Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lecia Brooks helped lead a group of heavily armed communist extremists through downtown Stone Mountain, Georgia.

According to reporting by the Springfield News Sun, out of the crowd of 150 or so Brooks marched with and then officially addressed, “many of the protesters had handkerchiefs over their faces, and several were armed.”

Brooks then identified herself with and lauded the hammer-and-sickle waving, assault rifle wielding mob, who held signs calling for violence: “We turned them back at Stone Mountain, and we can turn them back at every turn. We just have to show up,” she proclaimed.

Video of the rally leaves no room for plausible deniability about the nature of the militants. None of the groups at this rally were made up of MSNBC liberals or normal Democrats. The SPLC officials knowingly marched with people who want to impose communism and anarchism on America by the use of armed violence, and were proud to use them to terrorize their political opponents.

The display was so disturbing that the SPLC’s supporters in the mass media quickly memoryholed the supposed victory against Confederate heritage groups. The Huffington Post, which apparently sent journalists to cover the event, wrote one small article about it and did not mention the many Soviet flags or masked, armed men sporting red armbands.

In spite of her close ties with violent left-wing extremists, Brooks found herself testifying in Congress on behalf of the SPLC today, taking credit for financial and social media deplatforming of “hate groups” and demanding more government action against “hate groups.”

None of the “lone wolves” involved in attacks Brooks spoke about received any kind of organized funding for their weapons or plans, nor did they act on behalf of any specific organization, yet in her testimony she disingenuously ties them to the myriad of advocacy groups and 501(c)(3)’s on the SPLC’s arbitrary “hate group” list.

Brooks then condemned attempts at applying the law to “antifa” and “Black Identity Extremists,” instead urging the government to use all of its resources against law-abiding nationalists to prevent them from having the resources to exercise their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.

According to Brooks, the SPLC has played an important role in Amazon, Paypal, and Facebook’s censoring of books, charities, ideas and opinions. In a 2018 poll, 72% of Americans stated that social media censorship is politically motivated, not a national security question. 51% said that the government should step in to protect political speech. The agenda of Silicon Valley, who today give the SPLC and Anti-Defamation League the power to decide who can and cannot use the internet public square, is extremely unpopular.

That the House of Representatives defers to Brooks on these matters is yet another brazen failure in actually representing the public, or protecting it from the wanton political violence and harassment of private citizens anarchists and communists commit in America all the time and brag about. Their close ties to the SPLC play a role in why the justice and legal system is applied differently to members of “antifa.”

Brooks is not the only person with extremist ties at the SPLC. One of its “senior investigative reporters,” a former BDSM writer named Michael Edison Hayden, was named by extremism researcher Dr Eoin Lenihan as a journalist with close ties with “antifa,” which is supported by threatening messages Hayden has sent in the past openly threatening to send his associates in “antifa” to their family’s home. Hayden has made a name for himself for stalking outside the homes of wives, children and elderly relatives of people targeted by the SPLC for their political views, in attempts to silence them.

Another SPLC employee, Hannah Gais, who attended the Congressional hearing with Brooks, also has significant ties to violent anarchist and communist groups.

These people do not belong anywhere near decisions made by the state or law enforcement. If you feel your basic rights as an American are being eroded, as 92% of Americans do, this is a big piece of the puzzle.