Days after cutting ties to the Anti-Defamation League, America's oldest group dedicated to combating anti-semitism, FBI director Kash Patel also denounced the Southern Poverty Law Center. The bureau will no longer work with it in any way, he writes.
"The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine," FBI Director Kash Patel told conservative site The Daily Signal Friday. "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."
The SPLC, like the ADL, tracks and researches extremism in the U.S. Its focus is on white supremacists and other hate groups, starting with the Ku Klux Klan and later expanding its efforts to counter discrimination against immigrants and other minorities. Reuters:
In a post on X on Thursday noting that [right-wing influencer Charlie] Kirk was briefly mentioned in an SPLC newsletter the day before his death, Musk accused SPLC of being "guilty" of inciting Kirk's murder, without providing evidence.
The significance of the FBI's relationship with the ADL and SPLC is that it investigates criminal activity by far-right extremist groups and organizations. By cutting ties with nonprofits that track and research them, Patel is not just "vice signaling" as part of the latest round of MAGA histrionics but signaling the FBI's disinterest in investigating or prosecuting right-wing extremists.
The SPLC is currently without a leader as its last one, Margeret Huang, resigned earlier this year, and interim CEO Bryan Fair has already ruled himself out.
That Patel denounced the ADL first is notable as its director, Jonathan Greenblatt, had made extensive efforts to mollify MAGA. It deprioritized issues that upset them and even publicly defended Elon Musk's fascist salute.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) came to Musk's defense, stating in an X post: "It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute", adding: "In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning." However, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute". The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) said that the ADL appeared to be contradicting its own definition of a Nazi salute, which the ADL defines as "raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down".
I find myself reminded of Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay for Harper's Magazine, "Who goes Nazi?"
Mr. G … has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. … He would certainly be purged.
