FBI Just Cut Ties With the ADL; It Should Consider Separating From This Group, Too

The FBI announced Wednesday that it had cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a welcomed development. However, the FBI should also cut ties with an even worse organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

While the ADL has twisted the facts to promote a leftist narrative, attacking critics of transgender ideology and straining to find any excuse to deny the Nashville transgender shooter was driven by left-wing extremism, the SPLC has a long and ignominious history of demonizing conservatives and carrying water for Antifa.

Based on the FBI’s decision to cut ties with the ADL, it should also distance itself from the SPLC.

The ADL

“James Comey disgraced the FBI by writing ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedding agents with an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization and the disgraceful operation they ran spying on Americans,” FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital earlier this week. “That was not law enforcement, it was activism dressed up as counterterrorism, and it put Americans in danger.”

Comey declared his and the FBI’s “love” for the ADL at the organization’s leadership summit in Washington, D.C., in May 2017. He called a previous 2014 speech a “love letter to the ADL.”

“Three years later I can say, from the perspective of the FBI, we’re still in love with you,” he said.

“That era is finished,” Patel said this week. “This FBI formally rejects Comey’s policies and any partnership with the ADL.”

As The Daily Signal exclusively reported last year, the ADL flagged “online amplifiers of LGBTQ+ hate” as extremists to be examined by law enforcement.

The ADL pushed law enforcement to scrutinize opponents of transgender ideology such as The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo.

Why the SPLC Is Worse

The SPLC is arguably even worse than the ADL.

The SPLC gained a reputation for suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy in the 1980s, and it developed the Klanwatch project to monitor Klan groups. “Klanwatch” morphed into “Hatewatch” and the “Intelligence Project,” which publishes an annual map of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” across the country.

Yet the map includes far more than just truly racist and hateful organizations like the Klan. Starting in the early 2000s, the SPLC added organizations that oppose illegal immigration to the map. In 2010, it added a host of “anti-LGBT hate groups” to the map, including the Family Research Council. It added organizations that oppose radical Islamist terrorism, such as the Center for Security Policy, as “anti-Muslim hate groups.”

In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council using the “hate map.” The SPLC condemned the attack, but kept the council on the map.

In recent years, the “hate map” has grown even more expansive. The SPLC put Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups on the map in 2023, just two years after the National School Boards Association compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists in a since-retracted memo. This year, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map.” A few months later, an assassin with a transgender boyfriend allegedly murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

The SPLC does not call for violence against organizations on the map, but it has repeatedly stated that the map reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

The comparison between mainstream conservative organizations and the Ku Klux Klan is arguably defamatory, and the SPLC is currently defending itself in court after calling the Dustin Inman Society, which opposes illegal immigration, an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

Big Tech companies like Amazon have used the “hate map” to screen program recipients. Companies like Eventbrite, PayPal, and Hyatt Hotels have relied on the SPLC’s “hate” accusations. Donor networks worth billions have pledged to keep charitable funds out of the hands of SPLC-accused “hate groups.”

Then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a 2021 donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” reached out to “solicit our expertise” to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” That wasn’t hyperbole. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023. The FBI cited the SPLC in its notorious memo on “radical-traditional Catholics.”

Law enforcement agencies do not take briefings on mere matters of opinion. Companies do not blacklist charities based on matters of opinion.

Perhaps even more disqualifying, the SPLC has troubling ties to Antifa.

Kash Patel has previously criticized the SPLC, but he should give it the full ADL treatment.

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