Democrats defended the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its mission to manufacture hate hoaxes and target conservatives by claiming Tuesday that the SPLC is basically a government law enforcement agency and also not at all anything like a government law enforcement agency.
At the second edition of the House Judiciary Committee hearing series “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate,” Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., indicated the SPLC has the same power and authority as the FBI or other government law enforcement agencies to maintain confidential informants in extremist groups — and, ostensibly, to then fundraise off the manufactured chaos.
In an exchange with Georgetown Law Professor Mary McCord, a Democrat witness, Raskin justified the SPLC’s alleged funding of people to be “undercover as informants to find out what these groups are doing.”
“It is a very useful law enforcement tool to use informants and … cooperators to learn more, not just about hate groups and potential domestic violent extremism, but also as a tool to dismantle drug trafficking groups and human trafficking,” McCord said, listing other law enforcement activities.
Raskin then drew a direct comparison to the FBI, stating, “If the FBI sent someone undercover to expose a mafia organization, narco-traffickers, international human traffickers, that wouldn’t mean that the FBI is supporting those groups, would it?”
McCord also shrugged at violence against conservatives, stating a Trump memorandum about combatting left-wing domestic terrorism “relies for support on the murder of Charlie Kirk, assassination attempts against the president and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the so-called riots in protest of ICE activity.”