Will This Conservative Activist’s Death Doom the Best Chance to Hold the SPLC Accountable?

D.A. King was well on his way to demonstrating in court that the Southern Poverty Law Center twisted the truth in branding his organization an “anti-immigrant hate group” and placing it on the SPLC “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

A former insurance agent, King started a nonprofit aimed at encouraging Georgia to enforce immigration law. As a crusader against illegal immigration, he found legal immigrants to join his organization’s board, and named the group after Dustin Inman, a 16-year-old boy who died in a car crash caused by an illegal alien.

The SPLC had previously told The Associated Press that it did not consider King’s group a “hate group,” but in 2019—after the SPLC registered a lobbyist to oppose an immigration enforcement bill King supported—it suddenly changed its tune and added the Dustin Inman Society to the “hate map.” King sued for defamation and his case got further than any other case against the SPLC had before.

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Yet, mere months before the public trial that may unravel the SPLC’s attack, the 72-year-old died of cancer on March 5, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His wife of 42 years, Sue Lanier King, survives him.

King’s death does not put an end to his lawsuit against the SPLC, however. The trial, scheduled for October, will give the Dustin Inman Society a chance to set the record straight.

Perhaps King will get his justice, after all, if only posthumously.

“The case continues,” Todd McMurtry, King’s attorney, told The Daily Signal. “We have his testimony on video. The Dustin Inman Society still exists, so its case is still moving.”

“He lived with passion,” McMurtry said of King. “He was a very strong person. I admired him.”

I had the pleasure of interviewing King when he traveled up to Washington, D.C., in September 2023. He came across as very passionate but grounded—dedicated to holding politicians accountable for failing to uphold immigration law and protect Georgians from the scourge of illegal immigration. He spoke carefully and deliberately, with the heaviness of longstanding advocacy for a cause that failed to get the attention it deserved up until quite recently.

The SPLC’s duplicitous tactics—in this case branding someone who opposed illegal immigration as wholly “anti-immigrant” and comparing this person to the KKK—have long infuriated me. The passion to set the record straight drove me to write my first book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.” I wanted to know how the SPLC went from a noble civil rights nonprofit to a threat to America’s free speech culture.

I discovered that after the SPLC gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy, it took the program it had used to monitor the Klan and expanded it, creating a “hate map.” Over the years, it added ever more mainstream organizations to the “hate map.”

Today, conservative groups that oppose open borders—like the Dustin Inman Society—find themselves branded “anti-immigrant hate groups” on the map. Christian public interest law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom find themselves on the map as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups.” Other “anti-LGBTQ hate groups” include doctors who oppose the grotesque “sex change” interventions euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care.” Parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education find themselves on the map as “anti-government extremist groups.”

Even LGBT groups like Gays Against Groomers have found themselves smeared as “anti-LGBTQ hate groups” because they disagree with the SPLC’s advocacy for transgender orthodoxy.

It sounds like a joke, but the Left takes the SPLC deadly seriously. Then-President Joe Biden hosted SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times at the White House, while officials at the Department of Justice and the Department of Education received SPLC briefings during his tenure.

The SPLC’s smears against conservatives have had ramifications outside of government, as well. In 2012, a gunman targeted a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting, using the SPLC “hate map” to find his target.

The SPLC has urged financial institutions and charity donation platforms to blacklist conservative groups on the “hate map.” Some companies have denied services to conservatives merely because the SPLC attacks them.

The Dustin Inman Society’s case represents the greatest chance for conservatives to hold the SPLC accountable for forcing its agenda on the American people by silencing any dissenting voices.

It’s just a shame D.A. King didn’t live long enough to see the SPLC held accountable for its smears.