The FBI has cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a long history of labeling its political opponents as “hate groups” amid renewed concerns about political violence in the United States.
In a statement posted on X Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that all of the federal law enforcement agency’s ties with the SPLC “have been officially terminated.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” wrote Patel, adding, “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”
While Patel did not provide specific examples of how the SPLC’s hate map has “inspired violence,” two of the organizations included on the map, which is a database of conservative individuals and groups that the SPLC deems “hateful,” have faced violence in recent years. Most recently, Turning Point USA, which is listed on the hate map as an “antigovernment general” organization, saw the assassination of its CEO, Charlie Kirk, on Sept. 10.
In a statement provided to The Christian Post on the day of Kirk’s assassination, SPLC spokesman Ricky Riley declared, “The Southern Poverty Law Center unequivocally condemns the shooting of Charlie Kirk and all forms of violence,” stressing that “Violence is never acceptable.”
Earlier this year, the SPLC published a report denouncing the conservative organization for purportedly “sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.”
The report also accused the group of exploiting “complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order” and embracing an “extreme, authoritarian vision for the country that threatens the foundation of our democracy.”
In an X post back in May, Kirk described the “game plan” of the SPLC’s labeling of his organization as a hate group as to “scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us.”
Recalling how “an SPLC-inspired gunman went after” the Family Research Council in2012, Kirk insisted that “They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.”
As Kirk mentioned in his May X post, the socially conservative Family Research Council, which was listed on the hate map in 2012, became the target of shooter Floyd Corkins. Corkins opened fire at FRC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 2012, wounding the building’s unarmed building operations manager. FRC President Tony Perkins pointed to the SPLC as the source of the “reckless climate” that allowed the attack to take place.
The FBI’s partnership with the SPLC received a renewed focus in February 2023 following the leak of an internal document that circulated in the agency’s Richmond Field Office, expressing concerns about “radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology” and listing the SPLC as a source. The FBI responded to backlash over the document by releasing a statement maintaining that it “did not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.”
“Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document,” the statement added. “The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”
Kyle Seraphin, the former FBI employee who made the contents of the memo public, maintained that the memo marked a departure from FBI policy, noting that the “FBI has distanced itself from the SPLC as a source in the past 10 years” over what he referred to as its “blatant partisan blindness.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
