Academics continue to cite the claims of the Southern Poverty Law Center without checking their veracity:

"As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of hate groups in the United States has continually risen since 2000 in response to three factors: the election of the nation’s first African American president, economic turmoil, and undocumented immigration (Potok, 2011)." - Rebecca Barrett-Fox, Book Reviews (PDF), The Journal of Hate Studies, Volume 10, 2012

Nothing could be further from the truth, as I showed in my paper "The One-Sided View of Hate in Hate Studies", which was submitted to The Journal of Hate Studies, but rejected out of hand.

Barrett-Fox's article is barely literate: "conspiracy theories, antisemitism, anti-Masonic activism, anti-Catholicism, and Islamaphobia, pseudo-conservativism, and white supremacy and black separatism, that the animating forces of hatred are similar across hate movements."

It's below the bar for acceptance into a scholarly journal. The Journal's criteria are political, not scholarly.