The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is one of the Left’s premier, well-heeled, and most ruthless attack dogs. It relentlessly smears legitimate conservative individuals and groups by labeling them as purveyors of “hate” and lumping them in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis. Its name-calling and defamation would be just more of the same bilge that comes daily from the Left were it not for the fact that the social media giants and numerous other major corporations still take the massively discredited SPLC seriously and use its smear pieces as a guide to shun and deplatform various dissenters from the Leftist agenda. So the SPLC sounds like the perfect organization for the Biden administration to work with, right? Oh, absolutely. Biden’s handlers have nominated SPLC litigation director Nancy Abudu for the Eleventh Circuit. On Wednesday, however, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had a few words for the nominee.
Hawley began by asking when Abudu joined the SPLC. When she told him she had started working for this sinister group in February 2019, Hawley got right to the point:
2019 was the year the SPLC paid 3.4 million dollars in response to defamation lawsuits. 2019 was the year that Charity Watch gave your organization an F rating. The SPLC has been labelled by the left-wing policy journal Current Affairs as an outright fraud that uses willful deception designed to scare liberals into writing checks. The progressive journalist Alexander Cockburn said this about SPLC: “I regard it, the Southern Poverty Law Center, collectively as one of the greatest frauds in American life.” Liberal death penalty abolitionist Stephen Bright refused to accept an award named after the founder of the SPLC, saying in his words, “The SPLC has long been run by a con man and a fraud.” That’s from a Harpers magazine article. Also in 2019, SPLC employees told the press, “We were part of a con and we knew it.” That’s in a New Yorker article, not exactly a right-wing journal. Are you concerned by any of this record of the organization that you worked for?
Abudu began to answer by using a tested Leftist technique: when asked an uncomfortable question, change the subject. “Senator,” she said, “what I’m glad that I didn’t hear in that litany is a complaint about the voting rights work that we’ve done, about the clients in the communities —” Yeah, and Hitler loved his dog. Hawley was having none of this, and brusquely interrupted Abudu to ask: “Are you concerned that Charity Watch gave you an F? That you had to pay 3.4 million dollars in response to defamation lawsuits? That you’ve been criticized – that your organization’s been criticized as a fraud and a con job, and that you work for an organization who says it’s their goal in life to completely destroy their opponents! None of that gives you any pause.”
"I can't believe you've been nominated for this position. I can't believe that the President of the United States would nominate someone from [the Southern Poverty Law Center] with this record," says @HawleyMO to Biden's latest far-left judicial nominee pic.twitter.com/JBI9z4YaXP
— Abigail Marone 🇺🇸 (@abigailmarone) April 27, 2022
Doggedly, Abudu stuck to her deflection: “Senator, again, my work with the Southern Poverty Law Center has been to uphold the constitutional rights of individuals who without pro bono counsel would not be even able to have access to justice.”
Hawley concluded: “I have to tell you, I find your answers absolutely extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. I can’t believe you’ve been nominated for this position. I can’t believe that the president of the United States would nominate someone from this organization with this record, and I can’t believe that you would sit here today and refuse to condemn this hateful, frankly, violent rhetoric from this organization with this record. It’s astounding to me.” This was a fine rhetorical flourish, but was it really astounding that Old Joe Biden would appoint as a circuit court judge someone from an unsavory organization dedicated to defaming and destroying conservatives?
After all, this is the administration that has manufactured and kept alive the myth of a January 6 “insurrection,” destroying the lives of people whose actual crime, if any, amounts essentially to trespassing. This is the administration that has claimed repeatedly, in the teeth of all the evidence, that “white supremacists” are the biggest terror threat the nation faces today, in a naked attempt first to smear Trump supporters as white supremacists and then to criminalize dissent as dangerous to “our democracy.” This is the administration that has just blithely ignored the First Amendment and appointed a “Disinformation Czar” with a pronounced taste for disinformation herself.
This is the administration that claims that Putin is responsible for skyrocketing gas prices and galloping inflation, that there is no crisis at the Southern border, that Rachel Levine is a woman, and on and on and on. In this company, Nancy Abudu looks positively moderate.
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