FBI Director Kash Patel announced the bureau would sever ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the second time in a week he has ended a partnership with a group that monitors right-wing extremism.
The SPLC works on a variety of issues, from monitoring white supremacists and other extremist groups to working on voting rights and criminal justice reform.
But Patel accused the group of being a “partisan smear machine.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine. 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,” Patel wrote Friday on the social platform X.
“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.”
The announcement came just two days after Patel similarly announced the FBI would cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that battles antisemitism and also monitors right-wing groups.
Like the ADL, the SPLC has previously evaluated the messaging of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last month during a Utah campus event.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has worked for more than 50 years to shine a light on the threat of hate, extremism and white supremacy. For decades, we have shared data and analysis with the public to protect civil rights and hold extremists accountable” the SPLC said in a statement.
“We remain committed to exposing hate and extremism as we work to equip communities with knowledge and defend the rights and safety of marginalized people.”
The SPLC reviewed Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, as recently as May, writing that Kirk had embraced the great replacement theory, which fears that immigration will diminish the influence of white people.
“Kirk accused Democrats of embracing immigration as part of their plot to secure voters, permit crime and enact the ‘great replacement.’ He warned his hundreds of thousands of listeners, ‘We native born Americans are being replaced by foreigners.’ He then promised Trump will ‘liberate’ the country from ‘the enemy occupation of the foreigner hordes,” SPLC wrote in a report last year.
The move comes as White House figures have said they planned to target left-wing groups in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Vice President Vance and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, made clear last month they would use Kirk’s death as a rallying cry to target left-wing groups they claimed were disproportionately responsible for provoking political violence.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Miller said in a conversation with Vance, who was guest hosting Kirk’s show this week.
“We’re going to go after the NGO [nongovernmental organization] network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” Vance added.