A pro-American activist in Georgia has won a critical battle against the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for labeling his group an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018.

The Daily Signal reports that the SPLC asked for a dismissal of activist D.A. King’s defamation suit against them, which a federal judge denied Friday.

“I’m going to get discovery on the SPLC [email records] and I can’t get the grin off my face,” King told Breitbart News, adding, “I would expect to find their internal discussion about ‘How can we frame him as a hate group after we told the Associated Press [in 2011] that he wasn’t?'”

King founded the Dustin Inman Society in Georgia to fight back against the establishment’s welcome for illegal migration. He has a long record of defeating business lobbies — and the SPLC — as they push for legislation that helps illegal migration. This year, for example, he blocked several bills in the state Capitol that would have allowed illegal migrants to get taxpayer grants and school aid needed by young Americans.

He is suing the SPLC over the hate group claim, and is seeking damages plus “an apology, public apology or retraction.”

He is raising the funds needed to review the so-far hidden emails.

In 2011, the very wealthy SPLC declined to classify his work as hateful towards migrants “because he is fighting, working on his legislation through the political process,” according to the lawsuit.

But the SPLC reversed its claim in 2018, King said:

We’ll fast forward to the spring of March 2018 when they go down there in the Georgia capitol and register as lobbyists and go to committees and testify against the passage of bills that I drafted. Well, days before they registered to lobby, they came out with their “Hate Map” and on it is D.A. King and the Dustin Inland society is an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

Being against illegal immigration is not being against [legal] immigration, or being against [personal or individual] immigrants.

“The SPLC has classified us as an ‘anti-immigrant hate group’ — that came as quite a shock to the immigrants on my [group’s] board and in my family,” he added.

Many media outlets and advocacy groups carelessly — or deliberately — use the same mental somersault to stigmatize Americans who favor pro-American policies.

The SPLC’s claim has damaged him, King said:

Clearly, the intent was to drive legislators away from me. [The “hate” claim] gives them an excuse to not go near me or the immigration issue. Nobody wants to be called an anti-immigrant racist hater, and if they’re cowards, they’ll go to great lengths to not be called that.

The SPLC made the mistake of thinking that political opposition to a policy is the same as hating a person or group, he said:

They got trapped in their own little goop bubble. They were successful in telling other leftists that if you’re against illegal immigration … you’re anti-immigrant.

But when you tell somebody — “I’m not anti-immigrant as you charge. I have immigrants on my board [and]  immigrant donors. My adopted sister is an immigrant. There’s a bazillion examples of newspaper articles and opinion pages where I have described … that I’m against illegal immigration” — [the left just responds] “It doesn’t matter — you’re anti-immigrant.”

Well, they got away with that for so long internally in their leftist bubble that they thought they could do it in public. And now, if it gets to a courtroom, we can go in front of a jury in Montgomery, Alabama, and explain this to them or ask the judge to make a decision.

The SPLC has long been criticized by mainstream activists, partly because its reports have spurred at least one murderous attack on a conservative group.

The Daily Signal reported on April 4:

The SPLC took the program it used to monitor the Ku Klux Klan—the Intelligence Project—and weaponized it against conservatives and Christians, branding them “hate groups” in an effort to raise money and demonize its ideological opponents. The SPLC has an endowment of more than $500 million and bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019 that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

“I can hardly keep my feet on the ground I’m so happy,” King said, adding,  “I’m going to go into discovery with the SPL freaking C!”

The case is King v. Southern Poverty Law Center, No. 2:22-CV-207-WKW, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.