anti-Muslim extremists. Associated Press, June 18, 2018 The SPLC ultimately removed the Field Guide from its website. In August 2017, a defamation lawsuit was filed against the SPLC by the D. James Kennedy Ministries for describing it as an "active hate group" because of their views on LGBT rights. The SPLC lists D. James Kennedy Ministries and its predecessor, Truth in Action, as anti-LGBT hate groups because of what the SPLC describes as the group's history of spreading homophobic propaganda, including D. James Kennedy's false statement that "homosexuals prey on adolescent boys", and false claims about the transmission of AIDS. On February 21, 2018, a federal magistrate judge recommended that the suit be dismissed with prejudice, concluding that D. James Kennedy Ministries could not show that it had been libeled. On September 19, 2019, the lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Myron H. Thompson, who ruled that the "SPLC's labeling of the group as [a hate group] is protected by the First Amendment." In March 2018, several journalists, including Max Blumenthal, were mentioned in an article by Alexander Reid Ross which the SPLC retracted after receiving complaints from those journalists that the article falsely portrayed them as "white supremacists, fascists, anti-Semites, and engaging in a conspiracy with the Putin regime to promote such views"; the Center's letter explaining its retraction of the article apologizing to Blumenthal and the other journalists who believed they had been falsely portrayed. The SPLC was criticized for taking down this article and was accused of caving in to pressure. The article argued that the dissemination of conspiracy theories around such issues as the Syrian Civil War (about the White Helmets and child refugees) were intended to co-opt leftist anti-imperialism in the service of a fascist agenda. Subsequently, the SPLC retracted two other articles written by Alexander Reid Ross on the topic of Russian campaigns to influence Western public opinion. In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) sued the SPLC for designating the CIS as a hate group, claiming it constituted fraud under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The SPLC defended its decision and said the group "richly deserved" the designation. Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson, a longtime critic of the SPLC, criticized the listing of the CIS as "pos[ing] a danger of being exploited as an excuse to silence speech and to skew political debate." The lawsuit was dismissed in September 2019