Is it any surprise that a trial in search of a crime would get help from an organization that specializes in defaming and destroying innocent people for the crime of political disagreement? CBS reported Wednesday that “new insight on how former President Donald Trump was able to influence hate groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers was brought to light during a Jan. 6 committee hearing,” and then presented an interview with none other than Margaret Huang, President and CEO of the notorious and massively discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to offer “more insight on how the group is assisting committee members with their investigation.” According to Politico, this hateful and fascist organization is “providing testimony and research to the Jan. 6 select committee” as “part of under-the-radar help investigators have received from outside groups and experts.” Under the radar? Of course. Those who have something to hide never do their work out in the open.
Since the Jan. 6 Committee itself is a naked attempt to demonize and ultimately criminalize legitimate political opposition in the United States, none of this is any surprise. The SPLC is one of the Left’s premier, well-heeled, and most ruthless attack dogs, but Politico, which is as much of the Leftist establishment as the SPLC itself, describes this sinister group as “a legal advocacy organization.” This is like calling the Ku Klux Klan a “racial justice organization.” The real business of the SPLC is to smear 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 SPLC seriously and use its smear pieces as a guide to shun and deplatform various dissenters from the Leftist agenda.
Michael Lieberman, a senior policy counsel on hate and extremism (that is, a senior policy counsel on those who dare to oppose the Left) at the SPLC, revealed that “over the past few months, our SPLC analysts have met with Jan. 6 Select Committee staff and submitted nearly 40 pages of written testimony and research to document the involvement of extremists in the planning and preparation for the insurrection.”
Given the fact that there was no insurrection — no leader, no plan, no weapons, nothing — this “research” must be quite imaginative. Lieberman adds, “Our work has helped to document coordination between Trump, his allies and two extremist groups we’ve tracked for years.” This is exactly how the original Stalinist show trials worked: find some innocuous connection between two targeted individuals or groups and exaggerate it into a conspiracy that threatens the very life of the nation.
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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) back in April offered a succinct summary of some of what’s wrong with the SPLC while questioning SPLC litigation director Nancy Abudu, whom Biden’s handlers nominated to be a Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. When Abudu told him she had started working for this unsavory 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 labeled 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.
The SPLC, while targeting individuals and groups it smears as “hate groups” and their leaders, is the real hate group. In 2012, a man named Floyd Corkins stormed the offices of the Family Research Council (FRC), intending to kill the entire staff; Corkins later admitted that he had targeted the FRC because the SPLC had tarred it as a “hate group.” The FRC’s Jessica Prol Smith wrote in USA Today in August 2019: “For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its ‘hate group’ list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit.”
He is no longer with the organization, but the SPLC’s Mark Potok described the organization’s enduring ethos when he said in 2008: “We see this political struggle. We’re not trying to change anybody’s mind. We’re trying to wreck the groups. We’re trying to destroy them. Not to send them to prison unfairly or to take their free speech rights away, but as a political matter to destroy them.”
Since the Jan. 6 Committee is also in the business of destroying the lives of people whose actual crime, if any, amounts essentially to trespassing in an attempt to silence all dissent from the Left’s line in America, it’s easy to see why the Committee and the SPLC would be bedfellows.
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