The administration used documentation from the SPLC to target traditional Catholics and worked with the group prior to its adding parent groups to their so-called “hate map.”
The Biden administration worked hand-in-hand with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was indicted on numerous fraud charges for funding the very "hate groups" they claimed to be fighting. The administration used documentation from the SPLC to target traditional Catholics and worked with the group prior to its adding parents groups to their so-called "hate map."
The charges come after it was discovered that the group was clandestinely funding the very "hate groups" they told donors they were fighting. The group funded members of the KKK, Nazis, and those who were part of the leadership in organizing the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA.
In 2023, it was revealed that Biden's FBI was relying on documentation from the SPLC to classify traditional Catholics as having an "adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology." The way these Catholics could be identified, per the FBI bulletin, was through their "rejection of the Second Vatican Council." The sources cited on that bulletin include materials from the SPLC and that discredited group's list of "Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups."
In January 2023, as the Biden administration continued to declare that white supremacy and right-wing extremism were the biggest threats facing America, the SPLC's director of their Intelligence Project, Susan Corke, met with the White House's National Security Council's counterterrorism director John Picarelli. It was shortly thereafter that the SPLC added Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and other parent groups to their "hate map."
It turns out that the SPLC met with both Biden and his White House officials 11 times by 2023, which was just two years into his presidential term. The Biden administration brought the SPLC in to serve on their antisemitism coalition.
Multiple members of the SPLC, including LaShawn Warren, Brandon Jones who was the SPLC director of Political Campaigns, head of the board of directors Joseph Levin, board member Joshua Bekenstein, Kirsten Johnson of the SPLC's Economic Justice Practice Group, and director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi state office Waikinya Clanton, all met with the Biden administration during his first two years in office.
President and chief executive officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center and its lobbying arm the SPLC Action Fund, Margaret Huang, met with Biden twice, once on May 20, 2021, and once on July 7, 2022, visitor logs show.
After the report showing the relationship between the White House and the SPLC, then-Senator JD Vance said, "The SPLC is a garbage organization now dedicated to harassing groups that advocate for parents. In the future, their pronouncements must be met with scorn."
"The SPLC is a hateful, bigoted, and despicable organization," Texas Senator Ted Cruz said of the group. "They're now attacking and labeling parents who want to have a say in their own kids' education."
The Biden administration's FBI targeted parents who attended school board meetings to speak out against the harm being done to their children from school closures and restrictions during the Covid pandemic or gender ideology.
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