In SPLC’s crisis, a broader lesson for how to combat hate?
Once a Democrat living in rural Kansas, Evan Mulch sought to wrench wisdom out of his daily life by reading and debating a full array of moral philosophies.
But one day, he stopped looking. “You can only go down so many rabbit holes,” he says.
He found his philosophical home at the archconservative John Birch Society, which is undergoing a renaissance in the Trump era.
To many progressives in the United States, Mr. Mulch is less a believer in small government than a patriot-movement extremist.
That view has been spread via the Southern Poverty Law Center and its influential Hatewatch project. In 2013, the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog called the Society a group of “conspiracy theory-loving, U.N.-hating, federal government-despising, Ron Paul-supporting, environmentalist-bashing ... true believers.”
That elicits barely a shrug from Mr. Mulch.
“Nearly everyone I run into says that the SPLC is a hate group itself,” he
