❓WHAT HAPPENED: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially cut all ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Kash Patel, the FBI, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Announced on October 3, 2025, via a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) by Daily Signal senior editor Tyler O’Neil.
💬KEY QUOTE: “The SPLC long ago abandoned civil rights work & turned into a partisan smear machine.” – Kash Patel
🎯IMPACT: The decision follows the FBI severing ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), signaling that the Trump administration intends to detach the federal government from partisan nonprofits pushing far-left agendas.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under the leadership of Director Kash Patel, has officially ended its relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Patel criticized the SPLC for straying from its civil rights mission, stating, “The SPLC long ago abandoned civil rights work & turned into a partisan smear machine.”
Patel particularly stressed the SPLC’s “hate map,” which lists the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) conservative youth organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk alongside the Ku Klux Klan, arguing that it “has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”
“That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership,” he added.
Leading figures such as Raheem Kassam, Editor-in-Chief of The National Pulse, Jack Posobiec, and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) frontman Elon Musk have long been lobbying for the FBI to cut ties with the SPLC, intensifying their efforts in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, allegedly by radical leftist Tyler Robinson, who explicitly cited the TPUSA chief’s supposed “hatred” as his motivation.
The FBI severing its links to the SPLC follows a similar cutting of ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which also listed TPUSA in a glossary of “extremist” organizations—but defended the Antifa movement recently designated as a domestic terror threat by President Donald J. Trump as misunderstood and generally non-violent.
“[Former FBI Director] 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,” Patel said of the ADL decision.
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