SPLC Union Logo: Yesterday, the Department of Justice leveled outrageous allegations at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In so doing, they maligned the integrity of the SPLC workers who have labored tirelessly for decades to expose the dangerous cruelty of extremists and hate groups in the United States.
SPLC Union Logo: This work is punishing. It takes a toll on our health and on our safety. But we persist because we believe in our mission to advance justice for all, and we believe that investigating, naming, and alerting the American people to the activities of those who seek to harm our neighbors is a moral imperative and an essential public service.
Today our colleagues are facing abuse and harassment from the far-right figures emboldened by this attack. But we will not be deterred, we will not be intimidated, and we will continue to name racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all hate for the blight that it is.
Below is a statement from the unionized workers of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
![Confederate flag removals upset Miller after church murders
White nationalist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Roof’s attack triggered a national conversation about racial hatred in the United States. In response, Amazon.com and other retailers made efforts to pull the Confederate flag from their websites and stores.
Miller sought to create a counternarrative to this news through Breitbart, the emails show. He emailed McHugh with the subject line “defies modern comprehension” on June 23, 2015, following the news about the retailers, and highlighted a statistic about the deaths of Confederate soldiers with a link to history.com:
Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET: “‘22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war.’” [history.com link]
McHugh told Hatewatch that she and Miller spoke on the phone about the subject of Amazon yanking Confederate flag merchandise after the email. Miller appears to refer to that call in his next email and suggests that McHugh write about how Amazon was selling “commie flags.”
Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:31 p.m. ET: “That’s a really, really, really good point.
Have you thought about going to Amazon and finding the commie flags and then doing a story on that? I think you’ve hit on something potentially profound.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bbp2b224lro3bfnzcqwwnkfo/bafkreigaabevfx77vthhxvglfjskf25miva4wfh4jgy5hjpokkth7ledui)
![What the founding generation understood as an establishment of
religion is a legal question to be decided by a court, not a “fact” question to
be decided by experts, no matter how credentialed. To be sure, courts must
make a determined effort to grasp the relevant history bearing on that legal
question. Hilsenrath, 136 F.4th at 491 (“This kind of historical inquiry
requires serious work.” (citation omitted)); McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561
U.S. 742, 803 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring) (noting “[h]istorical
analysis can be difficult”). See generally Heller, 554 U.S. at 592–95, 600–03,
605–19. They do so by consulting articles, books, and historical sources and
bringing their own independent judgment to bear on them—not by
appointing an “expert,” whose “findings” are insulated by clear-error
review on appeal.57
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![The key phrase—“an establishment of religion”—was readily
understandable to founding-era citizens. See District of Columbia v. Heller,
554 U.S. 570, 576–77 (2008) (relying on a phrase’s “[n]ormal meaning . . .
known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation”). The reason is
simple. At the time, establishments were “a familiar institution.”
McConnell, Establishment, supra note 12, at 2107.13 Someone on the streets
of 1789 Boston, reading that phrase, would have instantly thought of the
Church of England, the colonial established churches, or the current state
establishments—in other words, a polity’s official church or religion. Ibid.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:aw426jbgw7drhivb4ijrizlu/bafkreiduhdy2udsogi6jjhgxmz764ne7a25cvulptoeqmzq2kevp6pe66e)
