blacks in American inner cities every week. Is it a worse crime when the race of the perpetrator is white?

That brings us back to the SPLC. The organization is a tax-exempt, charitable organization with an endowment of $432.7 million. This war chest is used to tabulate a few actually hateful groups, but much of the organization’s very uncharitable efforts are spent serving as a bludgeoning tool for the Leftmedia and the Democrat Party. Why else would the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom be listed as “hate” groups? Or why would the SPLC warn about “members of Congress who traffic in hate and extremism” but only include Republicans and not, for example, actual anti-Semite Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar? A qualification for this political hate? Opposing same-sex marriage, just as Barack Obama did until 2012.

Despite — or rather because of — all this political chicanery, the SPLC is routinely cited by Leftmedia outlets as a “nonpartisan” and “objective” source for tracking hate in America. That is the essence of fake news.