Nicholas Giordano, writing at The Federalist, argues that "[t]he real Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) scandal isn’t just the indictment. The deeper scandal is that the FBI used a highly partisan activist group as an unelected, unvetted intelligence wing of the federal bureaucracy." He adds:
For years, the bureau didn’t just consult the SPLC. It folded the group’s ideology into its threat assessments and other work products, then used those products to brand Americans as hateful or flag them as potential domestic violent extremists.
How did this work out in practice?
The FBI’s Richmond memo, better known as the anti-Catholic memo, showed exactly what that pipeline looked like in practice. The FBI used the SPLC’s analysis to define so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics” by their opposition to abortion, LGBT ideology, and adherence to traditional family values. Sen Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed that one Richmond analyst produced a slide presentation that equated Catholic beliefs in “[c]onservative family values/roles” with ideas “[c]omparable to Islamist ideology.”
Despite former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s claim that the anti-Catholic memo was the work of “a single field office” with limited distribution, the records tell a different story. Multiple field offices were involved, the memo was distributed to more than 1,000 agents and employees, and congressional investigators uncovered at least 13 more documents using similar SPLC-driven “anti-Catholic terminology.” Ideological narrative laundering became the FBI’s standard practice.
FBI officials themselves recognized the problem. In an internal FBI email exchange, one official asked, “Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” and complained that “[a]pparently we are at the behest of the SPLC.” Another FBI official admitted the FBI’s “overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”
Read the whole thing.
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