LIBBY EMMONS: An SPLC lawyer was just charged with domestic terrorism — the 'anti-hate' org is now completely discredited

The Southern Poverty Law Center holds itself up as a "catalyst" for justice. They claim to "monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and expose their activities to the public, the media and law enforcement," but now one of their own attorneys has been arrested as part of an Antifa action against a future training facility for the Atlanta police. 

The SPLC is a far-left group spouting off propaganda to support ideology, not justice. They harbor violent extremists among their ranks while accusing others of doing the exact same thing that they are doing themselves. Their activist employees cozy up to Antifa accounts on Twitter, play at being reporters while really being agitators, and one of their lawyers is accused of committing an act of domestic terrorism. 

How can the SPLC rectify its mission of exposing extremists to law enforcement with the fact that one of its own attorneys is among those arrested for violently targeting law enforcement sites? The fact is, it can't.

The SPLC, which began in 1971 as part of the Civil Rights Movement, has morphed into an extremist organization dedicated to propagating leftist lies about Americans, Americans' religious beliefs, and dissidents to the progressive cause. And they do it under the cover of a mission dedicated to exposing that which they actually endorse.

Antifa militants have been targeting it for months, and on Sunday, the construction site of Atlanta's future Public Safety Training Facility—called "Cop City"—was attacked by Antifa-affiliated leftists, with at least one construction vehicle torched. 

Thomas Jurgens, 28, lists himself as a staff attorney for the SPLC, and was among those 23 arrested for taking part in the mayhem. The group that claims to monitor "the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists – including the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, antigovernment militias, Christian Identity adherents and others," has on their own staff a man suspected of firebombing a police facility.


And Jurgens isn't the only one to find himself straddling both a responsibility to seek justice and truth with an apparent inner desire to cause destruction and chaos by targeting law enforcement. Another suspect is an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild. These attorneys attend protests alongside activists and demonstrators to observe the proceedings. They are easily identifiable by the green caps they wear, and could be seen in video of what unfolded in Atlanta.

"James 'Jamie' Marsicano, 30, of Charlotte, NC, is a trans activist and member of the National Lawyers Guild," Post Millennial Senior Editor Andy Ngo reports, "a far-left legal group that provides free legal aid to far-left violent extremists. Some of them in their green hat uniforms were captured on security cameras moving in and out with the violent mob. Marsicana is studying at the University of North Carolina School of Law."


National Lawyers Guild attorneys can be seen in video footage at the Atlanta location

Recently, it was revealed that the FBI was using an SPLC list of Christian groups to target Christians as domestic extremists. The idea behind the FBI bulletin was that Catholics who prefer traditional Latin mass, which went out of favor with the church after the secularist reforms of Vatican II, are white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ hate groups. 

That bulletin cited articles from the SPLC, as well as the SPLC's list of "Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups." The whistleblower who exposed this bulletin revealed that agents "got briefings that SPLC was not legitimate" as part of their training at Quantico. Yet, taking their lead from the SPLC, the FBI used a citizen's Catholic faith as a litmus test for their political ideology and the likelihood of being a public threat.

The SPLC has a history of going after people who are neither hateful nor extremists, but simply disagree with the SPLC. In June 2018 they had to publicly apologize to Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation for defaming them as "anti-Muslim extremists." The SPLC had to fork over $3.365 million to Nawaz.

Nathan J. Robinson wrote that the organization "has long been dysfunctional," and that the SPLC has displayed "some of the worst and most hypocritical tendencies in American liberalism."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center was once a respected civil rights organization," the Alliance Defending Freedom said, but noted that it has "degenerated into a discredited and scandal-ridden group that one of its own employees described as 'a highly profitable scam.' After winning some important cases, the SPLC devolved into a fear-mongering, money-raising machine."

The arrest of an SPLC attorney for committing the same kinds of acts of violence that they claim to oppose shows that it is a group that harbors extremists under the guise of rooting out extremism. Any claims they may have had on objectivity have been thoroughly discredited.

The SPLC responded to the arrest, saying "An employee at the SPLC was arrested while acting—and identifying—as a legal observer on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). The employee is an experienced legal observer, and their arrest is not evidence of any crime, but of heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protesters.

"This is part of a months-long escalation of policing tactics against protesters and observers who oppose the destruction of the Weelaunee Forest to build a police training facility. The SPLC has and will continue to urge de-escalation of violence and police use of force against Black, Brown and Indigenous communities—working in partnership with these communities to dismantly white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people."