WASHINGTON — Kash Patel’s announcement that the FBI was cutting all ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center followed a letter from top conservative leaders urging the White House to distance itself from the group, The Daily Wire has learned.
“Enough is enough,” the leaders wrote to White House Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley in a previously unreported letter. “The SPLC’s defamatory Hate Map should no longer be used by federal agencies as a fig leaf to mask discrimination against conservatives.”
The letter specifically called for President Donald Trump to issue an executive order removing any SPLC data from all federal agency websites and work, to block future use of the SPLC data on federal agency websites and work, and to block federal funds from going to government contractors who use the SPLC’s work to determine what organizations they will work with.
Moms for Liberty CEO Tina Descovich led the effort, joined by Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bower, Dr. Ben Carson, Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, WallBuilders founder David Barton, Liberty Counsel’s founder Matthew Staver, Gays Against Groomers’s Jaimee Michell, and New Discourses founder James Lindsay.
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The signatories argued that the SPLC has become so “biased, politicized, and unmoored from its original mission that it has begun placing traditional value and faith-based organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, Liberty Counsel and the Family Research Council on its Hate Map” — a map that tracks over 1400 individuals and groups that it deems hateful and extremist and classes with the Ku Klux Klan.
That list included Charlie Kirk and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA.
“Just a few months ago, the SPLC ran a feature article viciously attacking Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk for advocating for President Trump’s agenda on such issues as faith and the reality of biological sex,” the leaders wrote in their letter. “This would be laughable if the consequences of this reckless and dishonest behavior were not so deadly serious.”
Months later, Kirk was killed by a radical assassin who targeted the TPUSA founder for his political beliefs.
The SPLC once did “good work” fighting segregation in the South, the leaders noted. But less than a decade after its founding, “it egregiously strayed from its mission, declining today into what Politico has described as ‘more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.'” In recent years, a number of radical left-wing terrorists have specifically cited the organization as their motivation to commit violence against Christians and conservatives.
In 2012, an attempted mass murderer made a plan to “stride into” the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to “open fire on the people inside in an effort to kill as many people as possible,” the letter argued. That gunman specifically said he was motivated by the SPLC, which had listed the Family Research Council as a hate group.
The SPLC hate designation was also cited as the reason for the riot and assault of a female professor at Middlebury College in 2017, the leaders argued.
“More recently, an SPLC staff attorney was arrested and charged in 2023 with domestic terrorism for his involvement in a violent riot against Atlanta police officers. The SPLC responded by condemning the arrests as ‘heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protestors.'”
But the most “stunning” fact about the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” they argued, is “neither its rank dishonesty nor its transparent bias against SPLC’s conservative political enemies, but the fact that anyone would ever rely upon it to make significant policy decisions.”
“And yet, federal government agencies have utilized SPLC data and analysis in their work product, resulting in the stigmatization of lawful organizations advocating for views well within the American tradition.”
“For example,” they said, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has utilized SPLC materials to label traditional Catholics, among others, as radical extremists. The most recent known report, created by the FBI’s Richmond Field Office, used the SPLC as a source to label traditional Catholic groups as hate groups, and was sent to over 1,000 FBI employees nationally.”
Their efforts appear to have been successful.
On Friday, as The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neill first reported, the FBI severed all ties to the SPLC.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a Friday statement. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
“In April, during our Anti-Christian Bias Panel, I made it clear that the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups — and certainly not from the SPLC,” Patel added. “Under this FBI, all ties with the SPLC have officially been terminated.”
The FBI confirmed to The Daily Signal that it has no intelligence products from the SPLC and that it no longer engages with the far-Left group. The news comes just days after Patel shared that the FBI had also severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that purports to oppose antisemitism but also has condemned critics of transgender ideology, including The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh.
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