(March 7) It is not too much of a guilt-by-association stretch to say that one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees should lose even more support after an Atlanta mob on Sunday threw bricks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers.
Biden’s nominee for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Nancy Abudu, is the “strategic litigation director” for the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, a scandal-plagued organization infamous for its outlandish “hate map.” SPLC labels even thoroughly mainstream right-leaning organizations as “hate groups.” Abudu’s own record is so replete with untenable positions and statements that no intellectually honest person claiming anything close to centrism could possibly support her.
To be sure, Abudu had nothing directly to do with Sunday’s violent attack against a construction site for an Atlanta police training center. That was the work of thugs affiliated with a group that claimed the “destruction of material” was acceptable because “all reported acts appear to be explicitly targeted against the financial backers & goons of the Atlanta Police Foundation, a shady nonprofit.”
One of those alleged thugs, though, was Thomas Jurgens, a staff attorney for the SPLC’s dubiously named Economic Justice Project. Even then, Jurgens’s involvement would not necessarily be a major mark against the SPLC, except that this association with radicalism is just par for the course for this left-wing outfit.
If an organization as widely discredited as SPLC wanted to regain a semblance of respectability, one overarching imperative would be to make sure it hires no radicals and that it makes clear to employees that extremist involvement won’t be tolerated. It would impress upon its staff lawyers to stay a million miles away from prominent hot zones such as the one near the Atlanta construction site, which already was rocked by violence just six weeks ago and for which more planned protests were well publicized…. [The full column is here.]
